User:Bryan Hilderbrand/Meeting Announcement (20DEC)

Originally sent via email titled The "MediaWiki products" project: next steps" (Sun Dec 20 15:51 UTC 2020)

Hi everyone,

Thanks for participating in the "kickoff meeting" (I hope we can call it that) we had on Friday. It's great that there is this level of interest in this project - obviously, if there were less interest, this would be a very different situation. And there was a lot of good discussion - for a plan with this many elements to it, there were a lot of different things to discuss, which is difficult to do with this many people in just one hour, but we did manage to cover a lot of important topics.

By the way, I'm sending this email to almost everyone who was there - there are a few people whose email addresses I don't know, though. Please forward this to anyone I missed (there may have been just two people) - and, of course, feel free to also forward this to anyone else whom you think may be interested in participating. This is not a secret project, but I just don't want to spam people who are not interested.

Here, as far as I can tell, are the issues on which there seemed to be general agreement, or at least no stated objections:

- We should keep these discussion meetings going, starting next year.

- The two main work areas for this project are (1) some mechanism for creating Docker images (or something like them) to install MediaWiki plus some set of extensions and skins, and (2) creating one or more "packages" of wiki pages for different use cases.

- Work on the two main tasks can be done in parallel, and actually pretty much independently of one another. (Either one would be quite useful on its own to have, I would think.)

- The Page Exchange extension is a reasonable mechanism for getting pages into people's wikis, at least for now. (There was definitely discussion of other approaches, but it doesn't seem like any of them are widely usable at the moment.)

- All components generated should be released as open source.

- We will use a wiki to coordinate work on this whole project, and Rich Evans will set it up.

The meeting also clarified that we would not really be "starting from scratch" on either task. For the first one, there is already Meza (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meza), which may or may not be what is needed - but it certainly seems close, at least in concept. And for the second one, there are already various consulting companies and organizations who have created data structures that could be used, in total or in part, for some of the use cases we have talked about.

That is why I am proposing the following:

- Starting in January 2021, we hold weekly meetings, alternating on these two topics - so really it would be two different bi-weekly meetings, on alternating weeks. We would pick some day of the week and some time, and that would be the day/time for both meetings, on different weeks.

- I also propose that we give this project its own name, so that it's not just called the "MediaWiki products" project - which would make it easier to talk about, and to name related things (like our meetings). Since I don't want to waste a lot of people's time trying to collectively come up with a clever name, I am hereby proposing the name "Project Canasta" for this project. I hit on this name using the clever strategy of doing web searches on "Project X" with all kinds of words for "X" until, after 30 or so attempts, I finally found one that has not been used already. :) There are a lot of "projects" out there! Let me clarify that this is *not* the name of the resulting product or product suite - if that product will even have its own name (some people want to brand it as just MediaWiki). This is strictly the name of the project to create these things. "Canasta" could be a product name on its own, but I'm pretty sure there are better names. (I would say that it's not a perfect name, because, among other things, I think it has two different pronunciations - in the English-speaking world, most people would pronounce it to sort of rhyme with "faster", while in the rest of the world I think it rhymes with "pasta". But I think that's okay, at least for a project name.)

There are obviously aspects to this whole project that are not covered by these two tasks. These include issues of branding, marketing, and governance. They also include the question of whether Page Exchange would be used as the system for installing pages, or something else. These all came up during the meeting (as would be expected), and they're all important discussions, but I personally think the highest-priority thing is just getting a system in place that works - and once that happens, it will be easier anyway to deal with these other questions. I could be wrong about these, though, and if there are some issues that keep coming up during meetings, like governance or anything else, then it probably means we should be talking about it.

This is a lot to cover here. This is my attempt at establishing and/or identifying consensus, and there may actually be a large number of points here that people disagree on. If you disagree on anything here (including the proposed project name, meeting schedule, etc.), please respond. Or if you have thoughts on the specific day/time for meetings, that would be helpful too.

-Yaron