Proposal
- A place where the Wikimedia Foundation and anybody else could share concepts for new software products using a common template for easier evaluation.
- Any Wikimedia Foundation team willing to prioritize a product concept should have it publicly available in this place.
- Any project following the WMF product development process should start publishing a concept in this space.
Reasoning
Currently the WMF product development process draft identifies a Concept phase, and also identifies Community Members as an explicit stakeholder in that phase. This proposal articulates who that would work in practice. If we agree on the principle, then we can discuss the implementation details.
Such public place could be useful for WMF teams well beyond transparency and community engagement. Currently there is no common way for WMF teams to propose new product concepts and fight for them, or a common place where all the concepts can be found.
Out of scope here but closely related
Once this process would be set up, why not inviting others to contribute their concepts? Why not inviting others to prioritize concepts and contribute their own resources? The WMF is clearly the biggest player in the house, but it is not the only one. Having all product developers (WMF, chapters, volunteers...) following the same product development process can only be good.
See also
- As part of the discussion about the new WMF product development process, a new topic on prioritization has been published at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Ssbm4s78i32242o2.
- T115659: Collaborate on community-involved Prioritization process requires having all the candidates for prioritization (Concepts) ready for public evaluation, otherwise there is no way to prioritize meaningfully.
- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Transparency/Practices
- T149948: IdeaLab for Wikimedia Foundation projects