Content Partnerships Hub/Needs assessment/Research results/Albin Larsson

Developer Albin Larsson about needs assessment 2021

Date: 2021-10-26

Participants:
Albin Larsson
Tore Danielsson, WMSE
Axel Pettersson, WMSE

How do you work with content partnerships today?

Working as a consultant, and helps out with technical development where need and payments are. Developing and helping with Pattypan to enable GLAM institutions to contribute with content themselves. The ambition is to get institutions to do uploads as they know the data, but a central helpdesk would help in giving support. Having institutions do the upload work scales better than having volunteers do the uploads. As the process is now it's easier to get funding for building new tools than to maintain existing tools. The process would need an oversight to make funding available for maintenance or fixing things rather than always building new. Having tools and infrastructure developed by volunteers and than taken over by WMF or Chapters/UG would not look good to the volunteer developer community, but would need a lot of discussion before it could happen. Changes by WMF in Mediawiki or other software needs to be better checked with existing tools not to break things, as projects are dependent on uploads or other events. Having discussions on several platforms (phab, talk pages, github…) makes it hard to keep track of everything and to be on top of all issues reported. What is your normal work process in collaborations with partners?

Suggestions, needs and support?

Support in maintaining projects is found within the developer community, with some larger and some smaller groups. Everytime a new release is up for deployment there is a need to find users on all platforms to help testing that nothing breaks. Help is available from the users of tools (if the user base is large enough). In some cases help with salary or reimbursement would enable the volunteer community to maintain tools. Better heads up from WMF when changing software that breaks tools. Pinging users on pahb would help and creating a list of tools that need to be updated where users can check off when they have updated their tools.