User:Sj/Design chats/Perennials

Reminder: This is a wiki! Edit and refactor at will.

Project

Perennial or long-standing issues can be hard to prioritize: by definition they were both popular but not immediately resolvable. How should these be tracked, visualized, resolved over time?

Current discussions

On Phabricator: Token leaderboard, oldest tasks, high-priority tasks

Ex: Shape rotator, URL shortener (resolved in 2020), Share link for sections, Support 3D formats (stl added 2018), merge m. subdomain, make captcha accessible, interwiki link redirects (added 2022), global template repository or cross-wiki transclusion (reported dozens of times), cross-wiki watchlist, move notifications to core, Instant Wikidata,

On wikis: Perennial proposals (en:wp)

Ideas

• Define feedback loops that work through outstanding issues and regularly shift things from each loop into production loops w/ release targets.

  E.g. make sure that every community network that regularly reviews and prioritizes needs has a named priority-network w/ clear metric for "most promising opportunity" (some mix of urgency, impact, popularity, longevity, simplicity), and that every cycle the top priorities for each of those are explicitly mapped to dev roadmaps (or mapped onto one of the patterns for alternate resolution: refactoring, delegation, transfer to fellow communities).

• Define a continuous version of a wishlist that maintains global measures of interest across a range of dimensions, such that everyone can see progress in each dimension and how much energy is going in / how much success is coming from each one

Challenges

• A dozen different measures and processes may not share methods, energy, or outcomes
• Redundant processes like an annual wishlist-from-scratch wastes time and past prioritization effort
• Narrowly-focused efforts to pick a small # of long-standing or popular issues can make this challenge worse:
  • Gathering new prioritization-data that is not acted upon
  • Focusing outcomes on choosing individual achievable goals, making it impossible to tackle shared issues or larger (often more interesting and impactful) changes
  • Focusing prioritization-energy away from larger longer-standing issues to focus on short-term issues of the day
• The frame of "paying off technical debt" can be counter-productive. (refactoring a working solution into a better one is good; but ending existing solutions because they are seen as 'debt' before knowing there will be a better solution can lead to permanent loss of function [cf: book-creator, bulk-uploader])

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