Toolhub/Progress reports/2020-10-02

Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2020-10-02.

Progress reports now published on metawiki

The weekly progress reports for Toolhub development from the weeks of 2020-09-18 and 2020-09-25 have been retroactively posted to the new Toolhub/Progress reports area on metawiki. Going forward these reports will start on metawiki as pages marked with {{Draft}} and then be tidied up and summarized to the toolhub-dev mailing list at the end of the work week.

Content moderation exploration

Where there is free form text content, there will be vandalism. This is an Internet truism that Wikimedians are well aware of. MediaWiki includes many components to help support patrolling content submissions. Toolhub will need systems for this as well, but what systems? How can we make the process of patrolling Toolhub feel friendly to folks who are used to doing content patrolling with MediaWiki?

Bryan, Keegan, Johan, Harej, Xover, and Risker all provided input on the discussion of needs in T261023. The combined recommendations have been summarized at Toolhub/Decision record#Content moderation support.

Draft goals for October-December 2020

Srishti and Bryan have drafted a proposed set of functionality to be implemented in Q2 of the Foundation's fiscal year 2020/2021 (October-December 2020). This list has been shared with the advisory council and will likely be finalized as objectives and key results (OKRs) in the week of October 5th.

Our goal is to implement the features described at Toolhub/Roadmap#Milestone 2: Initial API and UI; toolinfo crawler along with supporting features which are needed to build a stable foundation for the project. This set of features will result in an application which includes the core features of Hay's Directory and a platform that can be extended in future iterations to achieve the "first customer release" functionality of milestones 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Wrap up

The week saw the end of the Foundation's FY20/21 Q1 and the start of Q2. The key result for Toolhub in the Q1 plan ("Define the technical plan for Toolhub") ended the quarter with an assessment of 97% complete. The remaining work in the KR is closing out the Determine basic hosting parameters for Toolhub research task. This task is currently waiting on feedback from members of the advisory board.

Planning for the next phase of the project (coding!) is well underway. Official goals are being finalized and should be documented by the time we send out the progress report for the week ending 2020-10-09.

Bryan is happy in general with the progress that was made in Q1. His main takeaway for improvement in the future is to try and get issues needing feedback from other teams and the advisory council surfaced earlier in the quarter to avoid colliding with the inevitable time crunch that folks fall under towards the end of the quarter when they are trying to close out their own goals.