ClemFlip

Summarized response to the Committee regarding our application:Various types of transclusions of Structured Discussions boards

Dear Committee members,

Thank you for having reviewed our Grant application.

1. Your main concern refers to the future of the Structured Discussions (formerly known as “Flow”) extension.

As mentioned by one member of the committee: "Structured Discussions is not abandoned or dead".

In fact, Structured Discussions improvements are a goal of the 2017-2018 Fiscal Year development plan (see Program 5/Goal 3), focusing on search and interactions between topics (also explained here).

Recently, it was mentioned in the Global Collaboration Newsletter of November 2017: "Flow has been re-scoped to become Structured Discussions and the development has restarted."

The Structured Discussion's under-development features are listed in this Phabricator task.

All of this has been clarified by Jdforrester_(WMF), the product manager of Structured Discussions right here.

2. Sustainability and community impact was also one of your concern.

Our middle-term goal is that our extension is being integrated into the Structured Discussion extension master branch. This insures the sustainability of our work. In order to fulfill this commitment: we'll work closely with the WMF Tech team to provide the required support. Before we achieved that, we commit to maintain our separate extension compatible with MediaWiki 1.27+.

As a reminder, we, at Wikifab, are professional PHP programmers since 9 years. During the past 3 years, we have been full time dedicated to the development of MediaWiki extensions. All our extensions are open-source and can be downloaded here: https://github.com/wikifab. One of the main MediaWiki-based site we maintain is wikifab.org.

I hope these comments give you a better understanding of our proposal and the global context.

Looking forward to your feedback. Best regards, --ClemFlip 11:05, 20 November 2017 (UTC)