IT Development/Board report 7Jun 2014

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This page is intended to support the committee-board interaction, aiding the committee in reporting to the board, and the board in understanding and responding to the committee's needs. It is based on Education Committee/Board template; suggested changes to the structure should be addressed there.

Executive summary

Brief overview of activities this quarter. Since the 8 March, the Technology Committee has had two meetings, one on 1 April and the other on 6 May (minutes linked). Members are involved in a number of activities, namely discussing the charity's servers, dealing with spam, use of tools such as piwik and development of new tools for various purposes (including measuring the quality of Wikipedia articles), and the Programme Manager role (which has since been superseded by a scoping brief), .

Committee-community health

The board would appreciate any comments the committee has regarding the health of the committee, and its interaction with the community. For example, if committee burn-out, lack of response from relevant community, excellent recruitment of new volunteers through a programme, etc. are relevant to this period then this would be the place to note it.

  1. Dealing with spam - since the UK wiki was migrated away from the Foundation's servers, spam has increased as we did not have the black list and rangeblock list which the WMF used. The situation had got to the stage where blocking spam accounts and deleting their edits was a regular activity and taking up staff and volunteer time. Harry Burt began importing the WMF's rangeblocks to address the problem. Spam has decreased as a result to more manageable levels.
  2. Tech workshop - the committee is considering a proposal to hold a two-day tech workshop later this year.
  3. Project Manager - the post of Project Manager proved difficult to fill. As a result, it has instead been decided to hire a contractor to carry out a scoping exercise to assess the charity's tech needs.
  4. Servers - after performance issues with loading pages on the UK wiki were highlighted, the set up was enhanced so that the website is now quicker to load.
  5. Piwik - currently, usage statistics for Wikimedia UK's various sites (including the UK wiki, the WLM website, and QRpedia) are available through stats.wikimedia.org. The data is provided by piwik, but the interface has been difficult to use. The committee has discussed how to make it more user-friendly.
  6. Wiki-based teacher education and resource development - Dr Bjeorn Hassler proposed a project "to significantly enhance the usability of mediawiki for developing open learning materials for teacher education". The request sum was £3,000. This was approved by the CEO on 7th May.
  7. Future projects - the committee has been discussing a number of projects, aimed at accessability, integrating OpenStreetMap with Mediawiki, and rating Wikipedia articles (WikiRate).
  1. A review of the current state of accessibility was carried out, with the recommendation that a focus group be set up. In the charity's strategic goals, one of the stated aims is "G1.2 The quality of open knowledge continues to improve".
  2. Measuring this in terms of measuring improvements to articles over time has proven a challenge, one which the Technology Committee hopes to address through developing a"WikiRate" tool.

Actions for the board

Please copy actions for the board here. For example: if the committee would like some funds, or staff time for a particular project; if the committee would like approval (and funds) to run an internal workshop for planning purposes; if the committee would like the board to consider new processes/structures, etc.

For each item, use the structure below:

Item 1, brief description

Item 1, Explanation

Why is this being requested and why does it require board decision

Item 1, Action required

What actions do the Board need to take here (other than approval / rejection)?

Item 1, Risk

Are there any risks involved? Are they likely and what would be their impact?

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