Program/Building tools to serve diverse users: Community Centered Software Development
- Notes
- Format
- Round Table
- Keywords
- diversity
- mediawiki
- community
- community centered software development
- When and where
- Friday 20 July, 11:00
- Duration: 55 minutes
Mexico City
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- Presenter(s)
- Topic area
- Relationship to theme
Language & literacy
Access & accessibility
Abstract
Diverse users use the Wikimedia technical infrastructure and tools. Having different requirements and needs, contributors from all over the world need tools that serve them well in their work for the Wikimedia projects.
This sounds nice in theory, and is a challenge in practise: How can we make sure that multiple perspectives, experiences with workflows and local expertise shape the Wikimedia software development?
At Wikimedia Deutschland, we were working with different approaches to improve MediaWiki based on community needs through the past years: We call it Community Centered Software Development. Core element is the Technical Wishlist, a collaborative approach to collect and prioritise problems and missing functionalities on de-wiki. The perspectives of contributors from other language communities, other developers and even people who are no contributors yet come in on the way from the idea to the implementation.
In this session we would like to introduce our methods, experiences and lessons learned. Furthermore, we would like to discuss with the participants what accessibility means in an international context. To kick off the discussion, we will provide the example of categories that currently can't be gendered (which would be common in some languages). Everyone is invited to bring in examples for discussion as well!
This round table relates both to the topics of access and accessibility, and language and literacy.
No technical knowledge is required for this round table session.
Outcomes
The session should produce a list of areas, where our software is not yet fully supporting all kinds of languages, maybe even with ideas of how to change that. Also, attendees will be able to discuss the Community Centered Software Development approach, ideally also learning about new approaches that they may apply themselves.
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