Submissions:2016/Developing community norms for critical bots and tools

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Title
Developing community norms for critical bots and tools
(Don't let your brother-in-law's niece be the only person who keeps your community running)
Theme
Technology & Infrastructure
Academic Peer Review option
No
Type of submission
Presentation (and possible unconference follow-up meetings)
Author
Bryan Davis
E-mail address
bd808@wikimedia.org
Username
BDavis (WMF), BryanDavis
Affiliation
Wikimedia Foundation, Community Tech, Tool Labs support
Abstract
Present real life bot and tool failures with on-wiki impact that might have been avoided by following a few relatively simple guidelines for healthy FLOSS projects.
Bots and tools are a vital resource for many on-wiki content creation and curation activities. A typical bot/tool project begins life as a way for a motivated Wikimedia community member to make some on-wiki task easier (or possible). These individuals are "scratching their own itch" in the best tradition of open source development. Many of these projects have a short lifecycle due to factors such as loss of interest by the maintainer, insurmountable technical hurdles, or discovery of a better means to manage the original problem. Others however become popular and tightly integrated in the workflows of one or more on-wiki communities.
Popular tools and bots become de facto production software needed to keep the wikis healthy and happy. Their roots as weekend projects from motivated volunteers brought them their success, but ultimately pose a risk to their end users. Life happens and a single developer project is in perpetual danger of abandonment. Adopting basic FLOSS project practices and following some general rules of professional software and systems management can help protect the software and the wikis.
Length of presentation
30 min.
Special schedule requests
N/A
Preferred room size
10-20 (or more if there's interest!)
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  1. Jarekt (talk) 15:03, 29 August 2016 (EDT)
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