Madhumitha Viswanathan
| Tags | API, Complexity, Documentation, Knowledge as a Service, Tools |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture |
| Secondary Sessions | Knowledge as a Service |
We are in the business of democratizing knowledge, and I believe that lowering and removing technical barriers to entry, and creating a culture of inclusion in our technical spaces is essential to our success.'
The Knowledge as a Service aspect of our strategic directions focuses on building infrastructure and platforms that help create and share open knowledge. The key to successfully building and scaling such infrastructure, in the context of the Wikimedia Technical spaces, is enabling everyone, irrespective of their experience or backgrounds to be able to utilize and create research, data, and tools on top of our infrastructure. When designing infrastructure and other technical products, we often fail to take into account technical barriers, inessential complexities and social costs that can discourage or prevent people from being able to leverage them. For instance, is it enough to build a dataset and store it in a database, if we do not provide friendly ways for researchers to access and analyze this data? Is it enough to put out a call to contribute to a project, but not provide easy-to-setup development environments to be able to test changes? Is it sufficient to have a state of the art environment to host applications, but not design good, simple processes around gaining access and deploying to them?
These conversations are crucial, because we are not building products for technology's sake, but are in fact trying to build a culture where it is easy to use and contribute to our technical projects, whether you are a volunteer who has a few hours to spare or a paid employee; a newcomer or a long time contributor. We also want our technical communities to be diverse, and these complex systems and processes, and unsaid social constructs around how to interact with our projects, often bias against traditionally underrepresented populations in technology.
I have always worked on or pushed for creating and supporting simple graphical interfaces that provide unified access to data sources, building platforms and processes that lets people just create tools/APIs/dashboards and be able to painlessly host them, developing tutorials and good documentation for getting involved in our projects, and codifying friendly and inclusive social norms and promoting a culture of being excellent to each other in our technical spaces.
When talking about the future directions of new and existing projects, we should take into account the costs and barriers to access, and who we may be failing to include as a result. I hope to be this voice in the Developer Summit.
