Succession plan

This plan is inspired by a presentation at FOSDEM.

This page was last reviewed January 2023

Roles

These are the main roles for translatewiki.net. The current role holders form the translatewiki.net core team. One person can hold more than one role, and multiple persons can hold one role simultaneously, but they need to coordinate. It's not necessary to officially hold a role to do any of these things or to be restricted to only the duties of your own role – this is a collaborative volunteer project.

However, if you are holding role, there is an expectation that you will take care of the duties or bring it up to the project leader if you are unable to. Past role holders are good candidates to back you up for temporary unavailability. Fixed-term periods (e.g. 6 months, 1 year) and mentoring are a great way to try a role without committing to it for long times.

We are looking for new people to fill in these roles (with mentoring) to make it easier for all of us by having backups and sharing the workload over multiple people. Some of the roles require access to our servers, and that requires a lot of trust. If you are a completely new person, you should start gaining trust by trying other roles first. If you are interested, contact the current role holders on their talk page, by email, or on IRC.

Project leader

Takes a long view to ensure translatewiki.net will continue to exist and prosper.

Duties:

Ensure project continuity (e.g. hosting, succession planning)
Set a strategic direction and scope
Maintain this succession plan

Current role holders:

Nike

Currently being mentored:

Nobody

Past role holders:

Gangleri
Siebrand

Translator liaison

Helps translators and relays messages or connects people.

Duties:

Watch Support and project talk pages for issues reported by translators, helps them, or brings the issues to attention of an appropriate person.
Rename user accounts

Current role holders:

Abijeet Patro

Currently being mentored:

Nobody

Past role holders:

Nike
Siebrand
Nemo_bis
Many others

Documentation:

System admin

Keeps our servers running. This role requires a great amount of trust and responsibility because of the access to private data.

Duties:

Maintain puppet configuration for our servers
Keep software up to date
Perform big software updates
Monitor resource usage and alert project leaders when resources use is growing beyond capacity
Keep the servers secure
Keep the servers optimized

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored:

Nobody

Past role holders:

Siebrand

Documentation:

System admin for MediaWiki

Ensures our MediaWiki installation is fast, secure and maintainable.

Duties:

Deploy updates to our MediaWiki installation
Do configuration changes
Monitor MediaWiki/PHP error logs
Monitor upcoming changes to MediaWiki

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored:

Wangombe

Past role holders:

Siebrand

Documentation:

MediaWiki deployment

Developer

Responsible for maintaining and developing the features of translatewiki.net.

Duties:

Maintain and develop Translate for the needs of translatewiki.net
Maintain and develop RepoNG project and related scripts
Support other developers with code review

Current role holders:

Nike
Abijeet Patro since 2019-05

Currently being mentored:

Wangombe

Past role holders:

Siebrand
Wikimedia Language team developers

Documentation:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate

Translation admin

Imports and exports translation updates for projects supported in translatewiki.net.

Duties:

Monitor changes to project strings
Update group configuration in the translatewiki repo
Follow changes in upstream tagged for translation admins
Advice people how to do message renames, changes etc.
Import translation changes
Export translation changes
Report issues affecting imports and exports

Current role holders:

Raymond for MediaWiki components hosted in Gerrit
Abijeet Patro and Nike for everything else

Currently being mentored:

Nobody

Past role holders:

Documentation:

Project liaison

Reach out to new and current projects to ensure smooth collaboration.

Duties:

Reach out to potential new software projects to discuss using translatewiki.net
Gather necessary information to setup new projects
Follow Support, #translatewiki at Libera.Chat in IRC and #translatewiki.net in Phabricator for new project requests and helps them
Understand the requirements for projects using translatewiki.net
Keep in touch with existing supported projects to surface possible issues early
Work with project's to fix observed issues (e.g. translations not getting into use)
Keep the project pages up to date

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored: