#Agile training at the #Wikimedia Foundation

The #Localisation team consists of people who are used to each other. We worked together for a long time and now it is a job. With a job come dreary things, things like time management in order to be paid but it makes available time to spend on the real issues that are so dear to our heart.

With more time and with being part of the team of MediaWiki developers all kinds of things change and need to be addressed. As an amateur (ie non paid professional) you choose what you want to be involved in. Siebrand did the project management as well as being the working "first among equals" and in reality he has been herding cats.

The carrot and stick approach worked well; if you code this it will go live soon or if you localise these messages first, your Wikipedia will be more usable. Making sure that the environment was optimal for getting the jobs done has always been part of project management.

Now that we are a team intending to work with best industry practices, it is wonderful that the Wikimedia Foundation knows about best practices and intends to implement them in the various disciplines in the organisation. For software there is agile and we have the good fortune to have two days of training by Hai from ThoughtWorks.

The good news is that as a result of implementing an agile management style, we will have frequent updates of language related software. We will have a lot of communications particularly with the language support teams we are setting up about functionality and requirements (both ways) and we expect that as a result many great languages will get all the readers and editors they deserve.
Thanks,
      GerardM