2025-08-06 –, NYERI
Language: English
The Product and Technology Advisory Council is a group recently formed to advise on the development of product and technology in the Wikimedia ecosystem. It is composed of community members and some Foundation representatives.
In this session, the PTAC members will present the Council, its work in these first few months, and its recommendations, followed by questions and discussion.
For many years, there has been an idea of forming some sort of "tech council". In the Movement Strategy, a recommendation to Coordinate Across Stakeholders called for the creation of a Technological Council. Finally, at the end of 2024, a Product and Technology Advisory Council was created.
The Product and Technology Advisory Council is meant to discuss ambiguous problems such as prioritizing newcomer or experienced editor growth, or platform improvements versus user-facing feature development. They will also discuss the necessary tradeoffs and strategy to ensure the movement's success. In February, it published its first recommendation, aiming at prioritizing the improvement of mobile experiences.
In this session, the PTAC members will present the Council, its work in these first few months, and its recommendations, followed by questions and discussion.
- How do you plan to deliver this session? You will be asked to confirm this closer to the date in case of changes to the format.
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Onsite in Nairobi
- Should your session be selected for the program, do you agree to release your session and supporting materials on-wiki and on the eventyay platform under CC BY-SA 4.0?
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I agree
- What other themes or topics does your session fit into? Please choose from the list of tags below.
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Product development
- What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
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Some experience will be needed
- How does your session relate to the event theme: Wikimania@20: Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?
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From the announcement of its creation, the Product and Technology Advisory Council «supports the recommendation to "Coordinate Across Stakeholders" by bringing technical contributors and the Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform»: hence its goal is to make our technological platform more sustainable, by creating more inclusive channels and processes.
Long term wikipedian, former chair of Wikimedia Italy, vice chair of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation.
In my day job, I teach and do research at the University of Washington. I am also an active editor on several wikis and work with the Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation community to support academic research related to wikis and Wikimedia in a number of ways. Please see my user page on meta for more information.
Eugene is a volunteer technical Wikimedian and mentor with experience in building tools which help facilitate editors work on Wikipedia, Metawiki and Wikidata. Eugene has been involved in growing and mentoring a community of African developers for the past 4 years and has worked on several personal, community and Wikimedia Foundation projects.
Birgit Mueller is the Director of Product for MediaWiki and Developer Experiences at the Wikimedia Foundation. She joined the Wikimedia movement as a staff member of Wikimedia Deutschland in 2014 and moved to the Foundation in 2019 to support Wikimedia's developer ecosystem as the Director of Technical Engagement. Since 2023, she has been focusing on evolving the MediaWiki platform and improving the experiences of developers within Wikimedia’s ecosystem.