Proposal: Wikimedia Foundation to adopt, maintain, and extend ODK

[iamjessklein]

I would like to propose that we move Open Design Kit from pure community to Wikimedia Foundation shepherding.

Proposal:

Wikimedia Foundation would like to adopt, maintain, and extend Open Design Kit as a Wikimedia Foundation project. This will place ODK in a home where it will be actively maintained and kept open. The project will still live on github and will be open source but live under Wikimedia Foundation.

Why?

• Maintenance: As a community of a few folks it has been challenging to truly support this work.
• Quality Control: Moving this project will allow us to provide the quality control that a body of this work requires.
• Scale: this will go from an audience of dozens to a wider, global audience integrate open design methods with Wikipedia and sum of all human knowledge
• Transition team: @iamjessklein , co-creator of ODK, will be able to lead transition as part of her role as Sr. UX Designer at Wikimedia along with the Wikimedia design team (which includes ODK co-creator @pamela-drouin).

You can learn more here about design team at Wikimedia.

I would like to hear from you - do you agree or disagree with this proposal?

[deathbearbrown]

I approve of this. I still refer back to the ODK pretty regularly at Splice, and I want to make sure that it continues to be maintained and grows.

[mjchamplin]

I think this sounds good. Like @deathbearbrown I still reference ODK often, and still have a couple of methods I've been (more slowly than I'd hoped) working on for addition. So long as the project remains open-source I support the move.

[susanjrobertson]

I'm totally fine with this! I want it to be cared for, so it all sounds good.

[Wilto]

Absolutely agreed.

[dmichl]

This is great news, I totally agree and approve this :)

[bobholt]

[toolness]

Nice, I like it!

[toolness]

Oh wait! One concern I do have is, what happens if/when @iamjessklein leaves Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)? I'm a bit concerned that if WMF retains ownership of ODK after she leaves, it might go unmaintained and perish. But otherwise I think it's a splendid plan.

[dajbelshaw]

This is a great idea and I wholeheartedly approve. It's a wonderful resource and fully deserving of WMF's full support :)

[isaacdurazo]

I love this idea! I still use ODK quite often and would love to see it evolve <3

[iamjessklein]

So what we've done, is create a stub page for ODK on mediawiki. This can act as a container for all of the content that's currently on Open Design Kit.

Next steps:

• design information architecture
• create plan for implementation

[mjchamplin]

Does this mean that the homepage / opendesignkit.org is going away?

[iamjessklein]

Yes and no - it will be replicated and redirected.