The socio-technical dilemma: Fleshing out tradeoffs with a diverse set of concerns and stakeholders

(This is a hands-on lab with limited capacity)

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization that runs the technical systems behind Wikipedia. Wikipedia has been an open source software for 20+ years, and as a result, it’s relying on a monolith that is extremely hard to adjust and move, and involves a lot of contributors. Because decisions involve such a large set of stakeholders and a sense of danger to the integrity of the monolith, decisions about change are perceived as extremely expensive. It becomes very important to outline and highlight the tradeoffs between options before crosscutting decisions are made.

The Wikimedia Architecture Team has developed a process to collaboratively discover and weigh the tradeoffs that are involved in socio-technical changes. The process helps engineers and teams collect the concerns, tradeoffs, effort requirements and general change needed without falling into the endless pit of solutioning.These are then put into a format that allows discussion and finding agreements towards paths that were non-obvious before.

This workshop will walk you through the process so you can use it in your own work.

The components of the workshop are as follows: -How to agree on a problem statement -How to flesh out viable options -Raising additional ambitious options that may have been dismissed due to fear or perceived cost and fleshing out whether they are viable -How to discover the tradeoffs -How to describe the practical needs and cost behind options collaboratively -Presenting the result for executive buy-in for systemic change

Prerequisites

This is suitable for attendees of all backgrounds and skill levels.