>>! In T85151#961318, @Maryana wrote:
> It sounds like these "mobile skeptics" you're alluding to assume that WMF has already formulated some big mobile master plan (and perhaps cynically believe it involves ditching desktop development altogether...?),

@Maryana, I have heard in meetings the murmurings of putting desktop on hold.  Not from you, and I don't think the suggestion has truly taken root in our planning process, but I believe it's well worth spelling out (or discussing) in a plenary a very general sense of the size and shape of our investment in desktop vs mobile user interface in the next year or two.  I'll grant you that there's no master plan, but I've also heard many intelligent and compelling hunches about what the right strategy is.  

We will probably need to state the (only seemingly obvious) point that it's not a zero sum game where more mobile investment == less desktop investment.  For example, while our work on Wikidata querying (T85159) was motivated by a mobile use case, there is absolutely nothing mobile specific about the service.  In fact, the heart of our strategy almost certainly needs to be minimizing the cases where we are making zero sum tradeoffs.

However, there are going to be cases where it is zero sum.  Good user interface is messy like that.  We need to have a frank conversation about how much to invest in which area.

> but the reality is that our mobile teams and projects are still very new/emergent, we're still in the exploratory phase with a lot of our work, and there are still many ideas floating around for the directions mobile could go in the future.

I don't think this part needs a great deal of consensus building.  It needs some, because we have a lot of people working on it, and so one could argue we could scale back a little, but that's not the most urgent aspect that requires a big group conversation, and that's not what I was thinking of.

> So I think a "group alignment conversation" is a bit premature. It might be better just to provide a space to talk openly about all these possible future directions (mobile as a service! mobile as the one skin to rule them all! mobile as the shiny new unicorn!, etc.), without necessarily forcing any sort of consensus on the process or making it seem like any of these things are going to happen tomorrow ;)

Sure, there are limits to what we can accomplish in one session or even over the course of two days.  Just having the open conversation might be enough.  And, we don't have to "force" consensus in any way.  However, I think we should inject some amount of urgency and relevance to the conversation, and aspire to actually get something done by having the conversation.

BTW, as long as we're using quotes here, I am going to have to point out that I did say "mobile strategy skeptics" and not "mobile skeptics"  :-)