First off, thank you for your excellent response.
On 05/05/17 12:58, Quim Gil wrote:
Sorry for being so late replying. Isarra asks a good question and I have
been thinking of a good answer.
On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 8:35 PM, Isarra Yos <zhoris...@gmail.com> wrote:
Different events serve very different purposes, though - hackathons, for
instance, seem to be largely useful for onboarding newcomers and giving
staff and other occupational contributors an opportunity to work on
projects separate from their usual work, basically whatever they feel like
doing, as opposed to what they have to. But these often don't do much for
established volunteers, as a result, who generally just work on whatever
they feel like all the time already. Have you looked into how the roles of
these different events fit together across all the different groups, and
how scopes affect them (regional, topical, etc)? This would also be useful
for chapters/groups planning their own events.
Yes, we have started to think seriously how the different developer events
fit together, how can they support better each other, and how can chapters
and other affiliates get better involved organizing local / regional events
or adding a tech component to the events they are already organizing.
Until recently our approach has been quite fragmented, organizing
technically successful events disconnected from each other. We started a
new trend last Summer, at the Wikimania Hackathon in Esino Lario,
discussing with Wikimedia Austria how could we improve the Wikimedia
Hackathon 2017 (in Vienna, in two weeks) after the high bar set by
Wikimedia Israel in Jerusalem. We had this idea of supporting the
organization of smaller hackathons and sponsoring the best participants to
travel to Vienna. The idea is working so far.
Growth paths for volunteers is another idea that has become very important
in our strategy and plans. While we seem to be quite good at organizing
developer events, developer outreach programs, developer community
support... the fact is that we are not doing good at retaining new
volunteer developers. Many come, but most leave. And there are many reasons
for this, but we think that an important one is that we are not offering
clear growth paths that make people stick around. Some volunteers find
these growth paths themselves, and we have many examples in this list, but
many simply don't see them and leave.
Developer events play an important role in these growth paths. Imagine that
a chapter or even a small affiliate organizes a simple local workshop
somewhere. One of the best participants, a total newcomer to Wikimedia
although a fluent JavaScript developer, is invited to travel to the next
hackathon in the nearest regional event (WikiArabia, WikiIndaba, the CEE
conference...) There, the best developers are invited to one of our global
hackathons (invited to South Africa in 2018, how cool is that!?!?).
Actually, the growth paths through events can be connected with related
online activities (self-paced, scheduled), which allows us to work with
more people beyond travel budget and people's possibilities with travel and
calendars. We can also connect them with developer outreach programs (GSoC,
Outreachy...). Who was a newcomer becomes more experienced, maybe a speaker
or a trainer invited to online / offline events, maybe a maintainer, maybe
a mentor, maybe grantee, a professional developer at Wikimedia...
OK, all these are ideas in progress that we are starting to put together at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration/Onboarding_New_Developers
Now, back to the Summit. The Wikimedia Developer Summit never was an event
crucial for onboarding new developers, and in fact it was not an event easy
to involve volunteers, because of its location (expensive San Francisco, in
a region where there are not many volunteer developers) and also because
the topics were quite focused on what is work mostly for professional
developers (see our cyclic discussions about how to integrate volunteer
developers and the topics crucial for them).
We have tried in several editions, and it has been very difficult to obtain
a mild success. Instead, now we are trying to bring some of the "Summit
topics" to those hackathons based on who is attending anyway (or vice
versa) and then we can focus the Summit around a specific topic and the
people specializing on it, in the terms explained by Victoria. What topics
will be discussed where will be decided by a program committee that will be
active through the year, helping to provide this connection across events
(see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T160996 )
Sorry for the long response. It is the first time I write down all these
ideas in a single place. Feedback is very welcome.
A... suggestion, I suppose, though it comes with a caveat: if you
haven't, I would highly recommend documenting what you've found/wound up
with as learning patterns on meta, or similar, as well. This is valuable
stuff, and while it's often difficult to find specific information even
when it is available, I expect it would be very useful for the chapters,
local organisers, etc to see these thoughts and results even if you
don't wind up being able to act on all of it directly, or such.
Maybe.
-I
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