(It would be good to have the opinion of the
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013 organizers here)
On 01/23/2013 09:21 AM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
I am actually fine with inconsistency here.
I think you mean you are fine with flexibility. Me too. :)
I don't think we need uniformity.
Me neither. I'm proposing defaults and flexibility to change them based
on need.
Now we have lack of defaults, which leads to confusion and extra work.
In one city, local technologists might call something a
hackathon; in another country, the word "hack" always means cracking and
security work, so the people we want to reach would understand better if
we call it a training or a conference or a jam or "dev days"; and so on.
(This is what has happened in India and caused actual headaches and
disappointment and misleading word-of-mouth for past Indian events that
had "hack" in the name.)
This would fall under "Localizations and exceptions to be considered and
approved one by one."
If we find useful rules like "in India DevCamp is better than Hackathon"
then we can just document and apply them. Problem solved.
But the "hackathon" part is easy. The nut hard to crack is the
"Wikipedia", "Wikimedia", "MediaWiki", [choose your logo] and [nothing].
If you and me can have doubts, imagine the poor local event organizer
somewhere. Can we agree on a default?
I'd like to see what the actual harm caused by inconsistency is and I'd
like more data on what real benefit we'd get by making people always
name things according to the same scheme. Not just hypotheticals.
No harm... but no help either. Whoever wants to organize a hackathon
today must start almost from scratch and doing some research because
there are not clear precedents and recyclable materials.
Imagine yourself willing to have a hackathon in NY:
- How to call it?
- Do I need to craft my own logo?
Which imply: Who to ask permission?
Before having this clear it's not easy to even setup a wiki page or send
a first email or tweet announcing that you are planning to organize such
event.
For WMF employees and others deeply involved in this community this
might not be a good deal. But for your local tech promoter this lack of
clarity it really doesn't help. Those are exactly the ones we want to
engage.
> Perhaps a few other open source communities have dealt with this and
> would be able to provide that data.
Looking at e.g. the Mozilla and Ubuntu communities you can see that they
have defaults (MozCamps, Firefox OS App Days, Ubuntu Hours, UDS, LoCo
meetings... and flexibility for alternatives as well.
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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