Regarding the Developers Summit in particular, how do you plan to
reconcile making the event smaller with your goal of better retention of
newcomers and volunteers in general when that's often the only venue
they have at which to discuss the high-level technical issues with other
stakeholders? Volunteer and third-party developers are not privy to most
of the usual venues afforded to WMF staff such as inter-team meetings
and events, and yet they make up an important part of the overall
stakeholder community that these issues impact. They - we - need to be
able to participate in these discussions, and the Developers Summit is
one of very few opportunities even open to us where we can make our
voices heard.
-I
On 20/04/17 07:28, Quim Gil wrote:
On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 1:14 AM, Quim Gil<q...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi, the Wikimedia Foundation has published a draft of its Annual Plan
FY2017-18
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Draft>
and it welcomes your review.
I want to highlight here the improvements that we are proposing to the
developer events (co)organized by the WMF. From local to global:
The Technical Collaboration team proposes to combine multiple activities
(often disconnected) in a single program focusing on onboarding new
developers
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Draft/Programs/Community_Engagement#Program_12:_Onboarding_new_developers>.
We
want to work with the Wikimedia technical community to bring a new wave of
developers to our projects, and events play an important role.
Local developer events
We want to support developers and organizations willing to reach out to
specific groups and geographies. We are hoping to see many local developer
meetups and small hackathons or workshops around the World, starting small
and simple. We should be able to offer introductory materials, contacts
with Wikimedia developers in the region, maybe travel budget to send
experienced volunteers to help mentoring the in the bigger events, maybe
travel budget to invite the best newcomers to our regional and global
events.
Adding tech to regional Wikimedia events
Last year we experimented organizing technical workshops in WikiArabia,
and others have done similar efforts in other regional events (for
instance, a small hackathon next to WikiConference India). We want to work
with the organizers of these regional events in order to attract
experienced Wikimedia developers and newcomers, organize developer
activities, and also improve the collaboration between the technical and
non-technical contributors in these regions.
Better retention of newcomers at the Wikimedia and Wikimania hackathons
Although we don't expect major changes in the organization of the
Wikimedia Hackathon and the hackathon at Wikimania, we want to focus better
on new developers onboarding and retention. In every Hackathon we meet many
new developers, but the retention rates are very low. We want to review
what we can do before, during, and after these apparently successful events
in order to retain newcomers better. One hypothesis is that we should focus
call for participation, scholarships, and Wikimedia Foundation
participation in providing a great experience to new volunteers who have
gone through local and regional events, and also "junior" developers coming
from wiki projects through the development of bots, gadgets, tools,
templates.
A smaller and more focused Wikimedia Developer Summit
After some discussions between Community Engagement, Technology, and
Product, we have decided to propose a different approach for the Wikimedia
Developer Summit. Organized by the Technology department as part of their
technical
community building
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Draft/Programs/Technology#Program_4:_Technical_community_building>
efforts, we want the Summit to finally become the venue where the toughest
technical problems are discussed between the stakeholders directly related.
We want to reduce the size/budget of the event, separate it from the WMF
AllHands,
Due to travel budget considerations, the Summit still might be connected to
the WMF AllHands.
and define its main themes well in advance.
A Program Committee<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T160996> would
decide these main themes to be discussed at the Summit. We also want to
explore the possibility of tackling some of these themes at the Wikimedia
Hackathon and Wikimania, where we could get most stakeholders involved with
just a little extra effort (since many of them would be attending anyway).
We believe that this approach will serve better the Wikimedia technical
community that we have, and also the the community that we want to have,
with a new wave of developers joining our various projects.
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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