That would be great.
Interesting, thanks.
-I
On 28/04/17 20:57, Victoria Coleman wrote:
Hi there,
Quim and his team have indeed thought through the totality of tech community
events and I am sure he can respond here with his thoughts. Regarding the
MediaWiki roadmap, the thinking is that by publishing it we a/make planning for
3rd party users much more feasible, b/inform the community about what the
Foundation will be doing so that we can avoid overlap, and c/hopefully
incentivize broader participation by the community in the formulation and
delivery of the roadmap.
I hope this makes sense.
Victoria
On Apr 27, 2017, at 11:35 AM, Isarra Yos <zhoris...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks.
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.
How exactly is publishing a roadmap going to help facilitate community
contributions?
-I
On 27/04/17 03:11, Victoria Coleman wrote:
Hi Isarra,
thank you for the question. We want to support our diverse technical
communities in a variety of ways. One of our key tools are the hackathons,
where we hope to welcome both seasoned and new volunteer developers. We want to
support them not just by providing a series of events but also with tools and
WMF staff time. These are the key goals of our new Wikimedia Cloud Services
team. They build and make labs and tools available and participate in the
hackathons to onboard newcomers and in general assist volunteers. Another key
change we are making this year is creating the MediaWiki Platform team who as
well as doing much needed work on the codebase will also facilitate
contributions and planning with the volunteer community by publishing a
roadmap. And as Quim notes below we are changing the nature of the Dev Summit
to have it focus on the strategic technology issues and decisions the Movement
is faced with. As such it is an event that might appeal more to the seasoned
members of our community. Attendance for the summit will be decided on the
basis of position papers for WMF staff and volunteers alike. I am personally
excited about the lineup of events this coming year. But as always we learn and
adapt. If we collectively decide to try for a different configuration the
following year, we can totally do that. Please keep the feedback coming!
Best regards,
Victoria
On Apr 26, 2017, at 12:23 PM, Isarra Yos <zhoris...@gmail.com> wrote:
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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