Re: [Wikitech-l] Going to FOSDEM
What about staying around on Saturday at 18h, after the sessions? I'm at Fosdem and would love to meet you all in person. Would it makes sense to meet outside the community dev room at 18:00 today Saturday? Julien ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!)
Hi Gerard, thanks a lot for chiming in! There are all kinds of technical fixes that helped the people involved in GLAM content no end. There are many more opportunities. Do you have an example of these tech fixes that helped the GLAM people ? I'm very curious about it, as a way to inform issue-specific tech events. We had a GLAM wiki event in Paris, but there was no hackaton (or other kind of producing/making event) during it AFAIK. that makes for a much more refined result :) Could you elaborate on that? What do you see as a refined result -- and a non-refined result? I read your post on readability, is this te kind of non-refined tech where art and dev could meet better you are talking about? Julien ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!)
Hi Al, Bawolff, Lydia, Marcin, and thanks for your feedbacks and exchanges! I was away for a few days, so I'll try to summarize what's have been said and what it makes me think about tech outreach at wikipedia. Bawolff said: it just seems that often outreach focuses on people outside the Wikimedia community, well ignoring people already in the Wikimedia community. In a worldwide, open, community like the Wikimedia community, it's not clear cut who is inside the community and outside the community. Of course what is clear is the amount of work someone is putting for the community. The goal of the tech outreach coordinator would be to focus people on doing more work for the community, by giving them dedicated moments to do so. These moments don't need to be for insiders or for outsiders explicitly (but of course the design of the event can make it lean more toward regulars, irregulars, or newbies) That said the global tech plan as I understand it identified mentoring and nurturing the volunteer ecosystem as a priority over augmenting the intake of tech volunteers. So it's in line with what you say. Lydia said: it likely reached people who are not necessarily close to MediaWiki simply because Wikidata reaches quite a few people who are not close to MediaWiki. I didn't reach out to any group in particular for this. It's interesting as it shows that the data issue speaks to a specific part of the community. It's very possible that other parts of the community would better be addressed by identifying specific theme and issues. For example Gerard Meijssen has a blog post about readability ( http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.fr/2012/07/can-everybody-read-wikipedia.html) and I'm pretty sure we can gather people (not only devs, but designers and usability scientists) around that high leverage issue (a small effort can lead to huge benefits) for a week or a couple of days (be it online, offline or mixed). Al said: 1. Tag along - hold an event before or after a larger event, such as OSCON. This event might even be a charity event. Nice tactic! Something worth trying. 5. Hold a contest. Here is one that just finished a month-long contest: http://rubyosc.com/ Contests are indeed a good way to focus interest online. And to bring in new talents, too. http://rubyosc.com/6. Dual/joint hack event with other projects: Bugzilla, Mozilla, Mysql, php, perl, Something to explore. The new focus of Mozilla on helping setting web makers events all around the web could be a nice common ground. Marcin said: Maybe we should not be afraid and not only offer buzzwords but also point out real technical issues we are facing here. I would say that at least some parts the core code is hardly testable. The situation improves as we go, but still there are lots of problems with our almost-object-oriented coding. Totally right, pain points and technical issues must be openly acknowledged. Also, that's probably the only way to get interest from highly experienced devs in tests and TDD (that would be good!). The more challenging, the more interested they will be. We need to scream out there the core code is hardly testable!!! so that people that are interested in that kind of thing can hear it from where they are (usually, they are in agile dev communities, where they have their own events and dojos and code retreats. Yes, they love to name their events in very traditional ways :-) So may be one of the approaches would be to have a mini-bugathon to review some (or most typical? most annoying? site-breaking?) bugs and try to evaluate how TDD approach could help us to improve. Yes, it was exactly what I had in mind. Sorry if it wasn't clear enough. The goal would be to lure experienced TDD devs in by focusing the event on testing, make them work with the community during a weekend on the code base, existing test, writing tests, etc. and mentor others along the way. (I'm still convinced that giving it a cool, flashy, name doesn't hurt ;-) We might even have a nice cultural clash as a result:) Cultural clashes are fun, but cultural remixes are preferred to clashes, if at all possible :-) Please, keep the ideas and feedback coming: I'll synthesize everything at the end, Julien ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!)
Hi all, I'm Julien Dorra, I build creative communities using events. ex: http://museomix.com, http://artgameweekend.com, http://dorkbotparis.org, http://codinggouter.org. After a short discussion with Adrienne Alix from Wikimedia France, I took my chances and applied for the new role of Engineering Outreach Coordinator a few days ago!! Wish me luck!! (It's basically what I'm doing here in France with maybe the difference that we mix devs and non-devs, like designers and others professionals. We found that mixing is good for the cohesiveness of the communities built out of the events, because they are issue-oriented communities, mostly. Doing it for Wikimedia would be a dream job :) I also got a very nice answer from Sumana, encouraging me to email this list with proposals/ideas of what the Wikimedia community ought to be doing in term of engineering outreach. This application is a great occasion (excuse??) for me to divert some time and better understand the tech-side of the wikimedia community. I have collaborated with the non-tech side of the french community on issues like museum innovation and photography, but never directly with the tech-side of the community. I read with great interest the draft Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals). It's super-rich and very exciting in term of focus. - - So, I wanted to start with a couple of questions I was curious about: 1. In term of outreach to engineers, devs or other technical talents, in your experience is there a specific community that is harder to reach to than others for Wikimedia? 2. Also, would like to see even more effort toward the students? (as in the future professionals!). What about the web startuppers? (AFAISee in Paris, they don't really consider Wikimedia as a software project.) 3. Do you sometimes think there is not enough ux designers on this list? And during hackatons? What about other skills? - - Then, to engage the conversation further, I wanted to test on you some specific ideas around hackatons and technical events ;-) The wider issue of testing, of setting up a more robust test culture is one of the key goals for 2012-2013, if I understand well. I personally know at least 3 developers that are passionate about testing, love to evangelize Test Driven Dev, and that might attend a test-oriented, or TDD-oriented event – but they would probably *not* attend a Wikimedia or MediaWiki generalist event. They have so many event to attend! They even organize events themselves… These 3 devs I know personnaly are the kind of test-oriented mentors we want to be part of the wikimedia community, if for a weekend or a week, because they are good at mentoring and showing the path to others. So, how can we bring them in? That made me (re)think about the limits of generic events, and the importance of issue-oriented event. The idea I would like to put up to discussion would be to organize more fine grained events around specific issues: «Testing Wikipedia» could be a nice catchy name for a series for events in various cities around TDD, with experienced dev mentoring less experienced community members, etc. Even if the experts come and go, everybody learn, some test and process get done, and the community grow and learn. Another issue is engaging other orgs, so why not engage startups: «Wikimedia for fun and profit!» Ok, this title is a joke -- but we should do a series of events focused on encouraging startups to build products on top of MediaWiki, APIs and Wikipedia sites. The rationale here is that the more startups invest on the wikimedia tech, the more they contribute in return. The documentation of MediaWiki is also an issue. Let's not wait to have a big team to launch more sprints, let's the sprints build the team: «DocDocDc Sprints» Realspace events are a powerful way to focus people on a goal. So to build a stronger documentation team, we could start designing an engaging and inclusive event format, setting up dates and places for a series of events. That could boost interest, and gather people that wouldn't have think of helping on MediaWiki. Of course the challenge is to keep the momentum going in between realspace sprints. So that means building an strong doc community online too. Obviously, setting up events, even small ones, takes a lot of effort! Scaling them can seems too much to do, too, when resources are limited. The good news is that we have successful examples of worldwide scaled event formats, like Startup weekend, Dorkbot. It's doable. And the rewards can be huge. So the strategy here would be to kickstart local chapters with recipes for events and by connecting them with I call 'serial-collaborators', (people that love to attend hackatons and creative weekends - they know a lot about these events, and are precious resource for advice and support). Identifying and contacting partners and places usually helps a lot, too, for helping
Re: [Wikitech-l] About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!)
Thanks Bawolff for your feedback! It's great, as it helps me think even more about it! I gather from what you said above that your specialty is in-person events, More the combination of in-person events with unfocused (unaware of themselves) existing web communities. OrsayCommons for example (more here: http://side-creative.ncl.ac.uk/communities/symposium11/julien-dorra/) was actually a series of live photo-streaming events happening both inside the Orsay museum, and, of course, on Twitter. Online and offline were indissociable in event series, and it allowed us to focus a community of museum photo lovers against the ban on picture taking in this museum. Also, my co-organizers and I always try to include online participants during the in-person hackatons event. It's hard! It's actually a huge part of the new event organization for Museomix 2012 (random fact: we had two wikipedians at Museomix 2011) So there is multiple ways to combine realspace and cyberspace: you can build your realspace event as a focal moment where participants produce and share online. You could design your event with hooks and touchpoints for online participants. but perhaps it would be interesting to have virtual events of some sort via IRC focusing on a very fine grained topic. I'm not sure how exactly that would work, but I think it might be interesting. Virtual events could take the form of challenges like Ludum Dare, or the monthly Mozilla Dev derby. I would argue that the strength of online is in asynchronous events, where people from all timezone can participate. Having a continuously open channel during a challenge is a good idea. People can then come and ask question, be mentored by some 'elders'… One thing that I'd love to see exploited more is Etherpad-like (or Google Docs-like) simultaneous, realtime writing. The simple act of writing collectively in realtime is exhilarating and put you in a incredible flow state. I think there is a lot of potential for documentation sprints here. If you never tried to write an article or a blog post in realtime with one or more others, you should do it! It's a beautiful experience that is literally impossible to live with paper or a single computer. (Related to realtime writing: Unishared is a very young startup that want to push every university students to take class notes live, collaboratively and publicly! Nice goal) I personally think (and I imagine many people think differently), that perhaps retention rather than recruitment is what should be focused on. Yes, retention is a key issue. Also, ramping up people from casual participation to more and more complex involvement. Giving people a path, new goals, new focus. In any case, any community also have to account for people leaving or more frequently just gradually winding down their participation (like, when they become parents, or take a new job). I had that experience myself in 2009, when I was very active in the local Drupal community, helping gather people, find sponsors for a big event -- and then had to step down from my community roles, because of… my second daughter :-) After all, we power wikipedia. Wikipedia has a huge user base, some of which know how to program, and many of those will at the very least look our way, even if they don't explicitly drop in and say hi. Those are the people we should attract. Even though probably 90% of our contributor base come from a wiki project, I still think this is a vastly untapped pool. People generally join open source projects to scratch an itch (so the saying goes). The Wikipedians (not to mention the oft neglected sister projects) are the one's who would be itchy. I remember John Resig (from jQuery) saying: Treat every user as a potential contributor. Very Wikipedian, isn't it? Wikipedia does of course treat every reader as a contributor by nature for the content!! * Question for you all: On the technical side, from your experience, what would make an user/visitor/editor feel she/he *is* a potential tech contributor, not just a potential content contributor? In many ways I've noticed a trend where it seems people on some projects, especially en Wikipedia, treat the foundation as more of a host than an entity meant to serve their interests. As a result they start to feel that MediaWiki is a product that is being developed for them (in a similar way how something like facebook or google is developed for its users) rather than by them (or by their community). Maybe there was always such setiment, and I just never noticed it in earlier times, but I find such sentiment disturbing. I think in order to best reach out to new contributors, we need to start at home so to speak. Yes, from my experience too people tend to rapidly put themselves in consumer mode :-) I suppose it's (for the moment!) the default mode and we have to make a conscious and specific effort to get them out of that consumer mode. * Question for you all: do you
Re: [Wikitech-l] About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!)
Wow, thanks Chris for this great feedback! In May we collaborated with the Weekend Testers (Americas)[1] I love the name! They also seem to have an interesting history in term of organic community growth. In June we collaborated online with Openhatch.org participants from the previous test event with WTA helped out, so there was a mix of skill and experience among the testers, and several people remarked about how they had not expected to have so much fun. I'm very interested in reading more about this session! What would you say was the main expertise/know-how that the OpenHatch team brought? How would you say they brought the fun in testing? Also, does the OpenHatch process guide people of varied skills, or did you set up a set of pre-requisites? We would like to do some more sessions like these. One strong suggestion is to have a test event addressing outstanding Bugzilla issues for particular extensions. This could be an ongoing exercise, either in collaboration with other groups or as a pure-Wikipedia exercise. A regular test day could anchor the idea. Maybe Monthly Test 13th, so there would be added luck ;-) About the two events you had, did you somehow also regroup in-person, say 2 or 3 testers together, or was everybody at home? I think improving unit testing would be a great ongoing project. I'm probably brain-washed by the test driven developers I met, but I'm under the impression that there is no downside to better tests! (I'm a purely hobbyist coder myself, learned when I was a kid and along the way, so I took a *lot* of bad patterns and habits. Never learned to write a test before writing functional code, obviously. But I'm seeing the way, now ;-) Julien ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
