Yuvi, much thanks to you, to Srikanthlogic, and to the others who made this event possible. It sounds like a great success. Sorry for the late reply.
> It was a one day, 8 hour event focusing on getting people > together to hack on stuff related to all Wikimedia projects - not just > Mediawiki patches. Fantastic idea. And one-day events are a totally reasonable length, and easier for first-time event-runners to run. > As people came in, we asked them what technologies/fields they are > familiar with, and picked out an idea for them to work on from the > Ideas List (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Chennai_Hackathon_March_2012/Ideas). > This took care of the biggest problem with hackathons with new people > - half the day spent on figuring out what to work on, and when found, > it is completely outside the domain of expertise of the people hacking > on the idea. Talking together with them fast to pick an idea within 5 > minutes that they can complete in the day fixed this problem and made > sure people can concentrate on coding for the rest of the day. That's a really great tactic and one that I hope to copy for future outreach events. Can you add it (and any other tricks up your sleeve) to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach/Event_planning ? > Demos > ===== I strongly appreciate your consolidated list of names and links -- thanks. > Vivek is also applying to work with Mediawiki for > GSoC, so we will hopefully get a long term contributor :) And of course anyone is welcome to work with us outside of GSoC as well. (obligatory reminder) I forwarded the "all unique words in Tamil Wikipedia" project link to the researchers on wiki-research-l. > 4. Program to help record pronunciations for words in tawikt > Is currently blocked on figuring out a way to > properly upload to commons You should consider consulting Maarten Dammers and Ryan Kaldari on that as they are seasoned experts on the social and technical intricacies of Commons mass upload. > 6. Structured database search over Wikipedia > https://github.com/ashwanthkumar/structured-wiki-search. You could tell Ashwanth to get in touch with those "Swipe" folks from http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21625-new-search-tool-to-unlock-wikipedia.html . > 7. Photo upload to commons by Email > I hope someone from the community (perhaps people doing WLM?) > should be able to get in touch with him to see if this tool could > be developed further with a specific goal in mind. Yes, talk to Maarten and to the Wiki Loves Monuments people. > 8. Lightweight offline Wiki reader I presume you've already told offline-l? :-) > He's still fixing things on the script. If the community needs people > to come fix up their user scripts/gadgets, Bharath would be a willing > (and awesome!) candidate! That sounds terrific! Please do ask him to contact me. > 1. WikiPronouncer > By: Russel Nickson > I think this would still be a very useful tool, and > hope someone from the community steps up to work with Russel and get > this finished. Talking with Yuvi to ask him about getting developers who know Android involved. (mobile-l.) > 2. Wiktionary cross lingual statistics > By: PranavRC > > What it was supposed to do: > It was a statistical tool that generated statistics about how many > words overlap between all indic languages in Wiktionary (as measured > by interwiki links). > > Status: > The code has been written (I've requested the author to put it up > publicly, will update list when it is). It, however, requires a lot of > time to be run. So validation by the community that such stats would > be useful would, IMO, definitely give Pranav the impetus to finish it > up and show us the pretty graphs :) Ask wiki-research-l and point them to Pranav's code? If you aren't on that list, give me an email to forward and I will. Or ask Dario to do so. > Next Steps > ========== > Where do we go from here? Random thoughts: > > 1. Geek retention - this is reasonably easy. If we keep feeding > hackers interesting problems that affect a lot of people, they'll keep > helping us out. Is it possible to have some sort of a 'tools required' > or 'hacks required' or 'gadgets required' page/queue someplace where > we can always direct hackers looking for interesting problems to? IMO > Wikipedia is full of interesting technical problems, so this *should* > be feasible. We have https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Annoying_large_bugs as a start but it's not quite right, as it's pretty MediaWiki-centric. And every community has its own wishlist and isn't likely to come off-wiki to add to yet another one, so probably the best thing to do is to simply compile links to more those wishlists at the bottom of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Annoying_large_bugs#See_also . > 2. Follow ups - this time, I am able to do this personally (small > enough group). Clearly this will not scale. Do we have ideas/methods > for following up with these people so that they stay with us? If you could answer this question definitively, you could instantly achieve a stable career as a religious or political leader. :-) Over and over we see that there is simply no substitute for personal followup and delegating right-sized tasks. Our best investment is in that personal followup and in building infrastructure for ourselves (contact lists, databases, boilerplate emails). > 3. More of these? This was pretty much a 'zero cost' event - stickers > were the only 'cost'. A lot of places around the country would love to > have their space used for a hackathon of sorts. Should we do more of > these kind of 'Unofficial' hackathons? Yes, but only if we can prepare for them as well as you did. Thanks again. -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
