I'm not a dev (by day job) but frequently attend hackathons and other coding events, and just wanted to detail what I do and what I've seen others do (without coding.)
- write documentation - do rapid protosketching or user testing - write content for the platform/app - user test existing platforms (if devs want someone to test something out) - ideation and initial brainstorming - translation - develop comms. strategies so that the participants continue to work beyond the event - accessbility testing (I haven't done this but have seen people do it.) I've never attended this particular summit, but thought the list might provide some food for thought. This is a good blog post <https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/04/21/hackathons-not-just-for-folks-who-code/> on how to shape a hackathon or dev event for non-coders too. (Full disclosure: I used to work there, though I didn't write that post.) On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 1:32 PM, Brian Wolff <[email protected]> wrote: > Last year there was an attempt to sort of do this (mostly by extending the > word "developer" to mean new things). Largely those types of people didnt > attend (although there were a few exceptions), however I remember being > left wondering if they did attend, what would they do? It seems to me most > sessions were about architecture design decisions that actually didnt > affect anyone not working on the code (ie we were going to make the user > visible feature either way, the question was do we use method x or method y > in the backend). With that in mind. Otoh, its entirely possible that some > of the sessions i didnt attend were more applicable to these groups. > > With that in mind are you proposing the focus of event also change? Or do > you think that these groups would be interested in it as is? > > -- > Brian > > On Thursday, September 1, 2016, Brion Vibber <[email protected]> > wrote: > > The last couple years we've done a big MediaWiki Dev Summit in January, > > around the time of the Wikimedia Foundation all-hands meeting. > Invitations > > have been fairly broad to known developers, but there's a very strong > > feeling that newbies, non-technical people, and in general *the people > > MediaWiki is created and maintained for* are not welcome. > > > > I think we should change this. > > > > I would really like a broader MediaWiki Dev Summit that asks our users to > > participate, and asks "developers" to interact with them to prioritize > and > > work on things that really matter to them. > > > > I want template authors, Lua module authors, template users, power > editors, > > folks working on the lines of defense for vandalism patrol and copyvio > > checking. I want people with opinions on discussion systems. I want > people > > who have been editing for years and have experience with what works and > > what doesn't. I want people who wish they could edit but have a bad > > experience when they try, and want to share that with us so we can help > > make it better. > > > > Thoughts? > > > > -- brion > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > -- Melody Kramer Read a random featured article from Wikipedia! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RandomInCategory/Featured_articles> [email protected] _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
