Naming our developer events

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Quim Gil

23 Jan 2013 23 Jan '13

12:14 p.m.

Hi, back in November Erik and Sumana explained the intention of the WMF to get less involved in the direct organization of developer events. Instead, the WMF will empower and help community groups taking the lead organizing developer activities. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-November/122725.html In practice, this means that those events are run more in a franchise-like mode (sorry for the commercial word: I'm using it to illustrate the point). As we can learn from the franchise model, the more complete is the documentation and the more standardized is the process, the easier it is for a local promoter to setup and activity on their own and succeed. Local successes help the global success, and global success helps local successes. Ok, now back to our reality. :) The first element of an event is its name, and already there we have room for improvement. Proposal: naming all our developer events MediaWiki Hackathon City e.g. MediaWiki Hackathon Amsterdam, to mention an event currently showing a branding problem: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013 Localizations and exceptions to be considered and approved one by one. The problem, in more detail: - We seem to have an erratic use of "Wikipedia", "Wikimedia", "MediaWiki", [choose your logo] and [nothing] for naming these events. For instance, see the web pages of "San Francisco Hackathon" "Berlin Hackathon" or "Amsterdam Hackathon" and try to find the full name written down. The pictures show that creative, inconsistent solutions were found for the banners. This makes no sense for the outsiders we want to reach. - We seem to use "Hackathon" always but then Bangalore was a "DevCamp". It is useful to settle in one word, unless the event is something completely different. - Some events specify the date in their name, some don't. There is no need to specify the month-year in the name of the event since any event has a date anyway. This allows us to recycle and update web pages, archiving properly past events. URLs stay and they become stronger. You can find an extreme example of this problem in Wikimania where (up to date) every year there has been a new URL, a new Twitter account, etc. Let's avoid this problem at least in our context. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

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Sumana Harihareswara

23 Jan 23 Jan

12:21 p.m.

On 01/23/2013 12:14 PM, Quim Gil wrote:

...

I am actually fine with inconsistency here. I don't think we need uniformity. In one city, local technologists might call something a hackathon; in another country, the word "hack" always means cracking and security work, so the people we want to reach would understand better if we call it a training or a conference or a jam or "dev days"; and so on. (This is what has happened in India and caused actual headaches and disappointment and misleading word-of-mouth for past Indian events that had "hack" in the name.) I'd like to see what the actual harm caused by inconsistency is and I'd like more data on what real benefit we'd get by making people always name things according to the same scheme. Not just hypotheticals. Perhaps a few other open source communities have dealt with this and would be able to provide that data. Dates in the names of events -- sure, do away with those, fine. -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation

Alolita Sharma

12:51 p.m.

Quim, Responses inline. - We seem to have an erratic use of "Wikipedia", "Wikimedia", "MediaWiki", [choose your logo] and [nothing] for naming these events. For instance, see the web pages of "San Francisco Hackathon" "Berlin Hackathon" or "Amsterdam Hackathon" and try to find the full name written down. The pictures show that creative, inconsistent solutions were found for the banners. This makes no sense for the outsiders we want to reach. +1 for standardizing to Mediawiki <event> <city> - We seem to use "Hackathon" always but then Bangalore was a "DevCamp". It is useful to settle in one word, unless the event is something completely different. We changed the usage of the term 'hackathon' to 'devcamp' specifically for the India subcontinent where 'hacking=security breakins'. We were having to turnaway people who wanted to work together on cracking passwords and more at our hackathons. The preferred terminology in Asia would not be 'hackathon'. Devcamps have also included lightning talks as well as tutorials and demos. Again, localizing for the needs of a geography is okay. - Some events specify the date in their name, some don't. There is no need to specify the month-year in the name of the event since any event has a date anyway. This allows us to recycle and update web pages, archiving properly past events. URLs stay and they become stronger. You can find an extreme example of this problem in Wikimania where (up to date) every year there has been a new URL, a new Twitter account, etc. Let's avoid this problem at least in our context. I agree. There is no need to specify month-year in the event name. We discarded the practice for the most recent Bangalore DevCamp. -Alolita On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 9:21 AM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org

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wrote:

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On 01/23/2013 12:14 PM, Quim Gil wrote:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-November/122725.html

In practice, this means that those events are run more in a franchise-like mode (sorry for the commercial word: I'm using it to illustrate the point). As we can learn from the franchise model, the more complete is the documentation and the more standardized is the process, the easier it is for a local promoter to setup and activity on their own and succeed. Local successes help the global success, and global success helps local successes. Ok, now back to our reality. :) The first element of an event is its name, and already there we have room for improvement. Proposal: naming all our developer events MediaWiki Hackathon City e.g. MediaWiki Hackathon Amsterdam, to mention an event currently showing a branding problem: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013 Localizations and exceptions to be considered and approved one by one. The problem, in more detail: - We seem to have an erratic use of "Wikipedia", "Wikimedia", "MediaWiki", [choose your logo] and [nothing] for naming these events. For instance, see the web pages of "San Francisco Hackathon" "Berlin Hackathon" or "Amsterdam Hackathon" and try to find the full name written down. The pictures show that creative, inconsistent solutions were found for the banners. This makes no sense for the outsiders we want to reach. - We seem to use "Hackathon" always but then Bangalore was a "DevCamp". It is useful to settle in one word, unless the event is something completely different. - Some events specify the date in their name, some don't. There is no need to specify the month-year in the name of the event since any event has a date anyway. This allows us to recycle and update web pages, archiving properly past events. URLs stay and they become stronger. You can find an extreme example of this problem in Wikimania where (up to date) every year there has been a new URL, a new Twitter account, etc. Let's avoid this problem at least in our context.

-- Alolita Sharma Director of Engineering Language Engineering Wikimedia Foundation

Yuvi Panda

1:05 p.m.

+1 for not forcing a standard on. (Talking from the perspective of organizing smaller events) If we standardize on 'Hackathon', we'll have people coming in and asking us 'how to crack fb?'. If we call it 'Workshop', we'll have people coming in asking for certificates (or wondering how much to pay for it). DevCamp avoids these problems by being completely ambiguous :P Every event needs associated messaging to reach the right audience and to set the right expectations. Workshops and hackathons are also fundamentally different events - Workshops are 1 to many knowledge transfer + hacking, while hackathons are much more distributed 'get stuff done' type things. Without proper messaging, people might come expecting the former, and be disappointed to get the latter (or vice versa). Forcing a convention would make the problem worse. TL;DR: -1 to standardizing for names, let whoever is organizing it figure it out.

Quim Gil

1:27 p.m.

(It would be good to have the opinion of the http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013 organizers here) On 01/23/2013 09:21 AM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:

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I am actually fine with inconsistency here.

I think you mean you are fine with flexibility. Me too. :)

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I don't think we need uniformity.

Me neither. I'm proposing defaults and flexibility to change them based on need. Now we have lack of defaults, which leads to confusion and extra work. In one city, local technologists might call something a

...

hackathon; in another country, the word "hack" always means cracking and security work, so the people we want to reach would understand better if we call it a training or a conference or a jam or "dev days"; and so on. (This is what has happened in India and caused actual headaches and disappointment and misleading word-of-mouth for past Indian events that had "hack" in the name.)

This would fall under "Localizations and exceptions to be considered and approved one by one." If we find useful rules like "in India DevCamp is better than Hackathon" then we can just document and apply them. Problem solved. But the "hackathon" part is easy. The nut hard to crack is the "Wikipedia", "Wikimedia", "MediaWiki", [choose your logo] and [nothing]. If you and me can have doubts, imagine the poor local event organizer somewhere. Can we agree on a default?

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I'd like to see what the actual harm caused by inconsistency is and I'd like more data on what real benefit we'd get by making people always name things according to the same scheme. Not just hypotheticals.

No harm... but no help either. Whoever wants to organize a hackathon today must start almost from scratch and doing some research because there are not clear precedents and recyclable materials. Imagine yourself willing to have a hackathon in NY: - How to call it? - Do I need to craft my own logo? Which imply: Who to ask permission? Before having this clear it's not easy to even setup a wiki page or send a first email or tweet announcing that you are planning to organize such event. For WMF employees and others deeply involved in this community this might not be a good deal. But for your local tech promoter this lack of clarity it really doesn't help. Those are exactly the ones we want to engage.

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Perhaps a few other open source communities have dealt with this and would be able to provide that data.

Looking at e.g. the Mozilla and Ubuntu communities you can see that they have defaults (MozCamps, Firefox OS App Days, Ubuntu Hours, UDS, LoCo meetings... and flexibility for alternatives as well. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

sankarshan

1:47 p.m.

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 11:57 PM, Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Looking at e.g. the Mozilla and Ubuntu communities you can see that they have defaults (MozCamps, Firefox OS App Days, Ubuntu Hours, UDS, LoCo meetings... and flexibility for alternatives as well.

Another relevant example would be The Fedora Project. There are Fedora Activity Days and, then there are events like FUDCon - there exist documentation on the wiki about how the events are named and handled. -- sankarshan mukhopadhyay <https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan>

Tomasz Finc

1:37 p.m.

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

MediaWiki Hackathon City

Alolita Sharma

1:46 p.m.

Tomasz has a good point. Language tools and apps don't use Mediawiki exclusively either. This is one of the reasons we used Wikipedia Engineering instead of Mediawiki for our Bangalore DevCamp naming. -Alolita On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Tomasz Finc <tfinc(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

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On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

MediaWiki Hackathon City

As a team that doesn't exclusively work within MediaWiki what would you suggest for naming if someone wanted to run a hackathon on our mobile apps? Our mobile apps are fully decoupled from mw and only use its API. --tomasz _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

-- Alolita Sharma Director of Engineering Language Engineering Wikimedia Foundation

Quim Gil

2:13 p.m.

If an event is specific to a piece of software then by all means let's call it after such piece of software e.g. Wikipedia Mobile Hackathon (or DevCamp, if we decide that is a better default than Hackathon) On 01/23/2013 10:46 AM, Alolita Sharma wrote:

...

It is easy for WMF teams to organize events containing the Wikipedia word. Less so for your average local promoter. This is one practical reason to default to "MediaWiki" and then be flexible with exceptions. But there is another point here, which is how narrowed / inclusive are we with the "MediaWiki" word. You can see it as the name of a CMS. You can see it as a name of a wider community. Looking at the content at mediawiki.org it is obvious that such community does a lot more things than developing a CMS. Why not calling all those things under the MediaWiki umbrella, and refer to the CMS as MediaWiki Core? We know that Wikipedia / Wikimedia / MediaWiki confuses people systematically. Also the people attending our technical events. Simplifying might be inaccurate for some oldtimers, but it can be helpful for most of the newcomers we aim to reach out with these events.

...

-Alolita On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Tomasz Finc <tfinc(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > >> MediaWiki Hackathon City >> > > As a team that doesn't exclusively work within MediaWiki what would you > suggest for naming if someone wanted to run a hackathon on our mobile apps? > Our mobile apps are fully decoupled from mw and only use its API.

-- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

bawolff

6:07 p.m.

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: [snip]

...

But there is another point here, which is how narrowed / inclusive are we with the "MediaWiki" word. You can see it as the name of a CMS. You can see it as a name of a wider community. Looking at the content at mediawiki.org it is obvious that such community does a lot more things than developing a CMS. Why not calling all those things under the MediaWiki umbrella, and refer to the CMS as MediaWiki Core?

I don't really like that idea. It may be because I'm just cranky and dislike change ;) but MediaWiki and the rest of Wikimedia's technical stuff are fairly orthogonal. I can work on MediaWiki without caring about Wikipedia and friends. I could also work on non-Wikimedia technical infrastructure without caring about MediaWiki. (However, non-MediaWiki Wikimedia tech stuff needs a more concise name (or names). There's a lot of things in this category including "wiki-templates", local gadgets, puppet/ops related stuff, some of the mobile stuff, and there is no good name to describe it.) We use names to describe things. If the names become too broad they could lose their usefulness. I would also be concerned that by making MediaWiki (the CMS) subordinate to general wikimedia technical activities by renaming MediaWiki to MediaWiki-core [and having mediawiki=wikimedia-technical-thingies] it could alienate some contributors who are primarily interested in MediaWiki and not Wikimedia. On the other hand that could quite possibly be an imagined problem. As for actual hackathon naming (whatever happened to hackaton, I thought that was a cute name) . I don't think it really matters. Call it MediaWiki if its primarily focused on MediaWiki, call it Wikimedia if its more focused on Wikimedia things. Call it Wikipedia if you really must [As someone who originally came to Wikimedia land via a non-Wikipedia project, calling Wikimedia things "Wikipedia" makes me go grrr, but I recognize that Wikipedia is a more recognizable brand]. To be honest making naming requirements sounds like a bikeshed discussion. -bawolff

Quim Gil

7:23 p.m.

On 01/23/2013 03:07 PM, bawolff wrote:

...

To be honest making naming requirements sounds like a bikeshed discussion.

I'm sorry it has been perceived by some as such. I started the discussion after the real need this morning of suggesting a name to a local promoter willing to organize an event. End of discussion at wikitech-l. If anybody is interested please continue at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Groups/Promotion#Naming_our_developer_e… The Promotion group is actually the perfect context for discussions about names, logos, events and such. If you are interested in these topics please watch https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Groups/Promotion and consider joining the group. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

Gregory Varnum

24 Jan 24 Jan

2:46 p.m.

I may be in the minority - but I like the idea of adding some structure to the naming and logos. It may not matter to those of us already involved, but in trying to engage new people - having three events with very similar purpose but three different names is confusing and sometimes makes us look a bit unorganized. While it appears no one will be winning popularity contests shepherding this conversation along, I am glad to see it happening. -Greg aka varnent ___________ Sent from my iPad. Apologies for any typos. A more detailed response may be sent later. On Jan 23, 2013, at 7:23 PM, Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

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On 01/23/2013 03:07 PM, bawolff wrote:

To be honest making naming requirements sounds like a bikeshed discussion.

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participants (8)

Alolita Sharma
bawolff
Gregory Varnum
Quim Gil
sankarshan
Sumana Harihareswara
Tomasz Finc
Yuvi Panda