Dear developers,

Hope we are all doing well. On behalf of the AWMD core team, I wish to thank you all for your contributions on answering the survey. I am mostly happy because the greatest participation was from the ladies👯. (No hard feeling guys but such results are rare in tech🙂).

More than 60% participation from AWMD countries in Africa
80% of response were from female.
70% of response were from people who Averagely attend IRC meetings.
60% find IRC meetings useful
80% find the IRC tool useful to developers
70% agreed on having more meetings centered around helping others with tasks and getting started
70% agreed they will regularly attend the meetings if it is centered on solving issues rather than addressing agenda points. the remaining 30% reacted with maybe.

To be considered.

We received a lot of complains mostly from beginners about IRC tool not being friendly
A few other comments show that some of you don't know how exactly you should or can contribute.
Two comments about not being aware of meeting times and one complain on the chosen meeting time.

What we are suggesting and will be trying soon:

we decided to introduce some regular meeting day twice a months, meant at fixing working in group remotely, debugging and fixing issues, this includes helping beginners with simple issues. attendance is optional. You may attend if you feel you can be helpful or if you have questions to expose or need some help related to code contributions to MediaWiki.

Action points

Meeting every second and third Saturday of the month. From 1pm to 6pm the floor is open for any help requests and questions. You are sure to meet people who can help then. (The name of the meeting is still to be chosen, we welcome suggestions e.g AwmdDebugTime ?)
IRC meetings will be once in 3 month, 2nd Friday of the 3rd month, 5pm-6pmUTC.
You can also request for a hangout call in case you think it will make things easier for you. You can send me a direct mail and we will make it happen for you.
Apart from meeting times you can always hang around on #wikimedia-dev-Africa.

We are still looking into changing the meeting tool (IRC to Slack?) but for now we will keep it till further notice.

Feel free to directly reply to this mail with your questions.

Sorry for the long email ;)

Have a great week

Best regards,

Perside Rosalie

about.me/perside