Cross-posting, da das für Euch von Interesse sein könnte. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Quim Gil &lt;qgil(a)wikimedia.org&gt; Date: Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 4:14 PM Subject: [Wikitech-l] Improvements to developer events in the WMF Annual Plan draft To: Wikimedia developers &lt;wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Hi, the Wikimedia Foundation has published a draft of its Annual Plan FY2017-18 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual _Plan/2017-2018/Draft> and it welcomes your review. I want to highlight here the improvements that we are proposing to the developer events (co)organized by the WMF. From local to global: The Technical Collaboration team proposes to combine multiple activities (often disconnected) in a single program focusing on onboarding new developers <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual _Plan/2017-2018/Draft/Programs/Community_Engagement#Program_ 12:_Onboarding_new_developers>. We want to work with the Wikimedia technical community to bring a new wave of developers to our projects, and events play an important role. Local developer events We want to support developers and organizations willing to reach out to specific groups and geographies. We are hoping to see many local developer meetups and small hackathons or workshops around the World, starting small and simple. We should be able to offer introductory materials, contacts with Wikimedia developers in the region, maybe travel budget to send experienced volunteers to help mentoring the in the bigger events, maybe travel budget to invite the best newcomers to our regional and global events. Adding tech to regional Wikimedia events Last year we experimented organizing technical workshops in WikiArabia, and others have done similar efforts in other regional events (for instance, a small hackathon next to WikiConference India). We want to work with the organizers of these regional events in order to attract experienced Wikimedia developers and newcomers, organize developer activities, and also improve the collaboration between the technical and non-technical contributors in these regions. Better retention of newcomers at the Wikimedia and Wikimania hackathons Although we don't expect major changes in the organization of the Wikimedia Hackathon and the hackathon at Wikimania, we want to focus better on new developers onboarding and retention. In every Hackathon we meet many new developers, but the retention rates are very low. We want to review what we can do before, during, and after these apparently successful events in order to retain newcomers better. One hypothesis is that we should focus call for participation, scholarships, and Wikimedia Foundation participation in providing a great experience to new volunteers who have gone through local and regional events, and also "junior" developers coming from wiki projects through the development of bots, gadgets, tools, templates. A smaller and more focused Wikimedia Developer Summit After some discussions between Community Engagement, Technology, and Product, we have decided to propose a different approach for the Wikimedia Developer Summit. Organized by the Technology department as part of their technical community building <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual _Plan/2017-2018/Draft/Programs/Technology#Program_4:_ Technical_community_building> efforts, we want the Summit to finally become the venue where the toughest technical problems are discussed between the stakeholders directly related. We want to reduce the size/budget of the event, separate it from the WMF AllHands, and define its main themes well in advance. A Program Committee <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T160996> would decide these main themes to be discussed at the Summit. We also want to explore the possibility of tackling some of these themes at the Wikimedia Hackathon and Wikimania, where we could get most stakeholders involved with just a little extra effort (since many of them would be attending anyway). We believe that this approach will serve better the Wikimedia technical community that we have, and also the the community that we want to have, with a new wave of developers joining our various projects. -- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l