I want to specifically invite interested researchers to the Wikimedia and MediaWiki hackathon happening 14-16 October in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/NOLA_Hackathon

We're getting together a wide variety of contributors -- including template, script, tool, extension, and gadget writers -- to participate, give feedback, test, and hack with us. If you write software that uses the MediaWiki API, or runs on the Toolserver, we want to chat and collaborate with you.

At the event, MediaWiki developers and Wikimedia operations engineers will be working on Wikimedia's gadgets/extensions/tools support, authorization/authentication strategy, dev-ops virtualization, and general training and hacking. And we'll improve and discuss the Wikimedia Labs projects infrastructure and other stuff that makes it easier for anyone to supercharge Wikimedia with awesomeness.

The event is open to anyone who wants to come and contribute, and is an opportunity to spend time with senior MediaWiki developers & ops engineers, write beautiful code, and learn about the latest developments. We'll write code together, discuss the software, and hold little workshops.

If you can make it to New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, 14-16 October 2011, we'd love to have you. Please add your name to the attendees list:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/NOLA_Hackathon#Attendees

(And please spread the word!)

Thanks and best wishes.