Hello,

I think it'll be great. Not at this moment rightly, but sometimes in the past I would have liked to ask devs questions tiny and hence hesitate to post to wikitech-l. IRC helped somehow but timezones have been always a barrier, and in these days I tend not to know who to speak, even if I still know some of devs and sysadmins personally and have realized enough none of them would bite.

I guess I wouldn't be an exception in this community and such a face-to-face Q/A time in a relaxed atmosphere would help a lot.

Cheers,

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 9:47 PM, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:

Hello all

As you probably know, this year's Wikimania will again feature hacking days (which I help to organize), just before Wikimania proper. However, the current setup is missing an opportunity for developers and chapter people to get together and talk about what the community wants and needs.

So, I would like to propose to have a Q/A session where the community can ask questions to developers. I'd like to do this during Wikimania proper, so everyone has a chance to attend.

The question is: are people interested? Or is it just my silly idea?

I feel that people often have "small" questions that developers could answer quickly, or there are long standing issues and it's unclear why they don't get fixed. But often people don't know who to ask, or when or how. At the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin last year, some people used the opportunity to grab a techie, which was good, but it was while standing up, over coffee. I'd like to give this a bit more time, space and especially attention.

So, would you be interested in such a session? Or do you know people who would be?

Please let me know.

Cheers Daniel

PS: Danese suggested a "fishbowl" type session for this. I think that's a good idea. Look it up on Wikipedia if you don't know what it is - I didn't :)

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Hi Daniel,

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:

Hello all

As you probably know, this year's Wikimania will again feature hacking days (which I help to organize), just before Wikimania proper. However, the current setup is missing an opportunity for developers and chapter people to get together and talk about what the community wants and needs.

So, I would like to propose to have a Q/A session where the community can ask questions to developers. I'd like to do this during Wikimania proper, so everyone has a chance to attend.

The question is: are people interested? Or is it just my silly idea?

Not a silly idea at all, on the contrary. I have fond memories of the Commons meeting in Paris where the techies and the non-techies sat together and made things go forward. So please, go ahead in organizing this, I think it's a great and potentially extremely interesting opportunity to make sure that the contributors feel "heard" by the developper community and vice-versa.

Delphine

2011/1/20 Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de:

So, I would like to propose to have a Q/A session where the community can

ask

questions to developers. I'd like to do this during Wikimania proper, so everyone has a chance to attend.

The question is: are people interested? Or is it just my silly idea?

It's an excellent idea, but it may be a bit hard to implement.

There are a dozen or so bugs in Bugzilla which are very important to me, and i think that they are quite important for the whole WM community and i keep wondering when will they finally be fixed. But dozens of other people have dozens of other bugs which are important to them. Put them all in one room with a few developers, and most likely a very little fraction of the people's questions will be answered.

It doesn't mean that such a session shouldn't be held, but this problem should be kept in mind. One idea is to prepare the people who will participate in it that it will be a very "first-come-first-served" thing and to tell the people to prepare their questions precisely (e.g. to have the bug number) or maybe even to submit their questions in advance. Also, there can be a kind of a preparatory lecture explaining how the developers work in general, how do they decide on which bugs to work, etc.