Thanks Srishti & DevRel team, that was interesting, and it's great to see that developer retention gets the organizational focus it deserves. Some comments on the document: We currently struggle to keep track of information about new developers FWIW this is a problem with all developers, not just new ones. For example after I find out who is the best person to ask about something, there isn't really way to find out their IRC account. (Or vice versa, know who I've just talked with on IRC.) Phabricator can be linked to mediawiki.org and wikitech but few people do both. And so on. The WMF has its private contact list, but even that is not always updated, and it's unaccessible to volunteers. It would be great to have a proper, public contact info management system somewhere. Re: surveys, it would be a missed opportunity to only survey new developers. The limitation in that is that only a small fraction of them become regulars, and it would be great to understand better what personality trait or circumstance determines whether a given person stays or leaves, but the only way to find that out is to survey people whom we already know remained (or left) about their experiences as new developers. Re: retention (the raw numbers for which can be found in T160430#3395405), apparently year-on-year for Q3 2017 is interpreted as "(developers who started in 2016 Q3 and were still active in 2017 Q3 / all developers who started in 2016 Q3) / (developers who started in 2015 Q3 and were still active in 2016 Q3 / all developers who started in 2015 Q3)" which is a weird definition. YoY should be the difference in retention between two full years, not between two quarters spaced one year apart. One thing that jumps out looking at the list of retained developers is how many of them are experienced Wikipedians (at a glance, something like two-thirds?). Which I guess is not that surprising, but I wonder to what extent is it reflected in the outreach strategy? On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 12:03 PM, Srishti Sethi <ssethi(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: