Yuvi, much thanks to you, to Srikanthlogic, and to the others who made this event possible. It sounds like a great success. Sorry for the late reply.
It was a one day, 8 hour event focusing on getting people together to hack on stuff related to all Wikimedia projects - not just Mediawiki patches.
Fantastic idea. And one-day events are a totally reasonable length, and easier for first-time event-runners to run.
As people came in, we asked them what technologies/fields they are familiar with, and picked out an idea for them to work on from the Ideas List (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Chennai_Hackathon_March_2012/Ideas). This took care of the biggest problem with hackathons with new people
- half the day spent on figuring out what to work on, and when found,
it is completely outside the domain of expertise of the people hacking on the idea. Talking together with them fast to pick an idea within 5 minutes that they can complete in the day fixed this problem and made sure people can concentrate on coding for the rest of the day.
That's a really great tactic and one that I hope to copy for future outreach events. Can you add it (and any other tricks up your sleeve) to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach/Event_pla... ?
Demos
I strongly appreciate your consolidated list of names and links -- thanks.
Vivek is also applying to work with Mediawiki for GSoC, so we will hopefully get a long term contributor :)
And of course anyone is welcome to work with us outside of GSoC as well. (obligatory reminder)
I forwarded the "all unique words in Tamil Wikipedia" project link to the researchers on wiki-research-l.
- Program to help record pronunciations for words in tawikt
Is currently blocked on figuring out a way to properly upload to commons
You should consider consulting Maarten Dammers and Ryan Kaldari on that as they are seasoned experts on the social and technical intricacies of Commons mass upload.
- Structured database search over Wikipedia
You could tell Ashwanth to get in touch with those "Swipe" folks from http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21625-new-search-tool-to-unlock-wikipe... .
- Photo upload to commons by Email
I hope someone from the community (perhaps people doing WLM?) should be able to get in touch with him to see if this tool could be developed further with a specific goal in mind.
Yes, talk to Maarten and to the Wiki Loves Monuments people.
- Lightweight offline Wiki reader
I presume you've already told offline-l? :-)
He's still fixing things on the script. If the community needs people to come fix up their user scripts/gadgets, Bharath would be a willing (and awesome!) candidate!
That sounds terrific! Please do ask him to contact me.
- WikiPronouncer
By: Russel Nickson
I think this would still be a very useful tool, and hope someone from the community steps up to work with Russel and get this finished.
Talking with Yuvi to ask him about getting developers who know Android involved. (mobile-l.)
- Wiktionary cross lingual statistics
By: PranavRC
What it was supposed to do: It was a statistical tool that generated statistics about how many words overlap between all indic languages in Wiktionary (as measured by interwiki links).
Status: The code has been written (I've requested the author to put it up publicly, will update list when it is). It, however, requires a lot of time to be run. So validation by the community that such stats would be useful would, IMO, definitely give Pranav the impetus to finish it up and show us the pretty graphs :)
Ask wiki-research-l and point them to Pranav's code? If you aren't on that list, give me an email to forward and I will. Or ask Dario to do so.
Next Steps
Where do we go from here? Random thoughts:
- Geek retention - this is reasonably easy. If we keep feeding
hackers interesting problems that affect a lot of people, they'll keep helping us out. Is it possible to have some sort of a 'tools required' or 'hacks required' or 'gadgets required' page/queue someplace where we can always direct hackers looking for interesting problems to? IMO Wikipedia is full of interesting technical problems, so this *should* be feasible.
We have https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Annoying_large_bugs as a start but it's not quite right, as it's pretty MediaWiki-centric. And every community has its own wishlist and isn't likely to come off-wiki to add to yet another one, so probably the best thing to do is to simply compile links to more those wishlists at the bottom of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Annoying_large_bugs#See_also .
- Follow ups - this time, I am able to do this personally (small
enough group). Clearly this will not scale. Do we have ideas/methods for following up with these people so that they stay with us?
If you could answer this question definitively, you could instantly achieve a stable career as a religious or political leader. :-) Over and over we see that there is simply no substitute for personal followup and delegating right-sized tasks. Our best investment is in that personal followup and in building infrastructure for ourselves (contact lists, databases, boilerplate emails).
- More of these? This was pretty much a 'zero cost' event - stickers
were the only 'cost'. A lot of places around the country would love to have their space used for a hackathon of sorts. Should we do more of these kind of 'Unofficial' hackathons?
Yes, but only if we can prepare for them as well as you did.
Thanks again.