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_pl…
?
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.
4. 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.
You could tell Ashwanth to get in touch with those "Swipe" folks from
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21625-new-search-tool-to-unlock-wikip…
.
7. 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.
8. 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.
1. 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.)
2. 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:
1. 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 .
2. 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).
3. 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.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation