Hey Lewis,

I'd be really interested in attending a UK hackathon. I'm a bot developer, Toolserver tool operator, and occasional MediaWiki hacker.

That said, the dates would be really important to me. It's either got to be a weekend in September (too close) or some time in December. Sorry.

Anyway, best of luck with the whole initiative.

Harry (User:Jarry1250)

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Lewis Cawte <lewiscawte@googlemail.com> wrote:
Hi all

Right, I'm not going to bore you with the long back story of this, but I was reading about the recently announced New Orleans hackathon, and as I normally do when I can't get to an event because its abroad or whatever, I go onto IRC and do my normal whiney thing (which I really hate myself for). But anyway, I got talking with 'sumanah, who is the Volunteer Development Coordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation (I guess that makes hackathons and stuff part of her job), but she suggested that if I can't get to these, why don't I organise my own...

So anyway, then we got talking about some stuff, and we decided that it would be best, especially for my first event not necessarily worry about international developers and participants as much, and that I should focus the event locally.

A few of the main hurdles with me not being able to get to the other hackathons are that my age, I'm 14 (15 in early September), so it makes finding a simple flight or whatever harder to find (because my parents don't have passports, and would not be able to afford coming with me, or finding something else to do), and cash to pay for hotel room and travel is also a problem. These problems also kind of apply to me running a hackathon, and a few solutions that came up were that 1, I hold it somewhere in Brighton, or somewhere rather close, and 2, that I contact my local chapter (if memberships a problem for no chapter support, I'll get the application in for the next meeting).

And basicly I need to know,
  • How many of you would be interested in coming to a MediaWiki Hackathon, will be before Christmas this year, which would last a day or two, depending on the level of support and interest we get. There may be an opportunity for a chapter/GLAM/board meetup depending on time/venue/interest, but I still need to find out the relevant information before that can be arranged fully. I plan to cross post an announcement to
  • What support I can get from the chapter, I don't have a lot of money, and I don't get a lot either, if anything, how much would the chapter be willing to put into this event.
  • Would anyone interested be willing to pay a small fee to attend, like £5/10 a day? This has yet to be decided but it would help especially if the chapter doesn't have much money it can spare...
  • How many MediaWiki developers, toolserver users (not toolserver tools users, but people that have their own tools/bots on toolserver) do we have here, because I personally don't know of that many, but it'd be nice if we could have some kind of workshop thing or mentoring program, because if we don't have a few, we're going to have a lot of bored people sitting in a room for a couple of days. I've spoken to a few of the other developers in #mediawiki, and I know one or two people that have said they would be happy to travel into the UK if I can get one organised and run by Christmas...
  • Deputy Event manager like person. As I've said, I'll be 15 when this happens, and I'm not comfortable running this by myself, or booking stuff in my name... or being the emergency contact on the time of the event, mainly because I'm a stupidly heavy sleeper. I am happy, however to go to the event, do some speaking, go shopping or order shopping for snacks, work out transport routes and stuff, and I'll go along with someone to visit the venue if need be...
Oh yeah, and if anyone doesn't know what a hackathon is, I've probably left it a bit late to explain, but its a meetup with a few talks and a lot of coding and bug fixing (and for this one, specifically MediaWiki related tools (so toolserver, pybot etc as well)).

Hope I haven't forgotten anything,
-- Lewis Cawte

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