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