Hm, I think we should throw a hackathon, I've been watching the talks at the one in Berlin so far, and its quite interesting. I'd show up and would help with some things (not a member of WM-UK though), but its an idea, anyway... -- Lewis Cawte On 27/04/11 18:04, steve virgin wrote:

I know of 1 developer in the UK, who is currently in Berlin, and I'd hope to have commit by then. One thing I have noticed, is that a lot of the developers there, are WMF staff/contractors from all over the place that have flown in, so it'd be interesting to see what the deal is with that... (I know Tim Starling, the release manager has probably flown in from Australia). It'd also be chance for British Wikimedians to talk to the developers, share some opinions face to face, and for people to do talks on general WM-UK stuff if they wanted to... -- Lewis Cawte On 14/05/11 11:41, Mike Peel wrote:

(resending this due to mailing list subscription quirks) This is something I'd like to attend. I run bots, have a Toolserver account and have submitted patches to the main MediaWiki codebase. Only problem for me may be the timing (I have exams). But that can be sorted later. Regards, Harry (User:Jarry1250) On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Lewis Cawte <lewiscawte(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote:

On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 12:41, Mike Peel &lt;michael.peel(a)wikimedia.org.uk&gt; wrote: I'm not a MediaWiki developer, but I have helped to organise three BarCamp events. These are overnight events done for very little money in partnership with a variety of companies or universities. We run overnight events in central London with three hundred developers and other interested people for a fraction of the cost of a similar commercial event. How? Well, we organise them in kind of a wiki way. Early BarCamps used to simply be people putting up "hey, we've got this space for the weekend, we need food, wifi etc., stick down on the wiki what you can provide". I'd be very interested in having some kind of Wikimedia/free culture hack day, perhaps at a university over a weekend. There are a variety of sponsors we could approach to do this. I wouldn't worry too much about the existing Wikimedia developers: they have events to go to. But getting more people involved from outside the Wiki[p|m]edia community is something we should do: there are plenty of developers I know who have great good will towards projects like Wikipedia and probably would be interested in getting involved, building hacks and so on. A hack day type event usually takes this form: Saturday 09:00 - 10:00 Breakfast 10:00 - 10:30 Welcome / Intro 10:30 - 12:30 Intro sessions: ideas, technical stuff etc. 12:30 - 13:30 Lunch and START HACKING Sunday 08:00 - 10:00 Breakfast CONTINUE HACKING 13:00 Lunch, stop hacking 14:00 present things people have built, then give out prizes. Who might be able to run such an event? At BarCamp, we've hosted them at The Guardian (near Kings Cross), IBM (South Bank) and City University (near Angel station). A number of hack days have been run at The Guardian, and I helped run WarbleCamp there (a Twitter hack day). We've also had events at eBay/PayPal (Richmond) and Google (near Victoria station). For Wikimedia UK/WMF, it could be seen as a form of developer evangelism - see http://developer-evangelism.com/ It might draw more people into working on stuff for toolserver, helping run bots, fixing long-standing issues (maybe some awesome image recognition person will turn up and write bots to go tag stuff on Commons), or maybe we'll just get cool ideas out of it. Either way, people will probably go home from it with a better feeling about Wikipedia, and next time they think "I should build a mashup", it may be that they decide to hack on MediaWiki or Wikimedia API stuff rather than Twitter or Facebook. When I started writing this e-mail, I tweeted asking if anyone would be interested in having a Wikimedia hack day in London. I've already had two positive responses from BarCamp/hack day regulars and Kevin Prince, one of the co-organisers of BarCamp London and a number of hack days, has retweeted it. If there is interest in doing this kind of thing, we could do it in a very lightweight and cost-effective way by following the sort of model used by BarCamps, hack days and HackCamps. Yours, -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/>

I'd appreciate such an event, there is more hacking than PHP hacking: * javascript * css * templating * bot coding * regexen * category hacking ? * borging On 17/05/2011 13:03, Gordon Joly wrote:

Are most of the people interested in this located in London? If not I could possibly look into organising a Hackathon somewhere in the East Midlands (fairly central...) - Nottingham perhaps. Tom / ErrantX On 17 May 2011 14:28, Chris Keating &lt;chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 14:28, Chris Keating &lt;chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I'm doing some behind-the-scenes scurrying and poking with a view to perhaps running an event sometime later on in the year (Oct/Nov/Dec) in London. -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you.