Hi everyone,
Andre, It is really good to see a major transformation in recent years. Since I am part of this transformation, I can say that it is already really going in a very good direction. But few things to note:
1. Lack of staff: WMF's Developer Advocacy has 6 staff for the globe. I had a recent experience with Google India's Developer Relations team. They had 5-8 members, just for a single county. I know comparison should have other factors as well but the gap is too far. Even Mozilla is outnumbering us. Another thing that I also noticed is that some WMF staff are part of multiple teams.
2. No Wikimedia outreach program: As far as I know WMF does not run its own outreach program. We are/were the only participant organization in various programs like Outreachy, Google Summer of Code, and Google Code-In. Wikimedia itself is a big name so we can attract many students with Wikimedia internship certificates without any stipend expenses.
3. No partnership with the external organization: As far as I know WMF did not collaborate with external organizations regarding technical partnerships and campaigns. Last year, two profit organizations, Intel and DigitalOcean, organized Hacktoberfest, an amazing month of open source love. They got 294,451 accept pull requests for open source projects. Profit organizations are running campaigns for open source software but we can't. (I know they have an advertisement factor but the point is open source campaigns). Why can't we?
I am not blaming anything on the current Developer Advocacy team. I worked with many members very closely as a volunteer. They are already working to their full capacity. But upper management has to break the glass. Otherwise, we will just fix/mingle with current problems within a single bubble.
Regards,
Jay Prakash,
Volunteer Developer