While i'm sure there is always more that can be done in terms of attracting
new devs, i don't think that's really where we have the problem. We have
lots of interested people. Enwiki is basically a huge captive audience of
interested people.
I think the problem lies more in the developer experience after people
join. It is politically difficult to get stuff merged with long lag times.
That's frustrating to people who want to fix bugs as opposed to play
politics, and its really difficult for outsiders who don't have the
internal social connections, not to mention the time availability to always
be responsive as opposed to just being available to contribute a couple
hours on the weekend.
--
Bawolff
On Friday, January 28, 2022, Jay prakash <0freerunning(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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
On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 11:46 PM Andre Klapper <aklapper(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Tue, 2022-01-11 at 13:30 +0000, Inductiveload
wrote:
[5] Developer Advocacy is a team that exists, but
at least in my
personal experience, I have never actually encountered it, except for
bug wrangling.
If you're interested in what that (my) team is doing, I recommend
checking out
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy
Spoiler: Improving Small Wiki Toolkits, working on a Developer Portal
and improving related technical docs, organizing Outreach Programs,
maintaining Community Metrics, sorting out the next Hackathon, helping
with the Coolest Tool Award (which happened two weeks ago), etc...
Hope that provides a bit of an impression? :)
Cheers,
andre
--
Andre Klapper (he/him) | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
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