On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 9:44 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
Although, I will say its still kind of unclear what is expected that these types of developers will be doing at the summit. Officially,
The content of the Summit is derived from the proposals submitted discussed well before the Summit. If a developer had topics to discuss before the Summit, they will have topics to discuss during the Summit. However, if a developer didn't have any topic to discuss before the Summit then indeed, there is a likely chance that such developer will have an unclear role during the event.
At least when it comes to the developers requesting travel sponsorship (most volunteers not based in the San Francisco Bay Area), we are requiring them to point out to proposals they are submitting or where they are heavily involved. So you see, I think we have a system that works, open to anyone but in practice unlikely to propitiate i.e. template editors lost at the Summit.
presentations are supposed to be "on organized discussions that start online and aim to reach to agreements during the event". Its been a while since I was a regular "template editor" or "gadget developer", but coming to agreement at an in person event isn't something that strikes me as being the wiki-way of doing things, and people who primarily develop on wiki-pages probably aren't going to resolve on wiki disagreements in such a forum
If you are thinking about fixing a template in enwiki or copying a gadget from pt.wiki and translating it to German, then sure. If you look at platform / roadmap questions like common repository for templates ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52329) or i18n framework for gadgets ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T110633) then I don't see any difference with other developer topics being proposed for the Summit.
Maybe a problem here is a simplistic view of template and gadget developers? Both areas have many content editors and junior developers doing their best at a very basic level. They also have experienced developers trying to solve complex problems that require the involvement of the developers of the frameworks supporting gadgets and templates. Same with bots, tools, apps, and the use of our APIs.