This topic is a great read, and as a non-developer who's interested in technical matters, I was quite excited to see this proposal.
It might be an idea to identify one or two specific topics that may be particularly amenable to outreach to users outside of the "usual suspects" who attend the Dev Summit, and then actively recruit interested parties. It is quite possible that scholarships may be required to ensure a broader (i.e., more than English North Americans) participation, so this may be a budgetary issue that needs to be weighed against using those same scholarships for active developers. I think some of the comments on this thread are correct, that it's likely that at least some of the discussions at the Dev Summit will be too esoteric for non-developers. On the other hand, there was a point where I only understood about 3% of what was posted on this mailing list, and I think I can quite honestly say I'm all the way up to 25% now. People do learn by assimilation. :-)
A similar process can be done with Wikimania - which has the added advantage of already attracting hundreds of community members for other reasons. I'd suggest that a special "developer/community day" be held in conjunction with the hackathon. While it's likely you'd still need to offer scholarships, in most cases it would be the cost of an additional day's accommodation/per diem rather than flight/accommodation/per diem, because you would target people who are already planning to attend Wikimania. I expect that the 2017 Wikimania will be one of the largest ones, since it is in North America and easily accessible by just about everyone, so there is likely to be a large target audience. You might want to work with Marc-Andre (who is the Wikimania Convenor) to see how this could be accommodated.
Thanks Brion for raising the topic - and thanks to everyone in this thread, you've all taken this idea to heart and recognized the value of user input.
Risker/Anne
On 1 September 2016 at 13:12, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
The last couple years we've done a big MediaWiki Dev Summit in January, around the time of the Wikimedia Foundation all-hands meeting. Invitations have been fairly broad to known developers, but there's a very strong feeling that newbies, non-technical people, and in general *the people MediaWiki is created and maintained for* are not welcome.
I think we should change this.
I would really like a broader MediaWiki Dev Summit that asks our users to participate, and asks "developers" to interact with them to prioritize and work on things that really matter to them.
I want template authors, Lua module authors, template users, power editors, folks working on the lines of defense for vandalism patrol and copyvio checking. I want people with opinions on discussion systems. I want people who have been editing for years and have experience with what works and what doesn't. I want people who wish they could edit but have a bad experience when they try, and want to share that with us so we can help make it better.
Thoughts?
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