Hi, back in November Erik and Sumana explained the intention of the WMF to get less involved in the direct organization of developer events. Instead, the WMF will empower and help community groups taking the lead organizing developer activities.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-November/122725.html
In practice, this means that those events are run more in a franchise-like mode (sorry for the commercial word: I'm using it to illustrate the point). As we can learn from the franchise model, the more complete is the documentation and the more standardized is the process, the easier it is for a local promoter to setup and activity on their own and succeed. Local successes help the global success, and global success helps local successes.
Ok, now back to our reality. :)
The first element of an event is its name, and already there we have room for improvement.
Proposal: naming all our developer events
MediaWiki Hackathon City
e.g. MediaWiki Hackathon Amsterdam, to mention an event currently showing a branding problem: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013
Localizations and exceptions to be considered and approved one by one.
The problem, in more detail:
- We seem to have an erratic use of "Wikipedia", "Wikimedia", "MediaWiki", [choose your logo] and [nothing] for naming these events. For instance, see the web pages of "San Francisco Hackathon" "Berlin Hackathon" or "Amsterdam Hackathon" and try to find the full name written down. The pictures show that creative, inconsistent solutions were found for the banners. This makes no sense for the outsiders we want to reach.
- We seem to use "Hackathon" always but then Bangalore was a "DevCamp". It is useful to settle in one word, unless the event is something completely different.
- Some events specify the date in their name, some don't. There is no need to specify the month-year in the name of the event since any event has a date anyway. This allows us to recycle and update web pages, archiving properly past events. URLs stay and they become stronger. You can find an extreme example of this problem in Wikimania where (up to date) every year there has been a new URL, a new Twitter account, etc. Let's avoid this problem at least in our context.