On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 12:48 AM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
Here's a question. For volunteers or third-party folks less close to core
- suppose we do want to come talk about whatever pertains to us. How do we
bring these things up? How do we propose discussions when they're not our projects (upstream) and we don't even necessarily know whose projects they are (I've certainly lost complete track of what WMF teams are which, and whoever is actually doing/maintaining the stuff can still apparently be other folks entirely)? Do we just put up a proposal 'talk about blah' and hope someone who actually knows about blah shows up? If I want to discuss the future of MF, do I just put up a thing 'the future of MF' and hope it attracts the relevant attention needed to actually go somewhere?
In the context of the Summit, "talk about blah" becomes a useful session proposal when the problem of blah is defined, the goals of the session are defined, and the people and projects related with blah are invited to participate.
If you want to discuss the future of MobileFrontend, it is useful to define what problems MobileFrontend has today, and what do you expect to solve between now and the day of this session at the Summit. #MobileFrontend has a project in Phabricator, and depending on the problems you might want to add more projects/tags. If that is not enough to raise attention (it should), then you have this list and/or mobile-l.
See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit_2016#Call_for_part... for the fields we expect in all Summit proposals.
Also, something I find particularly confusing is that we need to be heavily
involved in the proposals in order to even be considered for sponsorship when in a lot of cases volunteers/third party folks may not even in much position to bring them up in the first place even when we're definitely impacted. And yet we're also the ones who are most likely to need sponsorship, being less likely to be already working out of the bay area, and much less likely to be involved in the general team discussions that happen throughout the year.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit_2016#Travel_sponso... says "Candidates for travel sponsorship must be active contributors in ongoing Summit proposals". If a candidate is not active right now in the specific task, but they can proof their involvement in that topic in other ways, that is fine as well. We just want to see a clear connection between the people we sponsor and the activities being planned. It is a sensible requirement.
(And seriously, what's with the timing? So close after new year's, people are going to be on holiday and plane prices are horrible; for me it'd bring the price down by over half if it were even just a week later, and others may be more extreme.)
These dates were not our first option, but the availability of venues in San Francisco for the Summit and WMF AllHands during those weeks didn't gave us many alternatives. Also, the Wikimedia Hackathon is very close next year (end of March). On the other hand, the proximity / overlap with holidays might make it easier for some (i.e. students) to travel?