This email is meant for people who will be attending the Hackathon in London prior to Wikimania on August 6th and 7th. :)
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Hi wikitech-l,
This year we are expecting a very large turnout at the London Hackathon. Last I heard there were just under 400 people registered. While we will have our usual crowd of long term developers, this will also be the first hackathon for many of the attendees.
This means that the group is too large for our usual unconference approach, and we will need a bit more structure and pre-planning.
If you have an idea for a meeting, sprint or workshop that you would like to take the lead on, please add it to the "topics" section here:
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon
You can also browse topics that have already been added and express interest in attending. This will help us match up meeting rooms to talks.
We are asking for volunteers to help work with newbies to the community. If you have any ideas for intro/newbie sessions that you might be interested and capable of leading, please add them to the "newbie" section under topics. These can be anything from talks on the history of different projects, helping people get set up and running with mediawiki software (For example, BD808 will have some USBs with MediaWiki-Vagrant installer files preloaded to get people started.), or organizing a sprint for your own project that volunteers with a development background can help you with.
Finally, if you are willing to be available to be a mentor for a few hours one of the days of the hackathon, (which means that you will be located at a newbie table and/or somehow identifiable as someone that can be approached with questions and available to answer questions and provide direction), please add your user name to the participants section under the volunteer heading like this "username (mentor)." here:
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon/Volunteers#Coordinators
I will be reaching out to the email list of everyone registered for the hacakthon in a few days so that newer people can begin to sign up for different topics.
Thanks! If you have any questions, or if anything is unclear please let me know!
Looking forward to seeing everyone in London!
Rachel Farrand
On 07/08/2014 10:30 PM, Rachel Farrand wrote:
This year we are expecting a very large turnout at the London Hackathon. Last I heard there were just under 400 people registered.
Are those 400 already contributors to the code base, or does it include total newbies who never edited Wikipedia? When I signed up for participation in the hackathon, there was no way to indicate the level of skills. Are there other sessions that include tutorials, so the hackathon is a pure developer meeting? Or should the hackathon also cover tutorials on editing, uploading images, categorization, etc.?
Hi Lars,
All we currently know about the 400 contributors, is that they have registered for the Hackathon and Wikimania. Only 20/400 are registered just for the hackathon. I am planning to send out a survey shorty to everyone who is registered for the hackathon to get a better idea of backgrounds and attendance intentions. Some of them may not have realized they were registering for a developers event.
As far as what sessions will be at the hackathon: It all depends on what sessions are proposed by the participants. At https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon you can see already several introductory sessions and tutorials, with a few explicit invitations to non-developers (i.e. "Translathon - Where developers meet translators").
We expect to have diversity of sessions in terms of skills required and formats. We assume participants will have familiarity with software development, design, testing or documentation, and a genuine technical interest.
We haven't thought about tutorials about using editor tools. Then again, the hackathon is an unconference-like event, which means that any session with offer, demand, and a slot available in the schedule is possible.
See for instance https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich_Hackathon_2014/Schedule , taking into account that many ad-hoc small activities were not scheduled there, and considering also that we expect a higher percentage of newcomers and power users / non-developers hackathon in London because of the wider Wikimania context.
Again, if anyone has anything specific they would like to work on at the Hackathon please add it to the topics section soon: https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon Along with my survey I will be also asking participants to indicate interest in proposed topics.
Thanks! Rachel
On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 07/08/2014 10:30 PM, Rachel Farrand wrote:
This year we are expecting a very large turnout at the London Hackathon. Last I heard there were just under 400 people registered.
Are those 400 already contributors to the code base, or does it include total newbies who never edited Wikipedia? When I signed up for participation in the hackathon, there was no way to indicate the level of skills. Are there other sessions that include tutorials, so the hackathon is a pure developer meeting? Or should the hackathon also cover tutorials on editing, uploading images, categorization, etc.?
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
We should probably update parts of "The laptop setup guide" https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathon/Laptop_setup, which is linked from the Hackathon coordination page. I notice there are a few parts that are still in their 2012 state, which probably could use a bit of updating (Like using Smultron on OSX, now a $5 paid app).
I have just added a link to the Git section about http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching/, which I think is a nice online exercise for git cli beginners.
DJ
On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 11:38 PM, Rachel Farrand rfarrand@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Lars,
All we currently know about the 400 contributors, is that they have registered for the Hackathon and Wikimania. Only 20/400 are registered just for the hackathon. I am planning to send out a survey shorty to everyone who is registered for the hackathon to get a better idea of backgrounds and attendance intentions. Some of them may not have realized they were registering for a developers event.
As far as what sessions will be at the hackathon: It all depends on what sessions are proposed by the participants. At https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon you can see already several introductory sessions and tutorials, with a few explicit invitations to non-developers (i.e. "Translathon - Where developers meet translators").
We expect to have diversity of sessions in terms of skills required and formats. We assume participants will have familiarity with software development, design, testing or documentation, and a genuine technical interest.
We haven't thought about tutorials about using editor tools. Then again, the hackathon is an unconference-like event, which means that any session with offer, demand, and a slot available in the schedule is possible.
See for instance https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich_Hackathon_2014/Schedule , taking into account that many ad-hoc small activities were not scheduled there, and considering also that we expect a higher percentage of newcomers and power users / non-developers hackathon in London because of the wider Wikimania context.
Again, if anyone has anything specific they would like to work on at the Hackathon please add it to the topics section soon: https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon Along with my survey I will be also asking participants to indicate interest in proposed topics.
Thanks! Rachel
On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 07/08/2014 10:30 PM, Rachel Farrand wrote:
This year we are expecting a very large turnout at the London Hackathon. Last I heard there were just under 400 people registered.
Are those 400 already contributors to the code base, or does it include total newbies who never edited Wikipedia? When I signed up for participation in the hackathon, there was no way to indicate the level of skills. Are there other sessions that include tutorials, so the hackathon is a pure developer meeting? Or should the hackathon also cover tutorials on editing, uploading images, categorization, etc.?
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Tuesday, July 15, 2014, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com wrote:
We should probably update parts of "The laptop setup guide" https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathon/Laptop_setup, which is linked from the Hackathon coordination page.
The MediaWiki-vagrant troupe should take over that part.
On 14 July 2014 17:38, Rachel Farrand rfarrand@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Lars,
All we currently know about the 400 contributors, is that they have registered for the Hackathon and Wikimania. Only 20/400 are registered just for the hackathon. I am planning to send out a survey shorty to everyone who is registered for the hackathon to get a better idea of backgrounds and attendance intentions. Some of them may not have realized they were registering for a developers event.
A fair number of people who were planning to attend other events or activities on those two days registered for the hackathon because it was the only way to show that they would be around on Tuesday and Wednesday.
You're not going to get 400 developers. You'll probably get about 15% more people than what you had in Washington in 2012. The rest of us will just be hanging around and being annoying distractions :)
Risker/Anne
On 7/9/14, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 07/08/2014 10:30 PM, Rachel Farrand wrote:
This year we are expecting a very large turnout at the London Hackathon. Last I heard there were just under 400 people registered.
Are those 400 already contributors to the code base, or does it include total newbies who never edited Wikipedia?
I doubt there even exists 400 active contributors to our code base, so probably not all are active contributors to our code base.
According to http://korma.wmflabs.org/browser/ we have had over a thousand contributors to MediaWiki, with about 136 regular developers.
"Wikimedia developers" to me includes people who improve MediaWiki core, gadgets, templates, user scripts, bots and tools and apps that use our API or dumps, etc. So it's totally feasible to imagine an event that gathers 400 of those people. But I'm not involved in Wikimania hackathon planning (and will not be at the hackathon), and I don't know what proportions y'all should expect.
Sumana Harihareswara Senior Technical Writer Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 1:13 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/9/14, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 07/08/2014 10:30 PM, Rachel Farrand wrote:
This year we are expecting a very large turnout at the London Hackathon. Last I heard there were just under 400 people registered.
Are those 400 already contributors to the code base, or does it include total newbies who never edited Wikipedia?
I doubt there even exists 400 active contributors to our code base, so probably not all are active contributors to our code base.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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