This email is meant for people who will be attending the Hackathon in London prior to Wikimania on August 6th and 7th. :) --------------- 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