On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 5:09 AM, Sumana Harihareswara &lt;sumanah(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: Where is the overlap in goals and activities to achieving the goals when put in context of regional efforts like CIS/A2K in India (as an example)? -- sankarshan mukhopadhyay <https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan>

On 06/29/2013 02:31 AM, Faidon Liambotis wrote: Thank you Faidon for bringing up that discussion. There were several outcomes out of it: * Let's improve the main runways for new contributors but let's not reshuffle wikitech/mediawiki.org right now. * Let's focus on the onboarding & editor engagement tools to onboard and engage technical contributors. * Let's find specific audiences and areas to get new contributors right now. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:New_contributors#The_solution This is reflected in several points of the plan shared by Sumana: * Focus on the area of automated browser testing to bring a new breed of Wikimedia contributors. * Keeping the focus on mentorship programs like OPW and GSoC. * Fluent connection with two pools of potential contributors: the Wikimedia communities we serve (involving Tech Ambassadors) and the upstream FLOSS communities we depend on. * Introduction of community metrics to analyze our contribution workflows, where are the good practices and the bottlenecks. In addition to this, in my (draft!) personal goals I'm proposing * To improve web pages and documentation for new contributors. * To promote DIY tasks for volunteers. * To promote and streamline the conversion path from Wikimedia user to tech contributor. A lesson (at least for me) from that discussion is that, even when the community agrees in deep restructuring, this must happen through small steps. Absolutely personal opinion: The release management of MediaWiki is planned to change, while tools like Echo API and Flow are also in the pipeline. These factors might lead to pragmatic ad-hoc restructuring steps in a way that no big plan discussed in advance could. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

On 06/29/2013 10:23 PM, sankarshan wrote: Sankarshan, thanks for the question, and my apologies on the delay in reply. As I see it, there are two main ways that our group's goals interact with the efforts of other movement bodies and regional efforts: *capacity-building* and *helping fulfill specific aims*. We all want to improve the capacity of the movement as a whole to understand technical questions, contribute requests for features and bugfixes, translate among languages and between geekspeak and accessible language, and so on. So, for instance, we might ask CIS and other movement bodies whether the weekly "Tech News" summary https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News is useful to them, ask them how it could be made more useful, and so on. I also hope that the Wikimedia Chapters Association will be helpful in this kind of feedback and "signal-boosting." Guillaume Paumier has been working on that kind of relationship-building and community-building, and will be picking that up more once the VE rollout stops requiring so much of his attention. :) Second: ECT is available to help when individuals or communities are trying to figure out how to fulfill specific desires for functionality. Andre Klapper as bug wrangler is a key point of contact here, and has nurtured two-way communication between developers and users through presence in Village Pumps and so on. In the case of A2K I presume we'd be less needed because I think A2K's technical needs fall mostly within the Language team's remit, and they have their own dedicated Outreach Coordinator, Runa Bhattacharjee. But our continuing availability in bug management is one of our four main activities: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering#Engineering_C… And when any of us hear of a Wikimedia community needing some technical assistance, we try to connect them with technologists who can help. While ECT doesn't want to be unnecessarily duplicating any efforts of regional or thematic entities such as CIS/A2K, I'm sure sometimes we'll overlap or work together on similar aims. But as of right now, ECT does not have any specific plans to do so in the next year -- except that of course we'll help chapters with running the spring hackathon and the Wikimania developer days. I hope that helps! Thanks again. -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation