Hi all,
I'm Julien Dorra, I build creative communities using events. ex: http://museomix.com, http://artgameweekend.com, http://dorkbotparis.org, http://codinggouter.org.
After a short discussion with Adrienne Alix from Wikimedia France, I took my chances and applied for the new role of Engineering Outreach Coordinator a few days ago!! Wish me luck!! (It's basically what I'm doing here in France with maybe the difference that we mix devs and non-devs, like designers and others professionals. We found that mixing is good for the cohesiveness of the communities built out of the events, because they are issue-oriented communities, mostly. Doing it for Wikimedia would be a dream job :)
I also got a very nice answer from Sumana, encouraging me to "email this list with proposals/ideas of what the Wikimedia community ought to be doing" in term of engineering outreach.
This application is a great occasion (excuse??) for me to divert some time and better understand the tech-side of the wikimedia community. I have collaborated with the non-tech side of the french community on issues like museum innovation and photography, but never directly with the tech-side of the community.
I read with great interest the draft "Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals" ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals). It's super-rich and very exciting in term of focus.
- So, I wanted to start with a couple of questions I was curious about:
- In term of outreach to engineers, devs or other technical talents, in
your experience is there a specific community that is harder to reach to than others for Wikimedia?
- Also, would like to see even more effort toward the students? (as in
"the future professionals"!). What about the web startuppers? (AFAISee in Paris, they don't really consider Wikimedia as a software project.)
- Do you sometimes think there is not enough ux designers on this list?
And during hackatons? What about other skills?
- Then, to engage the conversation further, I wanted to test on you some
specific ideas around hackatons and technical events ;-)
The wider issue of testing, of setting up a more robust test culture is one of the key goals for 2012-2013, if I understand well.
I personally know at least 3 developers that are passionate about testing, love to evangelize Test Driven Dev, and that might attend a test-oriented, or TDD-oriented event – but they would probably *not* attend a Wikimedia or MediaWiki generalist event. They have so many event to attend! They even organize events themselves…
These 3 devs I know personnaly are the kind of test-oriented mentors we want to be part of the wikimedia community, if for a weekend or a week, because they are good at mentoring and showing the path to others.
So, how can we bring them in?
That made me (re)think about the limits of generic events, and the importance of issue-oriented event.
The idea I would like to put up to discussion would be to organize more fine grained events around specific issues:
«Testing Wikipedia» could be a nice catchy name for a series for events in various cities around TDD, with experienced dev mentoring less experienced community members, etc. Even if the experts come and go, everybody learn, some test and process get done, and the community grow and learn.
Another issue is engaging other orgs, so why not engage startups:
«Wikimedia for fun and profit!» Ok, this title is a joke -- but we should do a series of events focused on encouraging startups to build products on top of MediaWiki, APIs and Wikipedia sites. The rationale here is that the more startups invest on the wikimedia tech, the more they contribute in return.
The documentation of MediaWiki is also an issue. Let's not wait to have a big team to launch more sprints, let's the sprints build the team:
«DocDocDooooc Sprints» Realspace events are a powerful way to focus people on a goal. So to build a stronger documentation team, we could start designing an engaging and inclusive event format, setting up dates and places for a series of events. That could boost interest, and gather people that wouldn't have think of helping on MediaWiki. Of course the challenge is to keep the momentum going in between realspace sprints. So that means building an strong doc community online too.
Obviously, setting up events, even small ones, takes a lot of effort! Scaling them can seems too much to do, too, when resources are limited.
The good news is that we have successful examples of worldwide scaled event formats, like Startup weekend, Dorkbot. It's doable. And the rewards can be huge.
So the strategy here would be to kickstart local chapters with recipes for events and by connecting them with I call 'serial-collaborators', (people that love to attend hackatons and creative weekends - they know a lot about these events, and are precious resource for advice and support). Identifying and contacting partners and places usually helps a lot, too, for helping first-time event organizers. Having a regular schedule for the local, issue-driven events help the community stay focused on the goals in between events.
Of course if I post here it's because I need feedback, and I might be overly naive, overlooking many things. Does it makes sense to you? What's your own ideas about events as community catalyzers?
Let's discuss here –– you can also reach me on twitter : http://twitter.com/juliendorra
Julien
Hi,
Best of luck with your application. Its always nice to see people who are excited about what they do/want to do, and you seem to have excitement in abundance.
The idea I would like to put up to discussion would be to organize more fine grained events around specific issues:
I gather from what you said above that your specialty is in-person events, but perhaps it would be interesting to have virtual events of some sort via IRC focusing on a very fine grained topic. I'm not sure how exactly that would work, but I think it might be interesting.
- Also, would like to see even more effort toward the students? (as in
"the future professionals"!). What about the web startuppers? (AFAISee in Paris, they don't really consider Wikimedia as a software project.)
I personally think (and I imagine many people think differently), that perhaps retention rather than recruitment is what should be focused on. After all, we power wikipedia. Wikipedia has a huge user base, some of which know how to program, and many of those will at the very least look our way, even if they don't explicitly drop in and say hi. Those are the people we should attract. Even though probably 90% of our contributor base come from a wiki project, I still think this is a vastly untapped pool. People generally join open source projects to scratch an itch (so the saying goes). The Wikipedians (not to mention the oft neglected sister projects) are the one's who would be itchy.
In many ways I've noticed a trend where it seems people on some projects, especially en Wikipedia, treat the foundation as more of a "host" than an entity meant to serve their interests. As a result they start to feel that MediaWiki is a product that is being developed "for" them (in a similar way how something like facebook or google is developed "for" its users) rather than "by" them (or by "their" community). Maybe there was always such setiment, and I just never noticed it in earlier times, but I find such sentiment disturbing. I think in order to best reach out to new contributors, we need to start at home so to speak.
Cheers, and once again best of luck, --Bawolff
Thanks Bawolff for your feedback! It's great, as it helps me think even more about it!
I gather from what you said above that your specialty is in-person
events,
More the combination of in-person events with unfocused (unaware of themselves) existing web communities. OrsayCommons for example (more here: http://side-creative.ncl.ac.uk/communities/symposium11/julien-dorra/) was actually a series of live photo-streaming events happening both inside the Orsay museum, and, of course, on Twitter. Online and offline were indissociable in event series, and it allowed us to focus a community of museum & photo lovers against the ban on picture taking in this museum.
Also, my co-organizers and I always try to include online participants during the in-person hackatons event. It's hard! It's actually a huge part of the new event organization for Museomix 2012 (random fact: we had two wikipedians at Museomix 2011)
So there is multiple ways to combine realspace and cyberspace: you can build your realspace event as a focal moment where participants produce and share online. You could design your event with hooks and touchpoints for online participants.
but perhaps it would be interesting to have virtual events of
some sort via IRC focusing on a very fine grained topic. I'm not sure how exactly that would work, but I think it might be interesting.
Virtual events could take the form of challenges like Ludum Dare, or the monthly Mozilla Dev derby. I would argue that the strength of online is in asynchronous events, where people from all timezone can participate. Having a continuously open channel during a challenge is a good idea. People can then come and ask question, be mentored by some 'elders'…
One thing that I'd love to see exploited more is Etherpad-like (or Google Docs-like) simultaneous, realtime writing. The simple act of writing collectively in realtime is exhilarating and put you in a incredible flow state. I think there is a lot of potential for documentation sprints here. If you never tried to write an article or a blog post in realtime with one or more others, you should do it! It's a beautiful experience that is literally impossible to live with paper or a single computer.
(Related to realtime writing: Unishared is a very young startup that want to push every university students to take class notes live, collaboratively and publicly! Nice goal)
I personally think (and I imagine many people think differently), that perhaps retention rather than recruitment is what should be focused on.
Yes, retention is a key issue. Also, ramping up people from casual participation to more and more complex involvement. Giving people a path, new goals, new focus.
In any case, any community also have to account for people leaving or more frequently just gradually winding down their participation (like, when they become parents, or take a new job). I had that experience myself in 2009, when I was very active in the local Drupal community, helping gather people, find sponsors for a big event -- and then had to step down from my community roles, because of… my second daughter :-)
After all, we power wikipedia. Wikipedia has a huge user base, some of which know how to program, and many of those will at the very least look our way, even if they don't explicitly drop in and say hi. Those are the people we should attract. Even though probably 90% of our contributor base come from a wiki project, I still think this is a vastly untapped pool. People generally join open source projects to scratch an itch (so the saying goes). The Wikipedians (not to mention the oft neglected sister projects) are the one's who would be itchy.
I remember John Resig (from jQuery) saying: "Treat every user as a potential contributor".
Very Wikipedian, isn't it? Wikipedia does of course treat every reader as a contributor by nature for the content!!
* Question for you all: On the technical side, from your experience, what would make an user/visitor/editor feel she/he *is* a potential tech contributor, not just a potential content contributor?
In many ways I've noticed a trend where it seems people on some projects, especially en Wikipedia, treat the foundation as more of a "host" than an entity meant to serve their interests. As a result they start to feel that MediaWiki is a product that is being developed "for" them (in a similar way how something like facebook or google is developed "for" its users) rather than "by" them (or by "their" community). Maybe there was always such setiment, and I just never noticed it in earlier times, but I find such sentiment disturbing. I think in order to best reach out to new contributors, we need to start at home so to speak.
Yes, from my experience too people tend to rapidly put themselves in "consumer mode" :-) I suppose it's (for the moment!) the default mode and we have to make a conscious and specific effort to get them out of that "consumer mode".
* Question for you all: do you have an example of this "consumer mode" behavior on the software part of Wikimedia? How have you dealt with it in the past?
* Bawolff a question just for you, could you elaborate on the idea of "starting at home"?
Julien
On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 7:18 PM, Julien Dorra juliendorra@juliendorra.com wrote: [snip]
- Question for you all: do you have an example of this "consumer mode"
behavior on the software part of Wikimedia? How have you dealt with it in the past?
- Bawolff a question just for you, could you elaborate on the idea of
"starting at home"?
Julien
Well it just seems that often outreach focuses on people outside the Wikimedia community, well ignoring people already in the Wikimedia community. In my opinions we're much more likely to get someone who truley cares about MediaWiki if they use it every day (Like Wikimedians do). Case in point, the Wikidata folks set up a page asking for volunteers to help [1]. I have no idea in what venue they advertised this in, but presumably somewhere meta-ish. 20 people listed their name on this request for volunteers under the willing to code section. Of those 20, only 3 of them are even remotely involved in MediaWiki development as far as I can tell.
It seems like outreach sometimes concentrates on hard targets (people who aren't involved) and ignoring the easy targets.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Volunteers
-- -bawolff
On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 2:43 PM, bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com wrote:
Well it just seems that often outreach focuses on people outside the Wikimedia community, well ignoring people already in the Wikimedia community. In my opinions we're much more likely to get someone who truley cares about MediaWiki if they use it every day (Like Wikimedians do). Case in point, the Wikidata folks set up a page asking for volunteers to help [1]. I have no idea in what venue they advertised this in, but presumably somewhere meta-ish. 20 people listed their name on this request for volunteers under the willing to code section. Of those 20, only 3 of them are even remotely involved in MediaWiki development as far as I can tell.
It seems like outreach sometimes concentrates on hard targets (people who aren't involved) and ignoring the easy targets.
Hi :)
We advertise that page on meta:Wikidata and wikidata-l. I think I also mentioned it a few times on @wikidata on identi.ca and Twitter. It likely reached people who are not necessarily close to MediaWiki simply because Wikidata reaches quite a few people who are not close to MediaWiki. I didn't reach out to any group in particular for this. Hope that info helps.
Cheers Lydia
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org