Yesterday we opened the travel request process for Wikimedia Foundation employees in Engineering and Product willing to participate at the Wikimedia Hackathon or Wikimania. There is no public link, but you can follow this task at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89355 In this process, we are asking WMF employees to find a hackathon buddy with the sole requirement of not being another WMF employee. In fact, in the registration for the hackathons we will request the same to all participants. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathons#Pairing_buddies This means that non-WMF contributors might receive a request from a WMF employee to be hackathon buddies. This also means that if you are planning to participate in any of these events (and especially if you plan to request travel sponsorship to Lyon) you will be encouraged to find a buddy as well. It's going to be fun. :) And no worries, we will help making connections to whoever needs that help.