Hi everyone.
This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are
evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to
realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.
Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in
the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and
enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our
future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product
vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future
years will have have different focuses and themes.
We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to
improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have
informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme
of the event.
The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to look
at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of those
discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In
light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving
priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with
technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.
We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals
that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the
product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the
Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers.
Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals.
Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around
the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program.
Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and
sustaining our developer community.
We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously
established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All
Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the
DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to
accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come
together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting
together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to
give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and
successful.
This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in
October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the
opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual
planning cycle which starts in January 2019.
Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit
events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the
Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the
formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are
making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.
Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018> for more
details.
Best wishes,
Victoria Coleman
Chief Technology Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
+1-650-703-8112
vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org