Welcome to Portland, all! :)
-- brion
On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 4:47 PM Victoria Coleman <vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
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
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