Hi Al, Bawolff, Lydia, Marcin, and thanks for your feedbacks and exchanges!
I was away for a few days, so I'll try to summarize what's have been said and what it makes me think about tech outreach at wikipedia.
Bawolff said:
it just seems that often outreach focuses on people outside the Wikimedia community, well ignoring people already in the Wikimedia community.
In a worldwide, open, community like the Wikimedia community, it's not clear cut who is "inside the community" and "outside the community". Of course what is clear is the amount of work someone is putting for the community.
The goal of the tech outreach coordinator would be to focus people on doing more work for the community, by giving them dedicated moments to do so. These moments don't need to be for "insiders" or for "outsiders" explicitly (but of course the design of the event can make it lean more toward regulars, irregulars, or newbies)
That said the global tech plan as I understand it identified mentoring and nurturing the volunteer ecosystem as a priority over augmenting the intake of tech volunteers. So it's in line with what you say.
Lydia said:
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.
It's interesting as it shows that the data issue speaks to a specific part of the community. It's very possible that other parts of the community would better be addressed by identifying specific theme and issues.
For example Gerard Meijssen has a blog post about readability ( http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.fr/2012/07/can-everybody-read-wikipedia.html) and I'm pretty sure we can gather people (not only devs, but designers and usability scientists) around that high leverage issue (a small effort can lead to huge benefits) for a week or a couple of days (be it online, offline or mixed).
Al said:
- "Tag along" - hold an event before or after a larger event, such as
OSCON. This event might even be a charity event.
Nice tactic! Something worth trying.
5. Hold a contest. Here is one that just finished a month-longcontest: http://rubyosc.com/
Contests are indeed a good way to focus interest online. And to bring in new talents, too.
http://rubyosc.com/ 6. Dual/joint hack event with other projects: Bugzilla, Mozilla, Mysql, php, perl,
Something to explore. The new focus of Mozilla on helping setting web makers events all around the web could be a nice common ground.
Marcin said:
Maybe we should not be afraid and not only offer buzzwords but also point out real technical issues we are facing here. I would say that at least some parts the core code is hardly testable. The situation improves as we go, but still there are lots of problems with our almost-object-oriented coding.
Totally right, pain points and technical issues must be openly acknowledged. Also, that's probably the only way to get interest from highly experienced devs in tests and TDD (that would be good!).
The more challenging, the more interested they will be.
We need to scream out there " the core code is hardly testable!!!" so that people that are interested in that kind of thing can hear it from where they are (usually, they are in agile dev communities, where they have their own events and "dojos" and "code retreats". Yes, they love to name their events in very traditional ways :-)
So may be one of the approaches would be to have a mini-bugathon
to review some (or most typical? most annoying? site-breaking?) bugs and try to evaluate how TDD approach could help us to improve.
Yes, it was exactly what I had in mind. Sorry if it wasn't clear enough.
The goal would be to lure experienced TDD devs in by focusing the event on testing, make them work with the community during a weekend on the code base, existing test, writing tests, etc. and mentor others along the way. (I'm still convinced that giving it a cool, flashy, name doesn't hurt ;-)
We might even have a nice cultural clash as a result:)
Cultural clashes are fun, but cultural remixes are preferred to clashes, if at all possible :-)
Please, keep the ideas and feedback coming: I'll synthesize everything at the end, Julien