LevelUp is a mentorship program that will start in January 2013 and that
replaces the "20% time" policy
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_20%25_policy for
Wikimedia Foundation engineers. Technical contributors, volunteer or
staff, have the opportunity to participate; see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/LevelUp for more details.
We started 20% time to ensure that Wikimedia Foundation engineers would
spend at least 20% of each week on tasks that directly serve the
Wikimedia developer and user community, including bug triage, code
review, extension review, documentation, urgent bugfixes, and so on. It
had various flaws. 1 day every week, I made people task-switch and it
got in the way of their deadlines, and it was perceived as a chore that
always needed doing.
It felt like enforcing a rota to do the dishes. So instead, let's build
a dishwasher. :-) We can cross-train each other and fill in the empty
rows on the maintainership table
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers so our whole
community gains the capacity to get stuff done faster.
If you've been frustrated because of code review delays, I want you to
sign up for LevelUp -- by March 2013 you could be a comaintainer of a
codebase and be merging and improving other people's patchsets, which
will give them more time and incentive to merge yours. :-)
When I asked what people wanted to learn, I got a variety of responses
-- including "MediaWiki in general", "puppet", "networking",
and "JS,
PHP, HTML, CSS, SQL" -- all of which you can learn through LevelUp.
When I asked how you wanted to learn, all of you said you wanted
real-life, hands-on work with mentors who could answer your questions.
Here you go. :-)
I won't be starting the matchmaking process in earnest till I come back
from the Thanksgiving break on Monday, but I will reply to talk page
messages and emails then. :-)
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation