I'm not a dev (by day job) but frequently attend hackathons and other coding events, and just wanted to detail what I do and what I've seen others do (without coding.)
- write documentation - do rapid protosketching or user testing - write content for the platform/app - user test existing platforms (if devs want someone to test something out) - ideation and initial brainstorming - translation - develop comms. strategies so that the participants continue to work beyond the event - accessbility testing (I haven't done this but have seen people do it.)
I've never attended this particular summit, but thought the list might provide some food for thought. This is a good blog post https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/04/21/hackathons-not-just-for-folks-who-code/ on how to shape a hackathon or dev event for non-coders too. (Full disclosure: I used to work there, though I didn't write that post.)
On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 1:32 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
Last year there was an attempt to sort of do this (mostly by extending the word "developer" to mean new things). Largely those types of people didnt attend (although there were a few exceptions), however I remember being left wondering if they did attend, what would they do? It seems to me most sessions were about architecture design decisions that actually didnt affect anyone not working on the code (ie we were going to make the user visible feature either way, the question was do we use method x or method y in the backend). With that in mind. Otoh, its entirely possible that some of the sessions i didnt attend were more applicable to these groups.
With that in mind are you proposing the focus of event also change? Or do you think that these groups would be interested in it as is?
-- Brian
On Thursday, September 1, 2016, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
The last couple years we've done a big MediaWiki Dev Summit in January, around the time of the Wikimedia Foundation all-hands meeting.
Invitations
have been fairly broad to known developers, but there's a very strong feeling that newbies, non-technical people, and in general *the people MediaWiki is created and maintained for* are not welcome.
I think we should change this.
I would really like a broader MediaWiki Dev Summit that asks our users to participate, and asks "developers" to interact with them to prioritize
and
work on things that really matter to them.
I want template authors, Lua module authors, template users, power
editors,
folks working on the lines of defense for vandalism patrol and copyvio checking. I want people with opinions on discussion systems. I want
people
who have been editing for years and have experience with what works and what doesn't. I want people who wish they could edit but have a bad experience when they try, and want to share that with us so we can help make it better.
Thoughts?
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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