This topic is a great read, and as a non-developer who's interested in
technical matters, I was quite excited to see this proposal.
It might be an idea to identify one or two specific topics that may be
particularly amenable to outreach to users outside of the "usual suspects"
who attend the Dev Summit, and then actively recruit interested parties. It
is quite possible that scholarships may be required to ensure a broader
(i.e., more than English North Americans) participation, so this may be a
budgetary issue that needs to be weighed against using those same
scholarships for active developers. I think some of the comments on this
thread are correct, that it's likely that at least some of the discussions
at the Dev Summit will be too esoteric for non-developers. On the other
hand, there was a point where I only understood about 3% of what was posted
on this mailing list, and I think I can quite honestly say I'm all the way
up to 25% now. People do learn by assimilation. :-)
A similar process can be done with Wikimania - which has the added
advantage of already attracting hundreds of community members for other
reasons. I'd suggest that a special "developer/community day" be held in
conjunction with the hackathon. While it's likely you'd still need to
offer scholarships, in most cases it would be the cost of an additional
day's accommodation/per diem rather than flight/accommodation/per diem,
because you would target people who are already planning to attend
Wikimania. I expect that the 2017 Wikimania will be one of the largest
ones, since it is in North America and easily accessible by just about
everyone, so there is likely to be a large target audience. You might want
to work with Marc-Andre (who is the Wikimania Convenor) to see how this
could be accommodated.
Thanks Brion for raising the topic - and thanks to everyone in this thread,
you've all taken this idea to heart and recognized the value of user
input.
Risker/Anne
On 1 September 2016 at 13:12, Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)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
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