Thank you for starting this conversation, Brion!
Let me share the point where Rachel Farrand (Summit organizer) and I (Summit budget owner) find ourselves, after some conversations.
GOALS
First we need to define the goals of the Summit, then we can talk about the target audiences and the structure of the event that will help achieving these goals. The Summit and its goal have been a moving target over the years, as you can deduce from the many changes of names & goals. [0]
Widening the audience was a main goal last year. This is why we renamed it to Wikimedia (not MediaWiki) Developer Summit, and we invited developers of tools, templates, bots, mobile apps, the MediaWiki Stakeholders Group, and also non-Wikimedia users of our APIs. It was a half-backed thought that received half-backed support that unsurprisingly brought half-backed results.
Still, even if we would have done better, "widening the audience" is not a goal per se. What should we widen the audience for? Here is an idea.
What if the Summit would be product driven, with architecture and the rest following that drive. All we are here to offer better products to our users. All the technical discussions make more sense when there is a clear product vision to be either supported or contested with reality checks.
We have a Wikimedia Foundation Product department and also a Community Wishlist where the communities push for product improvements. We could set the goal of selecting (top down) a small number of product challenges and invite whoever needs to be involved to push them forward. Then we can leave plenty of free space for other topics that participants want to push (bottom up).
That "we" should be representative and effective in order to define a list of goals in a few days (we need to open registration asap). It should be possible to get a short list from the Product and Technology departments, the Community Tech team (representing the Community Wishlist) and the Architecture Committee. Then again these product goals cannot be too surprising, since they are supposed to be prominent in discussions and plans already now.
AUDIENCE
If the Summit will focus on product goals, then it is evident that software architects and core developers will not be enough to achieve it. Product managers, UX designers, researchers, [add other roles here], and maybe even selected users/editors must be invited too in order to push the selected product improvements forward.
But there is a problem: we have a capacity limit of 200 people. The Foundation alone could basically fill the event if we don't set limits, The Summit is immediately followed by the Wikimedia Foundation AllHands annual meeting. The Summit is actually the successor of Tech Days, an AllHands for all people who worked in tech at the Foundation.
We do have some travel sponsorship budget for volunteers, and I believe we could get more participants among non-Wikimedia users of Wikimedia APIs and MediaWiki if we really want to target them. However, we simply cannot go for a big outreach while keeping an expectation of general attendance from Foundation's Product and Technology departments.
Maybe we should go back to the invitation-only model with the capacity limit of 200 people in mind, and the representation of target audiences we want to get. For instance, we could set priorities on those directly involved in the product improvements selected (and that means that we need to select them asap) and define a % limit for Foundation participants.
Basically, we would need to make some tough calls to define main goals and main audiences for the Summit in 2017. Successful events (just like successful products) are often the result of tough calls, so no surprise here.
PS1: someone asked about lessons learned --> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit_2016/Lessons_Learn...
PS2: Rob suggested that a single email thread is not the best channel to solve this complex discussion and I agree with him... but I didn't want to kill this interesting thread either. Please note that the canonical places for Summit discussion are https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Developer_Summit_2017 and the related Phabricator project task https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/2192/
[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_ Summit_2017#Previous_summits
On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 9:17 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
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@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?
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