Re: [Wikitech-l] Opening up MediaWiki dev summit in January?

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_Lear… 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(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil