Victoria, Thanks for replying quickly, however what about the event I suggested, any thoughts on that?
On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 3:57 PM, Victoria Coleman vcoleman@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi there,
Quim and his team have indeed thought through the totality of tech community events and I am sure he can respond here with his thoughts. Regarding the MediaWiki roadmap, the thinking is that by publishing it we a/make planning for 3rd party users much more feasible, b/inform the community about what the Foundation will be doing so that we can avoid overlap, and c/hopefully incentivize broader participation by the community in the formulation and delivery of the roadmap.
I hope this makes sense.
Victoria
On Apr 27, 2017, at 11:35 AM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks.
Different events serve very different purposes, though - hackathons, for
instance, seem to be largely useful for onboarding newcomers and giving staff and other occupational contributors an opportunity to work on projects separate from their usual work, basically whatever they feel like doing, as opposed to what they have to. But these often don't do much for established volunteers, as a result, who generally just work on whatever they feel like all the time already. Have you looked into how the roles of these different events fit together across all the different groups, and how scopes affect them (regional, topical, etc)? This would also be useful for chapters/groups planning their own events.
How exactly is publishing a roadmap going to help facilitate community
contributions?
-I
On 27/04/17 03:11, Victoria Coleman wrote:
Hi Isarra,
thank you for the question. We want to support our diverse technical
communities in a variety of ways. One of our key tools are the hackathons, where we hope to welcome both seasoned and new volunteer developers. We want to support them not just by providing a series of events but also with tools and WMF staff time. These are the key goals of our new Wikimedia Cloud Services team. They build and make labs and tools available and participate in the hackathons to onboard newcomers and in general assist volunteers. Another key change we are making this year is creating the MediaWiki Platform team who as well as doing much needed work on the codebase will also facilitate contributions and planning with the volunteer community by publishing a roadmap. And as Quim notes below we are changing the nature of the Dev Summit to have it focus on the strategic technology issues and decisions the Movement is faced with. As such it is an event that might appeal more to the seasoned members of our community. Attendance for the summit will be decided on the basis of position papers for WMF staff and volunteers alike. I am personally excited about the lineup of events this coming year. But as always we learn and adapt. If we collectively decide to try for a different configuration the following year, we can totally do that. Please keep the feedback coming!
Best regards,
Victoria
On Apr 26, 2017, at 12:23 PM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
Regarding the Developers Summit in particular, how do you plan to
reconcile making the event smaller with your goal of better retention of newcomers and volunteers in general when that's often the only venue they have at which to discuss the high-level technical issues with other stakeholders? Volunteer and third-party developers are not privy to most of the usual venues afforded to WMF staff such as inter-team meetings and events, and yet they make up an important part of the overall stakeholder community that these issues impact. They - we - need to be able to participate in these discussions, and the Developers Summit is one of very few opportunities even open to us where we can make our voices heard.
-I
On 20/04/17 07:28, Quim Gil wrote:
On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 1:14 AM, Quim Gilqgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi, the Wikimedia Foundation has published a draft of its Annual Plan FY2017-18 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Draft>
and it welcomes your review.
I want to highlight here the improvements that we are proposing to
the
developer events (co)organized by the WMF. From local to global:
The Technical Collaboration team proposes to combine multiple
activities
(often disconnected) in a single program focusing on onboarding new developers <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Draft/Programs/Community_Engagement# Program_12:_Onboarding_new_developers>. We
want to work with the Wikimedia technical community to bring a new
wave of
developers to our projects, and events play an important role.
Local developer events We want to support developers and organizations willing to reach out
to
specific groups and geographies. We are hoping to see many local
developer
meetups and small hackathons or workshops around the World, starting
small
and simple. We should be able to offer introductory materials,
contacts
with Wikimedia developers in the region, maybe travel budget to send experienced volunteers to help mentoring the in the bigger events,
maybe
travel budget to invite the best newcomers to our regional and global events.
Adding tech to regional Wikimedia events Last year we experimented organizing technical workshops in
WikiArabia,
and others have done similar efforts in other regional events (for instance, a small hackathon next to WikiConference India). We want
to work
with the organizers of these regional events in order to attract experienced Wikimedia developers and newcomers, organize developer activities, and also improve the collaboration between the technical
and
non-technical contributors in these regions.
Better retention of newcomers at the Wikimedia and Wikimania
hackathons
Although we don't expect major changes in the organization of the Wikimedia Hackathon and the hackathon at Wikimania, we want to focus
better
on new developers onboarding and retention. In every Hackathon we
meet many
new developers, but the retention rates are very low. We want to
review
what we can do before, during, and after these apparently successful
events
in order to retain newcomers better. One hypothesis is that we
should focus
call for participation, scholarships, and Wikimedia Foundation participation in providing a great experience to new volunteers who
have
gone through local and regional events, and also "junior" developers
coming
from wiki projects through the development of bots, gadgets, tools, templates.
A smaller and more focused Wikimedia Developer Summit After some discussions between Community Engagement, Technology, and Product, we have decided to propose a different approach for the
Wikimedia
Developer Summit. Organized by the Technology department as part of
their technical
community building <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Draft/Programs/Technology#Program_4: _Technical_community_building>
efforts, we want the Summit to finally become the venue where the
toughest
technical problems are discussed between the stakeholders directly
related.
We want to reduce the size/budget of the event, separate it from the
WMF
AllHands,
Due to travel budget considerations, the Summit still might be
connected to
the WMF AllHands.
and define its main themes well in advance.
A Program Committeehttps://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T160996
would
decide these main themes to be discussed at the Summit. We also want
to
explore the possibility of tackling some of these themes at the
Wikimedia
Hackathon and Wikimania, where we could get most stakeholders
involved with
just a little extra effort (since many of them would be attending
anyway).
We believe that this approach will serve better the Wikimedia
technical
community that we have, and also the the community that we want to
have,
with a new wave of developers joining our various projects.
-- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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