Hi everyone,
I wanted to give you all a heads up about the upcoming Dev Summit. This year the Summit
will be held in San Francisco on January 22nd and 23rd, 2018. We are still finalizing the
details and will be sending out the call for participation soon. But meantime, we wanted
to share a preview of the game plan with you so that you can hold the dates and begin to
think about ways of participating.
This has been a year of strategy making for the Foundation and our communities. As the way
forward becomes clearer, we, the technology community entrusted with delivering the
products and infrastructure for supporting the community vision, need to reflect on what
the movement strategy means for us and how to best prepare, plan and execute that support.
This year, the Developer Summit is dedicated to this reflection. We invite technologists,
managers and users to study, reflect and propose ways to support the strategic vision we
are committed to. We would like you to capture your thoughts in a short position statement
and join the conversation.
Specifically, we invite you to think about ways of imagining, creating, planning, building
and maintaining the technology foundation needed to enable the key tenets of our
strategy:
The infrastructure for open: We will empower individuals and institutions to participate
and share, through open standards, platforms, and datasets. We will host, broker, share,
and exchange free knowledge across institutions and communities. We will be a leading
advocate and partner for increasing the creation, curation, and dissemination in free and
open knowledge.
An encyclopedia, and so much more: We will adapt to our changing world to offer knowledge
in the most effective ways, across digital formats, devices, and experiences. We will
adapt our communities and technology to the needs of the people we serve. As we include
other forms of free knowledge, we will aim for these projects to be as successful as
Wikipedia.
Reliable, relevant information: We will continue our commitment to providing useful
information that it is reliable, accurate, and relevant to users. We will integrate
technologies that support accuracy at scale and enable greater insight into how knowledge
is produced and shared. We will embrace the effort of increasing the quality, depth,
breadth, and diversity of free knowledge, in all forms.
This direction poses key questions for our technical community. Here are some example
topics we would welcome ideas and discussion in:
How do we maintain and grow the technical community and ready it for the mission ahead?
What should the role of open source be in the next 15 years of the movement? How does it
help or hinder? How do we promote it or adapt it? How do we leverage it?
What are the foundational building blocks for the language technologies we will need in
order to be present everywhere where there are people?
Scaling. What tools do we need as the movement and the community grow?
What are the implications of the strategic direction for our infrastructure? Do we have
any key gaps in this infrastructure? How ready is our infrastructure for what is to come?
How should MediaWiki evolve to support the mission?
What technologies are necessary for embracing mobility?
We operate in parts of the world where access to free knowledge is blocked, hindered or
plain dangerous. What tools do we need to support these at-risk communities?
How and with whom should we partner to create the technologies needed to support the
mission?
How can we leverage machine learning and analytics to support the mission and our
communities?
What are emerging trends in technology that will impact our mission in the next 5-10-15
years?
These conversations will be invaluable input to the next phase of the strategy process as
we shift from exploration to definition to execution. We are energized, excited and
hopeful for a great set of thoughtful, impactful conversations.
As we embark on this journey we want to have an open but focused dialog so we are aiming
for a smaller participant cohort than previous Dev Summits. We want to encourage everyone
to consider these questions and put forward ideas in the form of a short position paper or
abstract. We are selecting a Program Committee that consists of respected technologists
and best represents the diversity of our communities. The Program Committee will screen
and evaluate the position papers in a blind review process and will select those that best
fit the strategic intent of this Summit. The authors will then be invited to participate.
We hope to attract those within our community who are passionate about the future, hold
a point of view and have concrete ideas for how we best use technology to support the
objectives of the movement through 2030. We will bring the ideas and learnings from the
Summit to the broader technology community during the upcoming hackathons and related
events in the tech calendar.
So stay tuned for the Call for Participation! Looking forward to seeing you in San
Francisco!
Victoria & the TechCom