Hi Nemo,
one of the ideas we were floating was to rename the event to the “Wikimedia Technology Conference” and maybe we’ll get there but the decision was to stick with the original name for this coming year. I do understand how the change we are making might not be immediately obvious in the annual plan narrative.
The goal is to turn the dev summit into a much more strategic and influential function for the Movement. To do this we will pick a theme for each year - this coming year the theme will be “Technology in support of the Movement Strategy”. By late fall we should have a pretty good idea for where the Movement will be headed in the next 5-10 years and the Dev Summit is the place where we will have a broad discussion for what technology needs/choices this direction needs to succeed. Imagine for example that we say that as a goal we say that we want to make all language wikipedias as large as the English one. What technologies we would need to achieve that? Machine translation would an obvious one, AI, etc. What would we have to change in our platforms and infrastructure to support that goal? There may be another one around mobile broadband and many others. We will be asking people to think through these questions and write a position paper describing their thoughts and proposed solutions. We will send out a set of questions nearer the time helping frame the position papers - which I don’t expect to be super extensive - maybe a page or two. I hope this makes sense.
All the best,
Victoria
On Apr 30, 2017, at 6:58 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks Victoria for spelling out this project, which was not clear to me from reading the annual plan page (which mostly gives a feeling of continuity).
Can you clarify what you mean by "position papers" in this context?
Thanks, Nemo
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l