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About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!)

  

 
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juliendorra at juliendorra

Aug 2, 2012, 11:16 AM

Post #1 of 13 (587 views)
Permalink
About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!)
Hi all,

I'm Julien Dorra, I build creative communities using events. ex:
http://museomix.com, http://artgameweekend.com, http://dorkbotparis.org,
http://codinggouter.org.

After a short discussion with Adrienne Alix from Wikimedia France, I took
my chances and applied for the new role of Engineering Outreach Coordinator
a few days ago!! Wish me luck!! (It's basically what I'm doing here in
France with maybe the difference that we mix devs and non-devs, like
designers and others professionals. We found that mixing is good for the
cohesiveness of the communities built out of the events, because they are
issue-oriented communities, mostly. Doing it for Wikimedia would be a dream
job :)

I also got a very nice answer from Sumana, encouraging me to "email this
list with proposals/ideas of what the Wikimedia community ought to be
doing" in term of engineering outreach.

This application is a great occasion (excuse??) for me to divert some time
and better understand the tech-side of the wikimedia community. I have
collaborated with the non-tech side of the french community on issues like
museum innovation and photography, but never directly with the tech-side of
the community.

I read with great interest the draft "Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals" (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals). It's
super-rich and very exciting in term of focus.


- - So, I wanted to start with a couple of questions I was curious about:

1. In term of outreach to engineers, devs or other technical talents, in
your experience is there a specific community that is harder to reach to
than others for Wikimedia?

2. Also, would like to see even more effort toward the students? (as in
"the future professionals"!). What about the web startuppers? (AFAISee in
Paris, they don't really consider Wikimedia as a software project.)

3. Do you sometimes think there is not enough ux designers on this list?
And during hackatons? What about other skills?


- - Then, to engage the conversation further, I wanted to test on you some
specific ideas around hackatons and technical events ;-)

The wider issue of testing, of setting up a more robust test culture is one
of the key goals for 2012-2013, if I understand well.

I personally know at least 3 developers that are passionate about testing,
love to evangelize Test Driven Dev, and that might attend a test-oriented,
or TDD-oriented event – but they would probably *not* attend a Wikimedia or
MediaWiki generalist event. They have so many event to attend! They even
organize events themselves…

These 3 devs I know personnaly are the kind of test-oriented mentors we
want to be part of the wikimedia community, if for a weekend or a week,
because they are good at mentoring and showing the path to others.

So, how can we bring them in?

That made me (re)think about the limits of generic events, and the
importance of issue-oriented event.

The idea I would like to put up to discussion would be to organize more
fine grained events around specific issues:

«Testing Wikipedia» could be a nice catchy name for a series for events in
various cities around TDD, with experienced dev mentoring less experienced
community members, etc. Even if the experts come and go, everybody learn,
some test and process get done, and the community grow and learn.

Another issue is engaging other orgs, so why not engage startups:

«Wikimedia for fun and profit!» Ok, this title is a joke -- but we should
do a series of events focused on encouraging startups to build products on
top of MediaWiki, APIs and Wikipedia sites. The rationale here is that the
more startups invest on the wikimedia tech, the more they contribute in
return.

The documentation of MediaWiki is also an issue. Let's not wait to have a
big team to launch more sprints, let's the sprints build the team:

«DocDocDooooc Sprints» Realspace events are a powerful way to focus people
on a goal. So to build a stronger documentation team, we could start
designing an engaging and inclusive event format, setting up dates and
places for a series of events. That could boost interest, and gather people
that wouldn't have think of helping on MediaWiki. Of course the challenge
is to keep the momentum going in between realspace sprints. So that means
building an strong doc community online too.


Obviously, setting up events, even small ones, takes a lot of effort!
Scaling them can seems too much to do, too, when resources are limited.

The good news is that we have successful examples of worldwide scaled event
formats, like Startup weekend, Dorkbot. It's doable. And the rewards can be
huge.

So the strategy here would be to kickstart local chapters with recipes for
events and by connecting them with I call 'serial-collaborators', (people
that love to attend hackatons and creative weekends - they know a lot about
these events, and are precious resource for advice and support).
Identifying and contacting partners and places usually helps a lot, too,
for helping first-time event organizers.
Having a regular schedule for the local, issue-driven events help the
community stay focused on the goals in between events.

- - -

Of course if I post here it's because I need feedback, and I might be
overly naive, overlooking many things. Does it makes sense to you? What's
your own ideas about events as community catalyzers?

Let's discuss here –– you can also reach me on twitter :
http://twitter.com/juliendorra

Julien
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l [at] lists
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


bawolff+wn at gmail

Aug 2, 2012, 12:58 PM

Post #2 of 13 (550 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
> Hi all,
>
> I'm Julien Dorra, I build creative communities using events. ex:
> http://museomix.com, http://artgameweekend.com, http://dorkbotparis.org,
> http://codinggouter.org.
>
> After a short discussion with Adrienne Alix from Wikimedia France, I took
> my chances and applied for the new role of Engineering Outreach Coordinator
> a few days ago!! Wish me luck!! (It's basically what I'm doing here in
> France with maybe the difference that we mix devs and non-devs, like
> designers and others professionals. We found that mixing is good for the
> cohesiveness of the communities built out of the events, because they are
> issue-oriented communities, mostly. Doing it for Wikimedia would be a dream
> job :)
>
> I also got a very nice answer from Sumana, encouraging me to "email this
> list with proposals/ideas of what the Wikimedia community ought to be
> doing" in term of engineering outreach.
>
> This application is a great occasion (excuse??) for me to divert some time
> and better understand the tech-side of the wikimedia community. I have
> collaborated with the non-tech side of the french community on issues like
> museum innovation and photography, but never directly with the tech-side of
> the community.
>
> I read with great interest the draft "Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals" (
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals). It's
> super-rich and very exciting in term of focus.
>
>
> - - So, I wanted to start with a couple of questions I was curious about:
>
> 1. In term of outreach to engineers, devs or other technical talents, in
> your experience is there a specific community that is harder to reach to
> than others for Wikimedia?
>
> 2. Also, would like to see even more effort toward the students? (as in
> "the future professionals"!). What about the web startuppers? (AFAISee in
> Paris, they don't really consider Wikimedia as a software project.)
>
> 3. Do you sometimes think there is not enough ux designers on this list?
> And during hackatons? What about other skills?
>
>
> - - Then, to engage the conversation further, I wanted to test on you some
> specific ideas around hackatons and technical events ;-)
>
> The wider issue of testing, of setting up a more robust test culture is one
> of the key goals for 2012-2013, if I understand well.
>
> I personally know at least 3 developers that are passionate about testing,
> love to evangelize Test Driven Dev, and that might attend a test-oriented,
> or TDD-oriented event – but they would probably *not* attend a Wikimedia or
> MediaWiki generalist event. They have so many event to attend! They even
> organize events themselves…
>
> These 3 devs I know personnaly are the kind of test-oriented mentors we
> want to be part of the wikimedia community, if for a weekend or a week,
> because they are good at mentoring and showing the path to others.
>
> So, how can we bring them in?
>
> That made me (re)think about the limits of generic events, and the
> importance of issue-oriented event.
>
> The idea I would like to put up to discussion would be to organize more
> fine grained events around specific issues:
>
> «Testing Wikipedia» could be a nice catchy name for a series for events in
> various cities around TDD, with experienced dev mentoring less experienced
> community members, etc. Even if the experts come and go, everybody learn,
> some test and process get done, and the community grow and learn.
>
> Another issue is engaging other orgs, so why not engage startups:
>
> «Wikimedia for fun and profit!» Ok, this title is a joke -- but we should
> do a series of events focused on encouraging startups to build products on
> top of MediaWiki, APIs and Wikipedia sites. The rationale here is that the
> more startups invest on the wikimedia tech, the more they contribute in
> return.
>
> The documentation of MediaWiki is also an issue. Let's not wait to have a
> big team to launch more sprints, let's the sprints build the team:
>
> «DocDocDooooc Sprints» Realspace events are a powerful way to focus people
> on a goal. So to build a stronger documentation team, we could start
> designing an engaging and inclusive event format, setting up dates and
> places for a series of events. That could boost interest, and gather people
> that wouldn't have think of helping on MediaWiki. Of course the challenge
> is to keep the momentum going in between realspace sprints. So that means
> building an strong doc community online too.
>
>
> Obviously, setting up events, even small ones, takes a lot of effort!
> Scaling them can seems too much to do, too, when resources are limited.
>
> The good news is that we have successful examples of worldwide scaled event
> formats, like Startup weekend, Dorkbot. It's doable. And the rewards can be
> huge.
>
> So the strategy here would be to kickstart local chapters with recipes for
> events and by connecting them with I call 'serial-collaborators', (people
> that love to attend hackatons and creative weekends - they know a lot about
> these events, and are precious resource for advice and support).
> Identifying and contacting partners and places usually helps a lot, too,
> for helping first-time event organizers.
> Having a regular schedule for the local, issue-driven events help the
> community stay focused on the goals in between events.
>
> - - -
>
> Of course if I post here it's because I need feedback, and I might be
> overly naive, overlooking many things. Does it makes sense to you? What's
> your own ideas about events as community catalyzers?
>
> Let's discuss here –– you can also reach me on twitter :
> http://twitter.com/juliendorra
>
> Julien

Hi,

Best of luck with your application. Its always nice to see people who
are excited about what they do/want to do, and you seem to have
excitement in abundance.

> The idea I would like to put up to discussion would be to organize more
> fine grained events around specific issues:

I gather from what you said above that your specialty is in-person
events, but perhaps it would be interesting to have virtual events of
some sort via IRC focusing on a very fine grained topic. I'm not sure
how exactly that would work, but I think it might be interesting.

> 2. Also, would like to see even more effort toward the students? (as in
> "the future professionals"!). What about the web startuppers? (AFAISee in
> Paris, they don't really consider Wikimedia as a software project.)

I personally think (and I imagine many people think differently), that
perhaps retention rather than recruitment is what should be focused
on. After all, we power wikipedia. Wikipedia has a huge user base,
some of which know how to program, and many of those will at the very
least look our way, even if they don't explicitly drop in and say hi.
Those are the people we should attract. Even though probably 90% of
our contributor base come from a wiki project, I still think this is a
vastly untapped pool. People generally join open source projects to
scratch an itch (so the saying goes). The Wikipedians (not to mention
the oft neglected sister projects) are the one's who would be itchy.

In many ways I've noticed a trend where it seems people on some
projects, especially en Wikipedia, treat the foundation as more of a
"host" than an entity meant to serve their interests. As a result they
start to feel that MediaWiki is a product that is being developed
"for" them (in a similar way how something like facebook or google is
developed "for" its users) rather than "by" them (or by "their"
community). Maybe there was always such setiment, and I just never
noticed it in earlier times, but I find such sentiment disturbing. I
think in order to best reach out to new contributors, we need to start
at home so to speak.

Cheers, and once again best of luck,
--Bawolff

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Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l [at] lists
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


cmcmahon at wikimedia

Aug 2, 2012, 2:39 PM

Post #3 of 13 (548 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
>
>
> «Testing Wikipedia» could be a nice catchy name for a series for events in
> various cities around TDD, with experienced dev mentoring less experienced
> community members, etc. Even if the experts come and go, everybody learn,
> some test and process get done, and the community grow and learn.


I'm the QA Lead for WMF, and I can say a little about what we've done so
far, and things we'd like to do in the future.

In May we collaborated with the Weekend Testers (Americas)[1] in an online
test exercise to validate the new frequent rollout schedule of new software
to all of the Wikipedia wikis. WTA meets on the first Saturday of every
month, and conveniently, we had deployed the latest version to all of the
wikis except English Wikipedia at that time, so we had quite a few
professional software testers looking for anomalies in the new wiki
software, using English Wikipedia as an oracle for correct behavior. It
went well, but the scope was a bit ambitious, so we were lucky that the
testers were very professional.

In June we collaborated online with Openhatch.org to validate a near-final
version of the new Article Feedback system. This was a much more focused
exercise, and it went really well, we found a number of real issues with
AFT that we were able to address before rolling it out widely. Some of
participants from the previous test event with WTA helped out, so there was
a mix of skill and experience among the testers, and several people
remarked about how they had not expected to have so much fun.

We would like to do some more sessions like these. One strong suggestion
is to have a test event addressing outstanding Bugzilla issues for
particular extensions. This could be an ongoing exercise, either in
collaboration with other groups or as a pure-Wikipedia exercise. I have
discussed doing this with the leader of WTA who is also one of the
instructors of the Association for Software Testing[2] 'Bug Advocacy'
course, but haven't pursued it much farther than that.

In the long run we would like these sorts of exercises to foster a critical
spirit among Wikipedia users, improve the quality of issue reporting and
follow-up in Bugzilla, build liaisons with communities like WTA and
Openhatch that would not otherwise exist, and foster a general sense that
all the Wikipedia software can be tested at any time, and Bugzilla is
always open for all sorts of improvements.

So now to address what you actually said :-)...

Although I've read my share of unit tests in many languages, I'm not expert
at it, nor do I have a background in PHP. But I am nearly certain that our
existing unit test arrangements could be improved in many ways. Threads on
the subject show up on this list from time to time, and I think I can say
accurately that we could make better use of mocks and stubs instead of e.g.
real database tables, we could do more TDD, our code coverage is probably
not very high, and improving that coverage would entail not only writing
more unit tests, but also refactoring existing code to make it more
testable. I think improving unit testing would be a great ongoing project.


[1] http://weekendtesting.com/chapters/america
[2] http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/training/courses/
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juliendorra at juliendorra

Aug 2, 2012, 3:18 PM

Post #4 of 13 (547 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
Thanks Bawolff for your feedback! It's great, as it helps me think even
more about it!

I gather from what you said above that your specialty is in-person
> events,
>

More the combination of in-person events with unfocused (unaware of
themselves) existing web communities.
OrsayCommons for example (more here:
http://side-creative.ncl.ac.uk/communities/symposium11/julien-dorra/) was
actually a series of live photo-streaming events happening both inside the
Orsay museum, and, of course, on Twitter. Online and offline were
indissociable in event series, and it allowed us to focus a community of
museum & photo lovers against the ban on picture taking in this museum.

Also, my co-organizers and I always try to include online participants
during the in-person hackatons event. It's hard! It's actually a huge part
of the new event organization for Museomix 2012 (random fact: we had two
wikipedians at Museomix 2011)

So there is multiple ways to combine realspace and cyberspace: you can
build your realspace event as a focal moment where participants produce and
share online. You could design your event with hooks and touchpoints for
online participants.


but perhaps it would be interesting to have virtual events of
> some sort via IRC focusing on a very fine grained topic. I'm not sure
> how exactly that would work, but I think it might be interesting.
>

Virtual events could take the form of challenges like Ludum Dare, or the
monthly Mozilla Dev derby. I would argue that the strength of online is in
asynchronous events, where people from all timezone can participate.
Having a continuously open channel during a challenge is a good idea.
People can then come and ask question, be mentored by some 'elders'…

One thing that I'd love to see exploited more is Etherpad-like (or Google
Docs-like) simultaneous, realtime writing.
The simple act of writing collectively in realtime is exhilarating and put
you in a incredible flow state. I think there is a lot of potential for
documentation sprints here. If you never tried to write an article or a
blog post in realtime with one or more others, you should do it! It's a
beautiful experience that is literally impossible to live with paper or a
single computer.

(Related to realtime writing: Unishared is a very young startup that want
to push every university students to take class notes live, collaboratively
and publicly! Nice goal)



> I personally think (and I imagine many people think differently), that
> perhaps retention rather than recruitment is what should be focused
> on.
>

Yes, retention is a key issue. Also, ramping up people from casual
participation to more and more complex involvement. Giving people a path,
new goals, new focus.

In any case, any community also have to account for people leaving or more
frequently just gradually winding down their participation (like, when they
become parents, or take a new job). I had that experience myself in 2009,
when I was very active in the local Drupal community, helping gather
people, find sponsors for a big event -- and then had to step down from my
community roles, because of… my second daughter :-)



> After all, we power wikipedia. Wikipedia has a huge user base,
> some of which know how to program, and many of those will at the very
> least look our way, even if they don't explicitly drop in and say hi.
> Those are the people we should attract. Even though probably 90% of
> our contributor base come from a wiki project, I still think this is a
> vastly untapped pool. People generally join open source projects to
> scratch an itch (so the saying goes). The Wikipedians (not to mention
> the oft neglected sister projects) are the one's who would be itchy.
>

I remember John Resig (from jQuery) saying: "Treat every user as a
potential contributor".

Very Wikipedian, isn't it? Wikipedia does of course treat every reader as a
contributor by nature for the content!!

* Question for you all: On the technical side, from your experience, what
would make an user/visitor/editor feel she/he *is* a potential tech
contributor, not just a potential content contributor?



> In many ways I've noticed a trend where it seems people on some
> projects, especially en Wikipedia, treat the foundation as more of a
> "host" than an entity meant to serve their interests. As a result they
> start to feel that MediaWiki is a product that is being developed
> "for" them (in a similar way how something like facebook or google is
> developed "for" its users) rather than "by" them (or by "their"
> community). Maybe there was always such setiment, and I just never
> noticed it in earlier times, but I find such sentiment disturbing. I
> think in order to best reach out to new contributors, we need to start
> at home so to speak.
>

Yes, from my experience too people tend to rapidly put themselves in
"consumer mode" :-)
I suppose it's (for the moment!) the default mode and we have to make a
conscious and specific effort to get them out of that "consumer mode".

* Question for you all: do you have an example of this "consumer mode"
behavior on the software part of Wikimedia? How have you dealt with it in
the past?

* Bawolff a question just for you, could you elaborate on the idea of
"starting at home"?


Julien
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juliendorra at juliendorra

Aug 2, 2012, 4:14 PM

Post #5 of 13 (549 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
Wow, thanks Chris for this great feedback!

In May we collaborated with the Weekend Testers (Americas)[1]


I love the name! They also seem to have an interesting history in term of
organic community growth.


> In June we collaborated online with Openhatch.org

participants from the previous test event with WTA helped out, so there was
> a mix of skill and experience among the testers, and several people
> remarked about how they had not expected to have so much fun.


I'm very interested in reading more about this session!

What would you say was the main expertise/know-how that the OpenHatch team
brought? How would you say they brought the fun in testing?

Also, does the OpenHatch process guide people of varied skills, or did you
set up a set of pre-requisites?



> We would like to do some more sessions like these. One strong suggestion
> is to have a test event addressing outstanding Bugzilla issues for
> particular extensions. This could be an ongoing exercise, either in
> collaboration with other groups or as a pure-Wikipedia exercise.
>

A regular test day could anchor the idea. Maybe "Monthly Test 13th", so
there would be added luck ;-)

About the two events you had, did you somehow also regroup in-person, say 2
or 3 testers together, or was everybody at home?


I think improving unit testing would be a great ongoing project.
>

I'm probably brain-washed by the test driven developers I met, but I'm
under the impression that there is no downside to better tests! (I'm a
purely hobbyist coder myself, learned when I was a kid and along the way,
so I took a *lot* of bad patterns and habits. Never learned to write a test
before writing functional code, obviously. But I'm seeing the way, now ;-)

Julien
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jasnow at hotmail

Aug 2, 2012, 5:31 PM

Post #6 of 13 (550 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
Julian, Welcome. Here are my ideas:
1. "Tag along" - hold an event before or after a larger event, such as OSCON. This event might even be a charity event. Semi-example: http://railsconf.austinonrails.org/ignite
2. Create videos of ways to contribute.
3. Create a link/list of "small changes/bugs" - spelling errors, change copyright everywhere, etc.
4. Use Google Hangouts to hold regular events. Use Skype/etc if video is too much bandwidth.
5. Hold a contest. Here is one that just finished a month-long contest: http://rubyosc.com/
6. Dual/joint hack event with other projects: Bugzilla, Mozilla, Mysql, php, perl, ... By the way, here is my collection of hack days/etc that I have been collecting for the 13 months: https://sites.google.com/site/patchworklabs/
Help this helps,Al Snow
> From: juliendorra [at] juliendorra
> Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2012 20:16:47 +0200
> To: wikitech-l [at] lists
> CC: adrienne.alix [at] wikimedia
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!)
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm Julien Dorra, I build creative communities using events. ex:
> http://museomix.com, http://artgameweekend.com, http://dorkbotparis.org,
> http://codinggouter.org.
>
> After a short discussion with Adrienne Alix from Wikimedia France, I took
> my chances and applied for the new role of Engineering Outreach Coordinator
> a few days ago!! Wish me luck!! (It's basically what I'm doing here in
> France with maybe the difference that we mix devs and non-devs, like
> designers and others professionals. We found that mixing is good for the
> cohesiveness of the communities built out of the events, because they are
> issue-oriented communities, mostly. Doing it for Wikimedia would be a dream
> job :)
>
> I also got a very nice answer from Sumana, encouraging me to "email this
> list with proposals/ideas of what the Wikimedia community ought to be
> doing" in term of engineering outreach.
>
> This application is a great occasion (excuse??) for me to divert some time
> and better understand the tech-side of the wikimedia community. I have
> collaborated with the non-tech side of the french community on issues like
> museum innovation and photography, but never directly with the tech-side of
> the community.
>
> I read with great interest the draft "Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals" (
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals). It's
> super-rich and very exciting in term of focus.
>
>
> - - So, I wanted to start with a couple of questions I was curious about:
>
> 1. In term of outreach to engineers, devs or other technical talents, in
> your experience is there a specific community that is harder to reach to
> than others for Wikimedia?
>
> 2. Also, would like to see even more effort toward the students? (as in
> "the future professionals"!). What about the web startuppers? (AFAISee in
> Paris, they don't really consider Wikimedia as a software project.)
>
> 3. Do you sometimes think there is not enough ux designers on this list?
> And during hackatons? What about other skills?
>
>
> - - Then, to engage the conversation further, I wanted to test on you some
> specific ideas around hackatons and technical events ;-)
>
> The wider issue of testing, of setting up a more robust test culture is one
> of the key goals for 2012-2013, if I understand well.
>
> I personally know at least 3 developers that are passionate about testing,
> love to evangelize Test Driven Dev, and that might attend a test-oriented,
> or TDD-oriented event – but they would probably *not* attend a Wikimedia or
> MediaWiki generalist event. They have so many event to attend! They even
> organize events themselves…
>
> These 3 devs I know personnaly are the kind of test-oriented mentors we
> want to be part of the wikimedia community, if for a weekend or a week,
> because they are good at mentoring and showing the path to others.
>
> So, how can we bring them in?
>
> That made me (re)think about the limits of generic events, and the
> importance of issue-oriented event.
>
> The idea I would like to put up to discussion would be to organize more
> fine grained events around specific issues:
>
> «Testing Wikipedia» could be a nice catchy name for a series for events in
> various cities around TDD, with experienced dev mentoring less experienced
> community members, etc. Even if the experts come and go, everybody learn,
> some test and process get done, and the community grow and learn.
>
> Another issue is engaging other orgs, so why not engage startups:
>
> «Wikimedia for fun and profit!» Ok, this title is a joke -- but we should
> do a series of events focused on encouraging startups to build products on
> top of MediaWiki, APIs and Wikipedia sites. The rationale here is that the
> more startups invest on the wikimedia tech, the more they contribute in
> return.
>
> The documentation of MediaWiki is also an issue. Let's not wait to have a
> big team to launch more sprints, let's the sprints build the team:
>
> «DocDocDooooc Sprints» Realspace events are a powerful way to focus people
> on a goal. So to build a stronger documentation team, we could start
> designing an engaging and inclusive event format, setting up dates and
> places for a series of events. That could boost interest, and gather people
> that wouldn't have think of helping on MediaWiki. Of course the challenge
> is to keep the momentum going in between realspace sprints. So that means
> building an strong doc community online too.
>
>
> Obviously, setting up events, even small ones, takes a lot of effort!
> Scaling them can seems too much to do, too, when resources are limited.
>
> The good news is that we have successful examples of worldwide scaled event
> formats, like Startup weekend, Dorkbot. It's doable. And the rewards can be
> huge.
>
> So the strategy here would be to kickstart local chapters with recipes for
> events and by connecting them with I call 'serial-collaborators', (people
> that love to attend hackatons and creative weekends - they know a lot about
> these events, and are precious resource for advice and support).
> Identifying and contacting partners and places usually helps a lot, too,
> for helping first-time event organizers.
> Having a regular schedule for the local, issue-driven events help the
> community stay focused on the goals in between events.
>
> - - -
>
> Of course if I post here it's because I need feedback, and I might be
> overly naive, overlooking many things. Does it makes sense to you? What's
> your own ideas about events as community catalyzers?
>
> Let's discuss here –– you can also reach me on twitter :
> http://twitter.com/juliendorra
>
> Julien
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l [at] lists
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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bawolff+wn at gmail

Aug 3, 2012, 5:43 AM

Post #7 of 13 (547 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 7:18 PM, Julien Dorra
<juliendorra [at] juliendorra> wrote:
[snip]
>
> * Question for you all: do you have an example of this "consumer mode"
> behavior on the software part of Wikimedia? How have you dealt with it in
> the past?
>
> * Bawolff a question just for you, could you elaborate on the idea of
> "starting at home"?
>
>
> Julien
>
>

Well it just seems that often outreach focuses on people outside the
Wikimedia community, well ignoring people already in the Wikimedia
community. In my opinions we're much more likely to get someone who
truley cares about MediaWiki if they use it every day (Like
Wikimedians do). Case in point, the Wikidata folks set up a page
asking for volunteers to help [1]. I have no idea in what venue they
advertised this in, but presumably somewhere meta-ish. 20 people
listed their name on this request for volunteers under the willing to
code section. Of those 20, only 3 of them are even remotely involved
in MediaWiki development as far as I can tell.

It seems like outreach sometimes concentrates on hard targets (people
who aren't involved) and ignoring the easy targets.


[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Volunteers

--
-bawolff

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lydia.pintscher at wikimedia

Aug 3, 2012, 6:52 AM

Post #8 of 13 (549 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 2:43 PM, bawolff <bawolff+wn [at] gmail> wrote:
> Well it just seems that often outreach focuses on people outside the
> Wikimedia community, well ignoring people already in the Wikimedia
> community. In my opinions we're much more likely to get someone who
> truley cares about MediaWiki if they use it every day (Like
> Wikimedians do). Case in point, the Wikidata folks set up a page
> asking for volunteers to help [1]. I have no idea in what venue they
> advertised this in, but presumably somewhere meta-ish. 20 people
> listed their name on this request for volunteers under the willing to
> code section. Of those 20, only 3 of them are even remotely involved
> in MediaWiki development as far as I can tell.
>
> It seems like outreach sometimes concentrates on hard targets (people
> who aren't involved) and ignoring the easy targets.
>
>
> [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Volunteers

Hi :)

We advertise that page on meta:Wikidata and wikidata-l. I think I also
mentioned it a few times on @wikidata on identi.ca and Twitter. It
likely reached people who are not necessarily close to MediaWiki
simply because Wikidata reaches quite a few people who are not close
to MediaWiki. I didn't reach out to any group in particular for this.
Hope that info helps.


Cheers
Lydia

--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Community Communications for Wikidata

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Obentrautstr. 72
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.

Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnĂĽtzig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

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saper at saper

Aug 5, 2012, 5:16 AM

Post #9 of 13 (548 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
>> Julien Dorra <juliendorra [at] juliendorra> wrote:

> «Testing Wikipedia» could be a nice catchy name for a series for events in
> various cities around TDD, with experienced dev mentoring less experienced
> community members, etc. Even if the experts come and go, everybody learn,
> some test and process get done, and the community grow and learn.

Maybe we should not be afraid and not only offer buzzwords but also point
out real technical issues we are facing here.

I would say that at least some parts the core code is hardly testable.
The situation improves as we go, but still there are lots of problems
with our almost-object-oriented coding.

On the other hand the number of integration issues we are facing
(talking to databases, caches etc.) plus high level of optimization
of code suitable for the hugh site does not make a TDD approach
enthusiasts happy; we need multiple levels of testing unit;
integration; user inteface with the last two very important.

And there also infrastructure issues, like

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37702
"Cloned tables for unitests do not have references and constraints"

discovered when trying to write unit test for the very core
MediaWiki functionality. (The fact we didn't find is earlier
is telling something about our test coverage).

So may be one of the approaches would be to have a mini-bugathon
to review some (or most typical? most annoying? site-breaking?)
bugs and try to evaluate how TDD approach could help us
to improve.

We might even have a nice cultural clash as a result:)

//Saper


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gerard.meijssen at gmail

Aug 6, 2012, 1:17 AM

Post #10 of 13 (541 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
Hoi,
One area where technology combined with content hit the road is in the GLAM
projects. There are all kinds of technical fixes that helped the people
involved in GLAM content no end. There are many more opportunities.

What is relevant in this thread is that there have been technical meets
concentrating on such issues. What excites me is your notion to combine the
technical with the artistic ... other aspects that complete the effort are
in your scope... that makes for a much more refined result :)
Thanks,
Gerard

On 2 August 2012 20:16, Julien Dorra <juliendorra [at] juliendorra> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm Julien Dorra, I build creative communities using events. ex:
> http://museomix.com, http://artgameweekend.com, http://dorkbotparis.org,
> http://codinggouter.org.
>
> After a short discussion with Adrienne Alix from Wikimedia France, I took
> my chances and applied for the new role of Engineering Outreach Coordinator
> a few days ago!! Wish me luck!! (It's basically what I'm doing here in
> France with maybe the difference that we mix devs and non-devs, like
> designers and others professionals. We found that mixing is good for the
> cohesiveness of the communities built out of the events, because they are
> issue-oriented communities, mostly. Doing it for Wikimedia would be a dream
> job :)
>
> I also got a very nice answer from Sumana, encouraging me to "email this
> list with proposals/ideas of what the Wikimedia community ought to be
> doing" in term of engineering outreach.
>
> This application is a great occasion (excuse??) for me to divert some time
> and better understand the tech-side of the wikimedia community. I have
> collaborated with the non-tech side of the french community on issues like
> museum innovation and photography, but never directly with the tech-side of
> the community.
>
> I read with great interest the draft "Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals"
> (
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals). It's
> super-rich and very exciting in term of focus.
>
>
> - - So, I wanted to start with a couple of questions I was curious about:
>
> 1. In term of outreach to engineers, devs or other technical talents, in
> your experience is there a specific community that is harder to reach to
> than others for Wikimedia?
>
> 2. Also, would like to see even more effort toward the students? (as in
> "the future professionals"!). What about the web startuppers? (AFAISee in
> Paris, they don't really consider Wikimedia as a software project.)
>
> 3. Do you sometimes think there is not enough ux designers on this list?
> And during hackatons? What about other skills?
>
>
> - - Then, to engage the conversation further, I wanted to test on you some
> specific ideas around hackatons and technical events ;-)
>
> The wider issue of testing, of setting up a more robust test culture is one
> of the key goals for 2012-2013, if I understand well.
>
> I personally know at least 3 developers that are passionate about testing,
> love to evangelize Test Driven Dev, and that might attend a test-oriented,
> or TDD-oriented event – but they would probably *not* attend a Wikimedia or
> MediaWiki generalist event. They have so many event to attend! They even
> organize events themselves…
>
> These 3 devs I know personnaly are the kind of test-oriented mentors we
> want to be part of the wikimedia community, if for a weekend or a week,
> because they are good at mentoring and showing the path to others.
>
> So, how can we bring them in?
>
> That made me (re)think about the limits of generic events, and the
> importance of issue-oriented event.
>
> The idea I would like to put up to discussion would be to organize more
> fine grained events around specific issues:
>
> «Testing Wikipedia» could be a nice catchy name for a series for events in
> various cities around TDD, with experienced dev mentoring less experienced
> community members, etc. Even if the experts come and go, everybody learn,
> some test and process get done, and the community grow and learn.
>
> Another issue is engaging other orgs, so why not engage startups:
>
> «Wikimedia for fun and profit!» Ok, this title is a joke -- but we should
> do a series of events focused on encouraging startups to build products on
> top of MediaWiki, APIs and Wikipedia sites. The rationale here is that the
> more startups invest on the wikimedia tech, the more they contribute in
> return.
>
> The documentation of MediaWiki is also an issue. Let's not wait to have a
> big team to launch more sprints, let's the sprints build the team:
>
> «DocDocDooooc Sprints» Realspace events are a powerful way to focus people
> on a goal. So to build a stronger documentation team, we could start
> designing an engaging and inclusive event format, setting up dates and
> places for a series of events. That could boost interest, and gather people
> that wouldn't have think of helping on MediaWiki. Of course the challenge
> is to keep the momentum going in between realspace sprints. So that means
> building an strong doc community online too.
>
>
> Obviously, setting up events, even small ones, takes a lot of effort!
> Scaling them can seems too much to do, too, when resources are limited.
>
> The good news is that we have successful examples of worldwide scaled event
> formats, like Startup weekend, Dorkbot. It's doable. And the rewards can be
> huge.
>
> So the strategy here would be to kickstart local chapters with recipes for
> events and by connecting them with I call 'serial-collaborators', (people
> that love to attend hackatons and creative weekends - they know a lot about
> these events, and are precious resource for advice and support).
> Identifying and contacting partners and places usually helps a lot, too,
> for helping first-time event organizers.
> Having a regular schedule for the local, issue-driven events help the
> community stay focused on the goals in between events.
>
> - - -
>
> Of course if I post here it's because I need feedback, and I might be
> overly naive, overlooking many things. Does it makes sense to you? What's
> your own ideas about events as community catalyzers?
>
> Let's discuss here –– you can also reach me on twitter :
> http://twitter.com/juliendorra
>
> Julien
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l [at] lists
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
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juliendorra at juliendorra

Aug 7, 2012, 8:04 AM

Post #11 of 13 (531 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
Hi Al, Bawolff, Lydia, Marcin, and thanks for your feedbacks and exchanges!

I was away for a few days, so I'll try to summarize what's have been said
and what it makes me think about tech outreach at wikipedia.

Bawolff said:

> it just seems that often outreach focuses on people outside the
> Wikimedia community, well ignoring people already in the Wikimedia
> community.


In a worldwide, open, community like the Wikimedia community, it's not
clear cut who is "inside the community" and "outside the community". Of
course what is clear is the amount of work someone is putting for the
community.

The goal of the tech outreach coordinator would be to focus people on doing
more work for the community, by giving them dedicated moments to do so.
These moments don't need to be for "insiders" or for "outsiders" explicitly
(but of course the design of the event can make it lean more toward
regulars, irregulars, or newbies)

That said the global tech plan as I understand it identified mentoring and
nurturing the volunteer ecosystem as a priority over augmenting the intake
of tech volunteers. So it's in line with what you say.


Lydia said:

> it likely reached people who are not necessarily close to MediaWiki
> simply because Wikidata reaches quite a few people who are not close
> to MediaWiki. I didn't reach out to any group in particular for this.


It's interesting as it shows that the data issue speaks to a specific part
of the community.
It's very possible that other parts of the community would better be
addressed by identifying specific theme and issues.

For example Gerard Meijssen has a blog post about readability (
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.fr/2012/07/can-everybody-read-wikipedia.html)
and I'm pretty sure we can gather people (not only devs, but designers and
usability scientists) around that high leverage issue (a small effort can
lead to huge benefits) for a week or a couple of days (be it online,
offline or mixed).


Al said:

> 1. "Tag along" - hold an event before or after a larger event, such as
> OSCON. This event might even be a charity event.


Nice tactic! Something worth trying.


> 5. Hold a contest. Here is one that just finished a month-long
> contest: http://rubyosc.com/
>

Contests are indeed a good way to focus interest online. And to bring in
new talents, too.


> <http://rubyosc.com/> 6. Dual/joint hack event with other projects:
> Bugzilla, Mozilla, Mysql, php, perl,


Something to explore. The new focus of Mozilla on helping setting web
makers events all around the web could be a nice common ground.


Marcin said:

> Maybe we should not be afraid and not only offer buzzwords but also point
> out real technical issues we are facing here.
> I would say that at least some parts the core code is hardly testable.
> The situation improves as we go, but still there are lots of problems
> with our almost-object-oriented coding.
>

Totally right, pain points and technical issues must be openly
acknowledged. Also, that's probably the only way to get interest from
highly experienced devs in tests and TDD (that would be good!).

The more challenging, the more interested they will be.

We need to scream out there " the core code is hardly testable!!!" so that
people that are interested in that kind of thing can hear it from where
they are
(usually, they are in agile dev communities, where they have their own
events and "dojos" and "code retreats". Yes, they love to name their events
in very traditional ways :-)


So may be one of the approaches would be to have a mini-bugathon
> to review some (or most typical? most annoying? site-breaking?)
> bugs and try to evaluate how TDD approach could help us
> to improve.
>

Yes, it was exactly what I had in mind. Sorry if it wasn't clear enough.

The goal would be to lure experienced TDD devs in by focusing the event on
testing, make them work with the community during a weekend on the code
base, existing test, writing tests, etc. and mentor others along the
way. (I'm still convinced that giving it a cool, flashy, name doesn't hurt
;-)


> We might even have a nice cultural clash as a result:)


Cultural clashes are fun, but cultural remixes are preferred to clashes, if
at all possible :-)


Please, keep the ideas and feedback coming: I'll synthesize everything at
the end,
Julien
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cmcmahon at wikimedia

Aug 7, 2012, 8:40 AM

Post #12 of 13 (531 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
>
>
> The goal would be to lure experienced TDD devs in by focusing the event on
> testing, make them work with the community during a weekend on the code
> base, existing test, writing tests, etc. and mentor others along the
> way. (I'm still convinced that giving it a cool, flashy, name doesn't hurt
> ;-)
>
>
> > We might even have a nice cultural clash as a result:)
>

The recent discussion on this list about deprecation levels might indicate
a a lack of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) in core code, and an opportunity to
refactor for testability, with specific examples.
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juliendorra at juliendorra

Aug 8, 2012, 6:43 PM

Post #13 of 13 (514 views)
Permalink
Re: About outreach and tech events (as suggested by Sumana!) [In reply to]
Hi Gerard, thanks a lot for chiming in!

There are all kinds of technical fixes that helped the people
> involved in GLAM content no end. There are many more opportunities.
>

Do you have an example of these tech fixes that helped the GLAM people ?
I'm very curious about it, as a way to inform issue-specific tech events.

We had a GLAM wiki event in Paris, but there was no hackaton (or other kind
of producing/making event) during it AFAIK.


that makes for a much more refined result :)


Could you elaborate on that? What do you see as a refined result -- and a
non-refined result?

I read your post on readability, is this te kind of non-refined tech where
art and dev could meet better you are talking about?

Julien
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