I'd like to propose the opposite:

All Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017 proposals will be documented on mediawiki.org. We can take advantage of the InputBox extension and preloaded content to make the submission process simpler and more consistent across proposals,

• We need to define the fields of the form and the content that will pre-fill them.
• We also need a wiki subpage with the instructions, ready for users who have never used MediaWiki before.

Pros:

• Better dogfooding of our own software (Watchlist, enotifs, RC, VE, etc.)
• Developers tend to get angry and fix bugs after encountering it themselves (a good thing!)
• If we're able to get new people (T146615), we can also get valuable user testing from new users!

Cons:

• No phunny ph- words for people to learn how to pronounce.

Overall, I think it is demoralizing that we are not able to plan our own summit on our own software, that is supposed to be used for this kind of online collaboration.

In T146377#2670042, @Legoktm wrote:

I'd like to propose the opposite: [use mediawiki.org for proposals]
[...]
[This promotes] dogfooding of our own software (Watchlist, enotifs, RC, VE, etc.)

@Legoktm sent an email to wikitech-l that emphasizes the dogfooding point a bit more, so I replied on list (see @Legoktm's Re: Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017 discussion email and my 2016-09-27 response. In short, I don't believe as much in the values of dogfooding.

@Qgil (and others), I'll leave it up to you to respond about the potential benefits of using Phabricator. As my email suggests (and my experience from last year, and this year with ArchCom work), I think Phab gives us more convenient workflow options, but I don't intend to be the last holdout if I'm the only one who thinks that.

I have explained at https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2016-September/086667.html why now it is too late to start a discussion about Phabricator vs MediaWiki to handle the call for participation. Bottom line: we need to open registration this week; we have delayed this opening due to other reasons for several weeks now.

About the predefined form content. I checked T111811: templates for etherpads/Phabricator for all WikiDev16 sessions , which led me to the fields we had requested last year. Based on that, I am adding a proposal in the description of this task (in a few minutes).

I will try to have https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit/Call_for_participation ready today/tonight.

Instructions drafted at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit/Call_for_participation

@Qgil Ok how's this look:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/28/

This is good enough to not be a blocker for opening the call for participation. Thank you!

I see two problems:

• The Tags field is not editable. This means that we should either make it editable (at the risk of letting people remove the Summit tag accidentally) or change the instructions to reflect the current behavior.
• The Priority field is visible but not editable. If possible, we should remove it completely (preferred) or make it editable.

done