Feel free to assign this task to me. Things I will likely need to talk to someone about:

1. Volunteer developers and third parties using Wikimedia APIs - Do we have a list of people that we maintain who would be specific to these two groups? If not, are there people internally who I should ask for suggestions?

2. What are the deadlines for this?

3. I could write a template email that we could send out to possible participants. Other suggestions: I could build a Wiki that would be specific to remote participants that would detail how they can participate throughout the day.

Let me know! Happy to help on this task!

Thank you for volunteering @MelodyKramer !

Volunteers using Wikimedia APIs can be found in Wikimedia Labs and @chasemp or someone he knows should be able to help targeting them.

Third parties... I would ask Sheree / Partnerships.

Deadlines. We plan to open call for participation this week, and it would be good to have our today nebulous target audiences decently covered within two weeks, if possible. Otherwise the deadline to request travel sponsorship will be too close, and that will rule out possibilities for travel for most volunteers. Still, it is possible to keep improving outreach in the following weeks, assuming that we will have decent channels for remote participation (see T146613: Improve remote participation at the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017).

Template mail and template wiki Talk page are good ideas. Check with @Rfarrand please, she might have reusable materials from previous events.

I reached out to @chasemp and Sheree for suggestions, and will check with @Rfarrand. I have not worked with Template mail and Template wiki Talk pages yet, so am looking forward to learning more about those.

I chatted with @chasemp over email about outreach to folks who use Wikimedia APIs but may not be super-active on listservs or on-Wiki.

He says that we can do outreach as follows:

Labs-announce is the usual mechanism, it forwards to Labs-l, and then Wikitech-l would cover most cases. We can put a notice in the IRC channel(s) topic, and grab attention w/ the MOTD on relatively all instances (basically a banner), and also we can do a site notice on wikitech which shows up as a top level banner on all pages. I think that's what we can do for Labs integrated users directly.

If you can provide a sample/template I can fit to the various mediums in question I think.

@Rfarrand @Qgil I haven't worked with banners before - do you know what is required for a sample/template, or who I could collaborate with on this outreach.

@chasemp also suggested reaching out to "WMDE (https://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Hauptseite) and ask them as a large portion of developers are associated with them in various ways." @Qgil, do you have suggestions for who would be the best person to ping over there?

In T146615#2680209, @MelodyKramer wrote:

@Rfarrand @Qgil I haven't worked with banners before - do you know what is required for a sample/template, or who I could collaborate with on this outreach.

The sitenotice at wikitech is just a simple richtext message. Changing it is done by editing https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Sitenotice (but requires being an admin). Basically, once there is a wording/link to add, someone else can edit it in there.

I believe the MOTD he mentions is the one that appears within the developer console when they log into an instance/server. I don't know where it's configured (for pointing to examples). However, that would just be formatted as plaintext and a plainlink.

@chasemp also suggested reaching out to "WMDE (https://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Hauptseite) and ask them as a large portion of developers are associated with them in various ways." @Qgil, do you have suggestions for who would be the best person to ping over there?

That would probably be @Bmueller and/or @johl (Hi!).

Update:

@chasemp, here's a draft for the text for the site notice

Wikipedia Developer Summit Join us in San Francisco January 9-11, 2017.
Meet and learn from other technical contributors and third party developers using the Wikimedia APIs or MediaWiki.

I will reach out to WMDE.

I spoke to Sheree, and she said she extended an invitation to Google's Knowledge Graph team as well as some folks there who work on machine learning. Some of the latter may be interested in giving a talk.

To clarify, I mean "engage with others at the conference and participate, perhaps, in the call for participation or in an unconference session," not "give a speech." Thanks to @RobLa for pointing out that there could be confusion with my phrasing!

Thanks @Qgil - I just emailed the group to see if there are ways I can support and amplify their work.

@chasemp Please let me know if you need any help with the banners. Suggested text is above. I would also like to know the dates we're running the banners on Labs and anywhere else on site! Thank you!

@Andrew, can you please add this as a banner to wikitech?

Wikipedia Developer Summit Join us in San Francisco January 9-11, 2017.
Meet and learn from other technical contributors and third party developers using the Wikimedia APIs or MediaWiki.

Site notice added to wikitech.

In T146615#2687934, @Qgil wrote:

Assuming Normal priority. @MelodyKramer feel free to change it, since you own this task.

@Rfarrand and I have met today and we have agreed that our new Developer Advocate (joining next Tuesday 11) will be dedicated to help you reaching out to volunteers. She will also need some Wikimedia tech learning, but there will be the Program committee members and the Technical Collaboration colleagues to help out.

Meanwhile, I took an action to identify the facilitators of the main topiocs, so that Melody could work with them to find the best ways to promote the Summit to their audiences. This is the situation today:

• Useful, consistent, and well documented APIs - @chasemp @bd808

I have a counter proposal that is something like:

Building on Wikimedia services: APIs and Developer offerings

This can include API's and best practices, but also I want to highlight things we want devs to know about or do. It's a "If you build things on top of our things let's talk about it and how best to do it". We can include highlighting a few tools or projects that do things well, and how and why. We can talk about the narrative of merlbot and how to avoid it. We have a CDN in tools for js that a lot of (even) WMF devs seem not to know about, we have a shared pywikibot checkout in Tools, we have dumps offered to all of Labs via NFS, we have quarry and paws, we have an oauth provider folks can auth their users against, and definitely we need to evangelize licensing of code how/why/where, etc. I don't think all of that fits within a purely API driven track of talks but I would really like to make it a bit broader.

@chasemp I would love to work with you to develop this material, because it will be useful beyond the Dev Summit. I'll follow up with you separately.

In T146615#2687934, @Qgil wrote:

• Artificial Intelligence to build and navigate content - @Halfak @leila (allegedly, waiting for confirmation)

@Halfak introduced it and he should run with it. Thanks for checking with me.

@chasemp @leila let's keep this task focused on "Promote the Wikimedia developer Summit 2017 beyond the usual circles" and discuss changes in main topics or facilitators elsewhere, i.e. the related wiki pages. Thank you!

In T146615#2684241, @MelodyKramer wrote:

Update:

@chasemp, here's a draft for the text for the site notice

Wikipedia Developer Summit Join us in San Francisco January 9-11, 2017.
Meet and learn from other technical contributors and third party developers using the Wikimedia APIs or MediaWiki.

Just to clarify, this is the *Wikimedia* developer summit. I fixed the banner on wikitech. But, I like the idea and will add it to mediawiki.org too.

In T146615#2693822, @Legoktm wrote:

In T146615#2684241, @MelodyKramer wrote:

Update:

@chasemp, here's a draft for the text for the site notice

Wikipedia Developer Summit Join us in San Francisco January 9-11, 2017.
Meet and learn from other technical contributors and third party developers using the Wikimedia APIs or MediaWiki.

Just to clarify, this is the *Wikimedia* developer summit. I fixed the banner on wikitech. But, I like the idea and will add it to mediawiki.org too.

Good catch @Legoktm thanks. @Andrew can you fix on wikitech?

Thank you!

In T146615#2693909, @chasemp wrote:

In T146615#2693822, @Legoktm wrote:

Just to clarify, this is the *Wikimedia* developer summit. I fixed the banner on wikitech. But, I like the idea and will add it to mediawiki.org too.

Good catch @Legoktm thanks. @Andrew can you fix on wikitech?

I already did that.

Thank you very much for the extra help!

Here is an idea:

• Dedicate October to outreach through the Wikimedia movement, focusing on getting volunteers requesting invitation / travel sponsorship and proposals submitted. Reason: deadline for travel sponsorship requests and submissions at the end of this month.
• Dedicate November to outreach among MediaWiki big 3rd party users, developers using Wikimedia services, open source projects contributing to the Wikimedia stack and other developers working on similar problems/technologies, with a special emphasis in the San Francisco Bay Area. Reason: we will have a better idea about the program and we may get participants from different audiences not requiring expensive travel costs.

I mean, the outreach will be more mixed than that, but for reference on where to focus first?

The form to request an invitation includes this question:

Are there any topics that you would like to see at this year's event?
Please be as specific as possible: names of sessions, names of people or teams, details, etc.

There are also questions about areas of focus and preferred programming languages. I think it would be good for @MelodyKramer to get access to the participants responses, so she can target better our promotion and outreach efforts.

@MelodyKramer, about reaching out to WMDE: It's on our radar and we're going to talk about the Dev Summit with the teams in the next 1-2 weeks :-)

Ideas to promote the Summit among volunteer developers between now and the deadline for travel sponsorship on October 24, taking as basis the invitation I just wrote in the task description above:

(List moved to the description for better updating)

Completing every step takes time, but none is really complicated. @srishakatux could have this time, and then others familiar with each area could help answering the many questions she will surely have (@Rfarrand @Aklapper @Quiddity would make a great combo).

@MelodyKramer I don't want to step in your toes. I had been cooking this thoughts during several days, and I finally found the time to write them down.

Do we have a list of big MediaWiki websites and contacts there for potential developers?

Do we have a list of big MediaWiki websites and contacts there for potential developers?

@MarkAHershberger, @cicalese, @Mglaser as representatives of the MediaWiki-Stakeholders-Group do you know of any good way to contact folks who are using MediaWiki beyond what Quim has mentioned? I'm drawing a blank. :)

This is a great list and I can get started on this today. I will also make a list of people I reach out to individually, so that we can maintain that for future events.

Questions about specifics in line, and adding additional completed tasks at top. @Rfarrand @Quiddity @Aklapper - could you help me with the questions below?

Send the invitation to the Google group community for Media Wiki

Complete

Worked with @chasemp to add banner to top of wikitech

Complete

Sent information to Sheree to send to interested third parties

Complete

Send the invitation to all the Wikimedia technical mailing lists.

Sent to:
mediawiki-l
mediawiki-announce (restricted, cannot post)
Mediawiki-i18n
mediawiki-api (says I must be subscribed to post - subscribed and still receiving this msg)
wikitext-l (says I must be subscribed to post - subscribed and still receiving this msg)

Post the invitation to all technical Village Pumps (using MassMessage?)

I'm not sure how to do this using MassMessage. @CKoerner_WMF, do you know how to do this?

Send the invitation personally to top Wikimedia (non-WMF) developers, using our demographics data.

Do we have contact information for these people? What would be the easiest way to obtain that?

Send an invitation to contributors workin in Community Wishlist tasks.

What would be the best method for doing this? Happy to reach out, but am not sure how to do so.

Send an invitation to (non-WMF) participants of the hackathons in Jerusalem and Esino Lario this year.

Where is the list of these participants? How do we contact them? Off-wiki or on?

Send an invitation to the GSoC and Outreachy participants (interns and mentors) in recent rounds (and GCi mentors).

Same question - what's the best way to reach people?

Use MediaWiki and Wikipedia social media to advertise the deadlines for travel sponsorship requests and call for participation, separately.

I can pass this information along to @jeffelder and the social team.

@MelodyKramer @Johan says he's in contact regarding MassMessage. Let me know if I can help elsewhere!

In T146615#2713004, @MelodyKramer wrote:

Sent information to Sheree to send to interested third parties

Complete

But do we know whether Sheree's team has invited anyone, and who?

Send the invitation to all the Wikimedia technical mailing lists.

Sent to:
mediawiki-l

Didn't receive it? https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2016-October/thread.html

mediawiki-announce (restricted, cannot post)
Mediawiki-i18n
mediawiki-api (says I must be subscribed to post - subscribed and still receiving this msg)
wikitext-l (says I must be subscribed to post - subscribed and still receiving this msg)

What about delegating all mailing lists to @srishakatux. She can rely on her Technical Collaboration team mates, between all of us we probably cover the majority of those lists, and then we can go after the remaining ones one by one.

Post the invitation to all technical Village Pumps (using MassMessage?)

@Johan took this one. Thank you!

Send the invitation personally to top Wikimedia (non-WMF) developers, using our demographics data.

Do we have contact information for these people? What would be the easiest way to obtain that?

@Aklapper can you help here? In addition to those metrics, our list of contributors-to-get-a-shirt from June might be useful here.

Send an invitation to contributors workin in Community Wishlist tasks.

What would be the best method for doing this? Happy to reach out, but am not sure how to do so.

An easy yet time consuming way would be to go through #community-wishlist-survey
(German-Community-Wishlist / German-Community-Wishlist-Main-Wishes ) and collect Phabricator usernames of assigned / participants. Then spam them in a single go using a one-off Conpherence room.

@Quiddity and @Aklapper might have better ideas for a more targeted messaging.

Send an invitation to (non-WMF) participants of the hackathons in Jerusalem and Esino Lario this year.

Where is the list of these participants? How do we contact them? Off-wiki or on?

@Rfarrand has all the data.

Send an invitation to the GSoC and Outreachy participants (interns and mentors) in recent rounds (and GCi mentors).

Same question - what's the best way to reach people?

Also using Conpherence, with the advantage that the list of interns and mentors is a lot easier to retrieve. @Sumit and @01tonythomas can help you here, maybe sending the message themselves (since they have been in touch with all of them in previous programs).

PS: let's keep the description up to date with the actions that we have taken, to avoid misses and overlaps.

In T146615#2715826, @Qgil wrote:

Send an invitation to the GSoC and Outreachy participants (interns and mentors) in recent rounds (and GCi mentors).

Same question - what's the best way to reach people?

Also using Conpherence, with the advantage that the list of interns and mentors is a lot easier to retrieve. @Sumit and @01tonythomas can help you here, maybe sending the message themselves (since they have been in touch with all of them in previous programs).

PS: let's keep the description up to date with the actions that we have taken, to avoid misses and overlaps.

Done to the GSoC 16 mentors and students conph, Outreachy Round 10, 11 and GSoC 2015 participants and mentors!

In T146615#2712934, @CKoerner_WMF wrote:

Do we have a list of big MediaWiki websites and contacts there for potential developers?

@MarkAHershberger, @cicalese, @Mglaser as representatives of the MediaWiki-Stakeholders-Group do you know of any good way to contact folks who are using MediaWiki beyond what Quim has mentioned? I'm drawing a blank. :)

How about the Semantic MediaWiki mailing list? I didn't see that mentioned but may have missed it. There's also a monthly telecon of MediaWiki maintainers within federal government agencies this afternoon. I will mention the Summit there.

Technical Village Pumps have been notified.

How about the Semantic MediaWiki mailing list?

@cicalese Great idea. I just sent a message to the SMW lists. Thanks for the help!

@Aklapper can you help here?

Yes. I've used http://korma.wmflabs.org/browser/top-contributors.html our stats as an input (which are not sorted by technical contributions but also influenced by e.g. mailing list activity plus covers all-time activity hence the raw list wasn't too useful. I also went through the list of GCI 2015 mentors.

I'd like to avoid being the x'th person sending the very same invitation/heads-up email, so I'm going to pass the list via email to @MelodyKramer.

In addition to those metrics, our list of contributors-to-get-a-shirt from June might be useful here.

That list does not offer email addresses (one could however leave a message on their talk pages) and also includes great but non-technical contributors. It's pretty hard for me to 'judge'. :-/

@Aklapper Thanks for sending over the list. I'm not sure which of those folks have already received a head's up through a mailing list or other means — and I think it might be nice if we can contact them directly.

One thing we might be able to do is ask if they've received it elsewhere, so that we can know for future outreach. We could also ask them to fwd the note along to others who might be interested.

@Rfarrand Could you help me obtain the list of (non-WMF) participants of the hackathons in Jerusalem and Esino Lario from this year?

I just sent a note through conpherence to contributors working in Community Wishlist tasks and modified the task list accordingly.

@Qgil @MelodyKramer It seems from this thread that the planned target audience for the summit have all been contacted or is in the pipeline. Have you reached out to the facilitators of the topics already for promoting to their potential audience?

Besides the Media Wiki technical lists we have already informed, are there any other relevant ones here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Overview#MediaWiki_and_technical that might be worth looking?

Would it be a good idea to send personal invitations to non-WMF attendees from the previous year's summits/ hackathons?

@srishakatux I cannot tell if my notes to each mailing list went through — it doesn't look like my note to MediaWiki-l actually made it onto the list. Do you want to ping the various listservs with a note about the upcoming deadline? It might also be a good intro :)

In T146615#2723521, @srishakatux wrote:

Besides the Media Wiki technical lists we have already informed, are there any other relevant ones here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Overview#MediaWiki_and_technical that might be worth looking?

Considering that this is the Wikimedia Developer Summit and it happens only once a year, I would send the message above to all those mailing lists. And yes, it is a good introduction indeed. :)

@MelodyKramer @Qgil I have sent emails to all the mailing lists that are listed under MediaWiki header (mediawiki-l, mediawiki-i18n, mediawiki-api, wikitext-l, wikidata-tech), and from their corresponding archives, it seems that the emails were successfully delivered.

As mediawiki-announce and mediawiki-api-announce are restricted lists, I've reached out to their admins for help.

@Qgil While I am in the process of signing up on various other lists, wanted to double check that with all the mailing lists you meant only the ones which are listed under MediaWiki and technical section such as Code and bugs, Local, Related software tools, and infrastructure, etc.? :)

In T146615#2722887, @MelodyKramer wrote:

@Aklapper Thanks for sending over the list. I'm not sure which of those folks have already received a head's up through a mailing list or other means — and I think it might be nice if we can contact them directly.

Thanks! (Also for the draft.) I have sent an email to 29 community members, excluding those already included in Z483.

In T146615#2724321, @srishakatux wrote:

@Qgil While I am in the process of signing up on various other lists, wanted to double check that with all the mailing lists you meant only the ones which are listed under MediaWiki and technical section such as Code and bugs, Local, Related software tools, and infrastructure, etc.? :)

I have posted to all the mailing lists (over 50) which were listed under MediaWiki and technical section.

In T146615#2727506, @srishakatux wrote:

In T146615#2724321, @srishakatux wrote:

@Qgil While I am in the process of signing up on various other lists, wanted to double check that with all the mailing lists you meant only the ones which are listed under MediaWiki and technical section such as Code and bugs, Local, Related software tools, and infrastructure, etc.? :)

I have posted to all the mailing lists (over 50) which were listed under MediaWiki and technical section.

Uh, please don't do that again? I honestly can't think of why we needed 50 individual emails to some very niche lists, many of which all of the subscribers would be on some other list that also got the email. I have about 10 different copies of this email in my inboxes, and I'm sure I'm not the only one like that.

@Legoktm Apologies that you got multiple copies of the email. We're expanding outreach this year and trying to hit developers in the spaces where they congregate.

Not everyone is on all of the lists (or actively reads all of the lists) — and without being able to reach people individually, hitting the mailing lists is one of our most effective strategies for ensuring that people know about these events...particularly because we want to increase the participation of volunteer developers and other contributors dealing with extensions, apps, tools, bots, gadgets, and templates — some of whom may only read the niche lists.

If there's a more effective way to structure this, please let us know. Ideally, we would hit everyone individually so that we wouldn't have to mass mail everyone, but I don't think that's possible.

Mel

[offtopic; only about sending less emails next time:]

In T146615#2728320, @MelodyKramer wrote:

If there's a more effective way to structure this, please let us know. Ideally, we would hit everyone individually so that we wouldn't have to mass mail everyone, but I don't think that's possible.

Would someone like to create a task (for next time) about consolidating the email heads-up? One potential idea is gathering email addresses of mailing list members (would require Operations), merging, and eliminating duplicate entries? (I had similar concerns when contacting individual technical contributors.)
If so, someone please go ahead. :)

@Legoktm Apologies from my end as well! I agree with you, and I think that we could have avoided sending multiple emails. As @MelodyKramer mentioned that we wanted to hit all the developer lists, it might have been a bit tough to manually scan through the subscribers of these lists and pick one or two lists from each specific category to reach the majority.

I've also received an email from a contributor, who shared that we could CC up to 8 or 9 mailing lists, as long as we don't mix private and public lists. I like this idea, and I think that we might try CC'ing all the similar category lists next time. But as there might be subscribers who are registered on different category lists, this might solve part of the problem, but not all.

In T146615#2728544, @Aklapper wrote:

[offtopic; only about sending less emails next time:]
Would someone like to create a task (for next time) about consolidating the email heads-up? One potential idea is gathering email addresses of mailing list members (would require Operations), merging, and eliminating duplicate entries? (I had similar concerns when contacting individual technical contributors.)
If so, someone please go ahead. :)

What @Aklapper has suggested makes the most sense to me. Any other thoughts? If not, I will go ahead and create a task.

I've posted the msg onto the artificial intelligence ( ai@lists.wikimedia.org) list too as suggested by a staff member.

Is this spam? Are the code pywikibot devs and gadget devs "beyond the usual circles"?

Generally, I get so much irrelevant (to me) stuff from technical lists, that getting this kind of message doesn't bother me. It's rare and it's certainly relevant to technical audiences around Wikimedia.

In T146615#2729990, @Halfak wrote:

Is this spam?

15 copies of the same exact message? Yes, that meets my definition of spam.

Are the code pywikibot devs and gadget devs "beyond the usual circles"?

What does "beyond the unusual circles" actually mean?

Thank you for the writing prompt, @MelodyKramer ! I ended up plagiarizing large portions of your text, and sending it to the Pandoc mailing list (a copy of my email). Rumor has it that it resulted in at least one new registration, and I'm hoping more to come.

Sorry, my previous comment was probably a bit excessive, so I've removed it for now and will rephrase and repost shortly.

A few more ideas for another round of outreach for 'Call for Participation' > Hacker News, Bay area developer meetups, student alumni groups (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc.), women in tech mailing lists (Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, PyLadies), through the extended network of Lydia in Europe, Marina here in the US, and Runa in Asia. Any thoughts?

In T146615#2730010, @Legoktm wrote:

In T146615#2729990, @Halfak wrote:

Is this spam?

15 copies of the same exact message? Yes, that meets my definition of spam.

Several copies of the same message, each one sent to a mailing list where that message is relevant is not spam. 0 * 50 = 0.

While people subscribed to several mailing lists (most of them aware of the Summit) had to delete several mails, others that had no idea either of the event or the fact that it is targeted to them as well, learned something. We might have received more invitations and travel sponsorship requests from on-target volunteers this year than in all previous summits combined. Having scanned quickly the list of requests received I can already say that this campaign (including also social media and more) has been a success.

So yes, we can discuss how to polish this mailing to avoid the annoyance of deleting emails. But please let's put this into perspective. There might be a dozen people or more attending their first Summit exclusively thanks to this mailing.

In T146615#2737317, @srishakatux wrote:

A few more ideas for another round of outreach for 'Call for Participation' > Hacker News, Bay area developer meetups, student alumni groups (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc.), women in tech mailing lists (Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, PyLadies), through the extended network of Lydia in Europe, Marina here in the US, and Runa in Asia. Any thoughts?

While I think that we should keep reaching out for more non-WMF participants, I was convinced by Melody about not mixing the Call for Participation with this outreach. It is unlikely that at this point we will get much sensible proposals from people not familiar with Wikimedia tech today.

Now that the deadline for travel sponsorship requests is past, we should focus in reaching out to Wikimedia technical partners, 3rd party MediaWiki developers / big users, and related upstream projects in the San Francisco Bay Area or at a distance close / affordable enough for them. But maybe it is better to focus this week on the call for participation (deadline for new proposals is next Monday 31) and then, based on the proposals received, see who makes sense to reach out.

I just sent a reminder email about the call for proposals deadline to our registered participants and posted the same msg on the Wikitech-I list.

@Rfarrand should we still aim to have a round of comms focusing on the Bay Area in a couple of weeks, after keynotes are confirmed and we have a draft schedule?

Thats questionable at this point.
I think the one round should be good..
We are pretty close to capacity, I am sure there will be some more last min additions, and I am having to finalize all of the contracts which need specific numbers of participants.
We are also past the originally stated final deadline for registering.
We have a good sized group of non-wmf sf based folks and maybe we can just stick with what we have and see how it goes this year.
That would be my preference anyways.

I see. I wonder how known was/is that deadline for registration. As far as I remember, we never mentioned it publicly? The "Request an invitation" button is still in our web page.

This is a lesson learned for us, the Program committee deadlines won't help the Summit registration at all if keynotes and pre-scheduled sessions are announced when the registration is already closed. Not a big problem this year, all things considered. However, it is something to think about in future events where outreach is a real goal.

OK! The registration deadline for WMF staff has passed. We have looked into it and we can still handle a few more outside of WMF but local to SF attendees.
Here is our current plan:

• We expect the program areas to be mostly finalized by Dec 12
• I will change the website to indicate that registration will be FULLY closed as of Dec 19.
• During this coming week we will draft two emails: 1 will be to the local SF mediawiki meetup group letting people know that they can still request an invitation. The second will be to all WMF staff asking them to check over the program and see if they can think of anyone local who they really think should be at the event.
• Dec 12th or 13th we will send these emails out
• Dec 19 the registration link will close and no more registrations will be accepted.

We are not looking to get large numbers of last min registrations, and it is likely that a significant percentage of people who do apply will be refused, however we would like to give a chance to major MediaWiki users / contributors and well as anyone else who plays a large role in the development of a tool that WMF tech relies on. Each additional registration is quite costly and so they will be reviewed thoroughly to make sure the person is a good fit. Otherwise we will redirect them to our next WikiSalon.

Hope this makes sense to everyone?
@MelodyKramer is it OK with you if I reassign this task to myself unless you would like to take on the first draft writing of those two communications? Totally up to you and your interests! :)

This task was concluded in December, right?