Summary of our involvement in promotion of community wishlist (CW) tasks and lessons learned for wrapping this up

At the beginning of 2017, we created a CW project board with intent to keep track of tasks which are not in the top ten list and to promote them through developer outreach programs and hackathons. Initially, for GSOC and Outreachy, we picked projects from Possible-Tech-Projects (PT) that were newcomer-friendly, had mentors, instructions for getting started & implementation & and needed no consensus to move forward. In addition, we promoted the CW workboard via the GSOC & Outreachy MediaWiki page. Clearly, PT tasks received a lot of interest and were picked by candidates over CW tasks as the later were too complicated for beginners and missing the traits that I've mentioned above. There was interest expressed in a CW proposal, but we later learned it was still in a discussion phase.

For the hackathon, we wanted to highlight CW tasks more, and so we created T154988. First, it was interesting that we could only find two small tasks from 60 and second, we got the feedback from the community tech team that most of the tasks were too complicated. We also showcased the CW tasks in the list of featured tasks for the Wikimedia hackathon. In the hackathon, we saw three types of participants: Experienced developers who already knew what they are going to work on, newcomers looking for projects, & mentors willing to help out with almost anything. Newcomers worked on easy tasks that were pointed to them by the mentors based on the project they expressed interest in working on.

And, so to sum up -- lessons we learned were that it is not useful to explicitly promote tasks from CW list through hackathon & outreach programs due to their complex nature and that they may not be a good fit with participant's interests. Though we might try to screen through for easy & small projects from the list and promote it to new developers, we are not planning to promote & support ten tasks as we initially planned or committed.