Program committee, let's meet to discuss how all our work went, the end results, lessons learned...

The meeting happened on 2017-02-09

Participants: Halfak, Bryan Davis, Greg, Chase, Quim. CScott was on vacation and could not attend.

A lot of the conversation went about what could have been done better, and how we should do it next time. This brought a discussion about the future of the Summit.

A reorganized collection of topics discussed:

• The unclear purpose of the Summit continues to be an essential problem; from here the rest of the Program committee work becomes more difficult
  • At some point Tech management, Product, etc. ask "Why are you doing the summit?" If they don't know, that tells a story. E.g. chasing to participate and define topics. It's a lot of energy to do that. We can put that into Tech/Product's hands.
  • Aaron volunteers to make some arguments next time.
  • Essential problem: lack of drive from Technology and Product management
  • In general, the WMF has a difficulty for setting main topics and deadlines before.

• We built process as needed (this is interpreted as good, but also bad)
  • About decision-making, next time we need to be more organized beforehand. Have a better idea of what needs to be decided, by when, how to make
  • At the beginning many people were invited with different affiliations, backgrounds, gender... however, a lot of that was lost on the way. A succession of coincidences, or did we do something that intrinsically drove away diversity in the Program committee?

• The platform to organize the call for participation
  • Using phab for everything has its shortcomings.
  • We didn't have a nice portal to do this. Wikimania does it nice. Template, ect
  • IdeaLab is another good example.
  • http://papercall.io/ is a tool for this.
  • We should partner with whoever has already an experience organizing this type of portal / call for proposals.

• Scheduling sessions was a confusing process
  • There was a lot of confusion
  • Process for choosing which sessions would be scheduled was confusing
  • Some feedback about the pre-scheduled sessions, how they were decided. It might have made some people uncomfortable. A secondary problem?

• Scholarships and program definitions (speakers, sessions) should be synced well.
  • It has been a recurrent problem.
  • Some volunteers that could have been good speakers for the topics defined were found when the deadline for scholarship requests was passed.
  • About scholarship budget limitations, we could pull scholarship needs from different WMF teams in the annual plan, reflecting that the budget in TC reflects the needs of many WMF teams.
  • Earlier deadlines will lead to scrabbling -- but maybe not more productive in the end. A lot of topics in-the-now. Organizationally, we just don't plan that far ahead.

Other topics mentioned:

• The core of the conference was well curated and the unconference session filled in more recent stuff
• 90 minute sessions were shockingly well conceived for our question format
• Not having live streaming was hard

(Conversation about the future of the Summit)

• bd808 rambled about 2014 Architecture summit vs 2017 Wikimedia Developer Summit focus at a broad level
• Quim: audience of event and focus of event help define the time and structure
• chase: thought this was the technical version of Wikimania
• Quim: talking with Victoria and Wes to get their expectations