Is this a task for March (this quarter) or April (next quarter)?

This is probably going to happen in Vienna - so next quarter

Retaining would require tracking activities (calls for some application like the Wiki Education progarm dash?) or how exactly is that going to happen ?

I always had this idea, but not sure if this is the right place to tell it - but if we are thinking of engaging in new developers and making them stick - we need/have attractive programs - and we have IEG. I was thinking if the community can put a banner around say - community wishlist projects - telling that:

My point here is that - how easy is IEG for any volunteer to arrive, submit and work upon on ? How easy does it get if someone from the Foundation/community can already fix a grant amount on these potential projects making application and mostly (attraction) easy ?

In T160710#3182577, @01tonythomas wrote:

Retaining would require tracking activities (calls for some application like the Wiki Education progarm dash?) or how exactly is that going to happen ?

We already have Gerrit / MediaWiki / Phabricator to track the activities of technical contributors.

I always had this idea, but not sure if this is the right place to tell it - but if we are thinking of engaging in new developers and making them stick - we need/have attractive programs - and we have IEG. I was thinking if the community can put a banner around say - community wishlist projects - telling that:

NOTE: Hey, you are welcome to produce a proposal for this wishlist project and receive for a grant of upto X USD on completion.

My point here is that - how easy is IEG for any volunteer to arrive, submit and work upon on ? How easy does it get if someone from the Foundation/community can already fix a grant amount on these potential projects making application and mostly (attraction) easy ?

Individual Engagement Grants were deprecated in favor of Rapid Grants. There was a discussion related to bounties at T88265: Investigate sources to fund third party MediaWiki features.

@Rfarrand are you still looking for people to think about and run the session together? If yes, @Bmueller and me would be interested :)

@Lea_WMDE oh excellent. Thanks! Lets talk about this on Friday and maybe we can schedule it for Sunday if we come up with a good plan? :)

@Rfarrand, sounds good! Let's do this :)

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Developers_and_MediaWiki__How_to_bec

This session starts in 10 min!

20 people at this session including the three of us

Session Notes

• Problems / challenges
• navigating the code itself - complex code base
• documentation
• documentation partial and outdated
• so complex, difficult finding something for everyone to work on - getting an overview
• systems around tracking improvements to the software - e.g. scrutinizer is a great external tool, but we don't have anything similiar
• we use a unique and complex system, that is harder to get into than github
• all the new things and places to learn - javascript, feedback locations
• code review - volunteers have a hard time finding the appropriate person(s) to work with
• navigating code, and [?]
• overwhelming options, hard to get an understanding of all the options
• feels like we need to be an expert in many areas before
• scattered and outdated documentation
• finding people to help with code review, design review
• documentation - difficulty in finding documentation, some areas are better than others
• meeting new people at events, it's hard to talk to everyone with hundreds of attendees, and hard to stay in touch afterwards
• keeping up with changes
• reinvented wheels getting in the way of what I want to do
• lack of colleagues in certain areas, e.g. skins
• hard to get newcomers connected to the right places/people
• understanding urgency and complexity of tasks in phabricator
• communication and processes, rely too much on knowing each other and friends, but it should work for everyone
• freedom to work on anything we want

• Favourite aspect
• working on an important and prominent site
• too many things!
• tpt: [?]
• that it's so diverse, so many backgrounds coming together, so many motivations
• rewarding to work on
• having the opportunity to make it easier to contribute to the projects - it was hard when I arrived
• feeling a huge impact, on the wikimedia communities, and even 3rd parties
• brilliant people, and contributing to the mission
• visual editor
• quick setup for different groups/orgs to start working
• encouragement and experience from existing developers
• getting positive feedback from users - spontaneous and random
• getting positive feedback from community
• the world is large, with many opportunities/areas to contribute - design/qa/backend/etc/etc/etc
• endless opportunities
• sometimes easy to jump in
• diversity
• things that are suddenly fixed
• working together with multinational people who share a mission
• high barriers to entry

digging deeper

Question: Socially and technically, what were the easiest and hardest parts when you first joined?

Social

• people want to help
• very close mentoring helped entering the community
• Lot of varieties, different needs
• you need to ask
• Meeting people is very valuable
• Not as easy to join now (need access for things) as it was in the past
• Confusing number of IRC channels -

Technical

• hackathons help for learning
• Documentation - keeps changing, and always behind
• you don't know what you don't know

Ideas

• Infographics and visualizations- Maps to locate keywords
• introductory guides - walkthroughs, how tos, 1-on-1 guidance, workshops, tutorials, different levels of documentation
• 500 good extensions, and 4000 of varying quality
• code documentation is terrible, wiki documentation can be better
• task lists are helpful
• the unknown unknowns, so many aspects to discover - learning via mistakes is frustrating, if the mistakes were due to not knowing about something
• huge variety of people and perspectives.
• hard to get a complete overview
• onboarding improvements needed. Something that can give immediate success
• overcomplexity when getting started
• helpful when there are people who can/do help - but having to ask for help (Who? Where?) is a barrier
• barriers to entry have increased a lot over time
• face-time is so valuable - forging connections to new people. established relationships deepen beyond business-only
• too many IRC channels - nobody officially tasked with answering anything anywhere

wrapup

• FAQ / Q&A database? - like a mediawiki stackoverflow?
• better landing page - perhaps re-evaluate and implement https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki/Homepage_redesign/Preview/4 - Srishti is also working on this area
  • declutter, with minimal pathways, e.g. 3 links only
• IRC frustrates some people who expect Slack-level dunctionality (bouncer, etc)
  • IRC has easier web-entry though, with direct links to freenode webchat
  • perhaps 1 intro channel with official schedule for moderators to triage questions?
• docs for browsertests are a good example
• clearer identification for mentors/helpers at events (tshirts/sashes/etc)

Plan: start a once/week hour-long open officehour for answering dev questions. Not requesting help, but requesting pointers to docs or appropriate people.

@srishakatux & @Aklapper

Ideas, good and bad experiences in image format: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Hackathon_10_New_Developers_and_Mediawiki_session_results.jpg

P.S. to Rachels write_up: WMDE Tech plans to start with the open office hour for answering dev questions beginning of June - more infos to come, will be announced in various places :-)

It is missing the 'Thanks' extension on Phabricator :) but thanks for the session and for the outcomes (notes and photos).

@Bmueller & @Lea_WMDE :
Two questions:

1. I am just getting to this now, Yikes! What kind of write up do you think would be most helpful for this?
2. Any ideas or interest in doing a "part 2" in Montreal? If yes, lets talk!

Part II will take place at the Wikimania Hackathon: See T171900 - would be great to meet some of the part I attendees at part II, too :-).