Thursday, August 10 at 3pm
Salon 7 (Level 3)
Objectives of the session
- Awareness about the idea to form a permanent Program Committee to support the Wikimedia Developer Summit and other developer events.
- Discussion about the idea, refactoring and polishing as needed.
- Initial identification of potential candidates to form this Committee (not tied of participants at the session).
- Next steps.
Background
During the discussion of the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan FY2017-18, we talked about evolving the idea of the Program Committee implemented at the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017. This committee is mentioned in the plan, under Technology's Program 4: Technical community building, in the context of the next Wikimedia Developer Summit only:
Objective 2: A process allows prospect participants to submit statements and proposals about the main theme, and allows the Program Committee to review them and notify their decisions. Discussions start before the event with the involvement of all the relevant stakeholders, in order to identify the points that need to be addressed at the event.
In the related discussions, the idea was to have a permanent Program Committee that would support not only the Summit, but also other Wikimedia developer events, contributing to the goal that the right people can travel to the right places (including scholarships and other travel approvals) to discuss the right topics face to face.
Some notes from Winter 2017:
A Program Committee tasked to define the topics and activities prioritized for each international event, and to organize the corresponding calls for participation.
This committee would be responsible of defining a common strategy for international Wikimedia developer events, defining goals and measurements of success for each event.
One goal would be that Wikimedia Foundation’s Technology and Product plans move forward aligned with the rest of the Wikimedia technical community and related upstream projects thanks to good collaboration in various international developer events complementing regular online collaboration.
- Through a lightweight open process, a core Program Committee is selected with representation of Technology, Product, Community Engagement, and volunteer developers, latest by the Hackathon in Wikimania.
- When a new main theme is agreed for a new event, new members specializing in these themes are invited, and they leave when their duties for the related events are completed.