Give a guest lecture on our software development processes, with focus on how we work together with the communities.
Description
Description
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Some rough notes in case anyone is interested:
Intro: Wikimedia, volunteer org, non-profit; WMF/chapters/volunteer devs/editors (a lot of folks belonging to more than one category, exemplify with User:Johan (WMF) & User:Julle and that it occasionally isn't obvious who should do something); MediaWiki core/extensions/tools/bots/local scripts
What data most other sites have and we don't because of privacy concerns. What do we do instead?
How to work with the communities:
- How to gather data and feedback
- Involving non-technical editors in technical work – how to work together and not speak past each other, role of CLs
- When we involve folks and how we could do it better
- Information spread and information fatigue (banners, Tech News, Village Pump posts)
- Language barriers
A few case studies – good examples, bad examples, where we've failed, where we've succeded
Community Wishlists – main focus on WMF, also WMDE and WMSE
How to get involved as a volunteer dev
(Put together a handout)
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On request from the university, bonus after break – working in a geographically distributed setting
Short intro, then discussion
Tools, communication
Time zones (give the West Coast/East Coast/Sweden/India/Australia example)
What works well and what doesn't
Remote life
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This lecture is now in the past. I talked about our development practices and how to decide what to develop if you're not tracking your users (focus on editors rather than readers), contextualized it and talked about power balance between devs and users and Foundation and volunteers, with my double roles (User:Johan (WMF) and User:Julle) as examples, and about open source development and the importance of volunteer devs for what we do. Hopefully they're now slightly more aware of how to get involved in open source development in general and MediaWiki development in particular.
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And made sure the teachers will send out a link to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Developers to everyone.
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Is there any content at all (handout or such) that we could see? I'm unreasonably curious about this. Thanks!
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Not really. I ended up sending an email with links to them afterwards instead of using a handout – if you're really curious I could forward that to you, but it's rather boring on its own – and I used the whiteboard instead of slides, but I'm thinking about writing something short based on my notes and post somewhere.