Update on these activities and shared with MIT as is:

• Ideation Event - Yes, we would like to participate in this event. I'm planning to be active on Discord to communicate through chat or voice on the day of the event.
• Nonprofit village - Yes, we would like to participate in this activity as well. Our problem statement is: "What informational apps, tools addressing pressing issues (e.g., fake news or misinformation), data analysis and visualizations for data-informed decision making could you develop, harnessing the power of Wikipedia's open datasets and APIs?" I have attached an image with this email (see below), let me know if something like this might be more helpful or suggestions to enhance it.
• Mentors/Judges - I have signed up to both mentor and judge projects.
• Projects - Yes, hackers can indicate if they are willing to be contacted by Wikimedia.
• Tracks - You can list Wikimedia under "Education" track.

Email shared with tech-all, product-all:

Interesting in mentoring at HackMIT?

Hello everyone,

We are participating in HackMIT 2020, a weekend-long online event organized by MIT university for high-school, college, and undergraduate students older than 13. Around 1500 students from all around the world will take part in this event: https://hackmit.org/ [1]

Participating in hack events and other means to increase the visibility of Wikimedia-Tech outside of Wikimedia is something we’re exploring as part of the Tech Community Building objective in FY 20/21.

We have signed up as Wikimedia to participate in this event's many different activities under the "education" track. We plan to share a problem statement with students that they can develop prototypes or proof of concept around. Here it goes: "What informational apps, tools addressing pressing issues (e.g., fake news or misinformation), data analysis and visualizations for data-informed decision making could you develop, harnessing the power of Wikipedia's open datasets and APIs?". You can learn about the activities of HackMIT, for which we have signed up: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261169 [2].

In addition to helping students progress on their projects related to the problem statement, the event needs technical and non-technical mentors in many areas, interested in mentoring students or judging student's projects.

If mentoring at this event is something you would be interested in, please reach out for the next steps! The deadline to sign-up as a mentor is September 12th.

Cheers,
Srishti

5 people are interested! Shared some information around time commitment, mentoring areas and signing-up with them:

As far as time commitment goes, it is totally up to you how many hours you want to dedicate to mentor students on the weekend the Hackathon will take place (September 18th-20th). The team would like you to indicate in the sign-up form on which days and times you will be available to advertise your availability to students accordingly.

As far as the mentoring areas are concerned, in the form, you will be asked to choose skills that you are interested in, both technical and non-technical. If there is something else you want to mentor that is not listed, you could indicate that in the "Other" field. Here are the skills that you will see in the form:

HTML/CSS/JavaScript
Node.js
React, Angular, Vue (front-end frameworks)
PHP, Flask, Django, Ruby on Rails (back-end frameworks)
MongoDB, MySQL (relational databases)
Data science + data visualization
Machine learning, computer vision
Natural language processing
iOS, Android development (native and/or hybrid!)
Medical technology (biosensors, medical imaging, computational biology, etc.)
Virtual/augmented reality
IoT devices and network protocols
GIS/Remote sensing
Education technology
Graph databases (Neo4j)
Decentralized web
Cybersecurity
Cloud (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud; please specify in Questions/Comments)
Blockchain
Other:

You can go to go.hackmit.org/volunteer and sign-up as a mentor or judge or both (deadline is September 12).

4 folks from WMF Mukunda Modell, Matt Cleinman, Razzi Abuissa, and myself will be attending this event. Shared next steps with everyone:

I wanted to share some information with you related to the event:

• The organizing team has invited us to join the HackMIT 2020 slack channel through go.hackmit.org/slack2020. They will use it as one of the platforms for Q&A. #education stream will be most relevant to us here.
• A mentor orientation will occur this Thursday, September 17th, 8:00 - 8:45 pm EDT via Zoom at go.hackmit.org/mentor. You may have received an invitation already for this. I hope you all can attend this event as this will help inform more exactly how this event will roll.
• For the ideation event, on Friday at 10 pm EDT / 7 pm PDT, join Discord at go.hackmit.org/discord It might be a bit late for some of you, so no worries if you cannot attend. #non-profit-wikimedia stream will be most relevant to us here. As far as I know, a problem statement will be shared on our behalf with students before this event. During this event, students might ask us any general or technical questions. Our problem statement is below:

Wikipedia is one of the world’s largest encyclopedia and top ten internet websites. What informational apps, tools addressing pressing issues (e.g., fake news or misinformation), data analysis and visualizations for data-informed decision making, could you develop
harnessing Wikipedia’s open datasets and APIs? Resources
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data

You might be wondering what sorts of questions students might ask or how best you can support them. So far, my understanding is that students will approach you with questions based on the skills you have indicated in the mentor sign-up form. In addition, if and when they start developing projects in response to our problem statement, they might approach us with questions around Wikimedia APIs, their capabilities, resources to look for, venues for asking technical questions, etc. Overall, I think there will be a lot of ad-hoc support expected from us :)

I am also hoping to get clarity at the mentor orientation this coming Thursday. If there is anything new that I find out, I will share it with you. Please let me know if you have any questions in the meantime. Thanks again for being a part of this!

(adding a gist from the event here for future sake)

First, it was a refreshing event to participate in, and it was lovely to see how MIT students solely organized this Hackathon. I liked how they used a combination of existing as well as new tools that they developed mainly for the Hackathon:

• Slack
• Discord
• HelpQueue for technical queries: http://q.hackmit.org/
• HackMIT Virtual Playground: https://play.hackmit.org/ (background story)
• A ballot tool for judging students' projects

Mukunda and I participated in the ideation event on Day 1, where we pitched our guiding statement to students in two separate calls. A few students reached out to me with questions to learn more about our projects, so I shared a note in their Discord channel, highlighting the projects we already have related to our guiding statement:

Hi folks, I am sharing some information about the projects that we already have at Wikipedia/Wikimedia that you might find interesting in case you plan to work on a design challenge/problem statement we have crafted for HackMIT: "What informational apps, tools addressing pressing issues (e.g., fake news or misinformation), data analysis and visualizations for data-informed decision making could you develop, harnessing the power of Wikipedia's open content, datasets, and APIs?"

Informational apps: English Wikipedia has over 6 million articles, and Wikipedia is available in over 300 languages. There are 13 additional free knowledge projects on different topics that we call Wikipedia's sister projects. Some of the popular ones are Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, MediaWiki. You can learn more about these free knowledge projects here: https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/wikimedia-projects/. Besides this, there are tonnes of informational apps, some of which we don't officially support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_mobile_applications. There are apps for offline access to Wikipedia for people in the region with poor internet connectivity such as https://www.kiwix.org/en/. There are Wikipedia integrations with Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri to read content from Wikipedia, and smartwatches such as Pebble. Here is another example of Microsoft's app for Windows 10 Mobile phone and surface: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/wiki-here/9nblggh4p098 that shows "nearby places around you" and uses Wikipedia's content.

Data visualization tools: Two of my favorite examples a) visualization of real-time changes occurring on Wikipedia (http://listen.hatnote.com/) b) historical events from 1600-2000 (http://histography.io/). For more, see https://seealso.org/.

Fighting pressing issues (fake news and misinformation): Facebook and YouTube have been trying to rely on Wikipedia's content to combat these issues. For example, Facebook now shows publisher information for news articles (in certain parts of the world) that it fetches from Wikipedia: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/05/facebook-article-information-button/.

Machine learning / Artificial intelligence: Wikipedia relies on bots to do a lot of manual work, for example, fixing spelling mistakes, citations, dead links in articles, and a lot more. We also have a machine learning service that helps evaluate whether an edit made to a Wikipedia article is a good quality edit or a bad quality edit, making the work of human editors a lot easier. You can learn more about this service here, and it is already in action on several language wikis: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ORES. You can learn more about our free content, data dumps, and APIs here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data. For this Hackathon, if you have ideas for cool projects that you want to build that relates to our design challenge and even if not relies on Wikipedia's content and data sets, would love to chat with you :)

We had a dedicated channel in Discord and a Wikimedia tent in a virtual playground where I stood for so long :) Sadly, no one came and showed interest as far as I am aware, of working on a project that fits with our theme, nor I am aware that anyone used our APIs or datasets. It seemed like students may have brainstormed an idea among themselves during or before the event that they decided to work on.

Razzi and Mukunda provided technical support to students on their projects during this event via the HelpQueue system. I was assigned to judge six student projects, that I helped with.

Some screenshots of our virtual presence: