Group coordinator is: @Eleni.Christopoulou

This is a task to collect ideas and progress from hackathon participants who'd like to write blog posts about their experiences at Wikimedia Hackathon 2023.

Volunteer roles

• Write blog posts about your experiences at the Hackathon following the guidelines shared by the organizers (see below).

Coordinator roles

• Be a point of contact for the volunteer group and lead coordination efforts!
• Reach out to potential volunteers a few weeks before the event via email, informing them about their roles and responsibilities and asking them to subscribe to this Phabricator task to stay up to date. Organizers will share a spreadsheet with contact details.
• Invite volunteers to join the WMHack 2023 Volunteers channel on Telegram.
• Sync up with volunteers of your group at the beginning of each day during the event and provide the necessary support to volunteers & organizers.
• After the event:
  • All posts from volunteers are documented on the Hackathon’s landing page on MediaWiki.org.
  • Ensure no volunteering-related task remains to be resolved on Phabricator.
  • Send a thank you message to volunteers in the form of a Wiki love token. It will be shared by organizers with all leaders soon.

Blogging platform

• Volunteers of the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 from the Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece, have set up a blog to allow all members of the Wikimedia movement to stay up to date with activities taking place at Wikimedia Hackathon 2023.
  • Link to the blog: https://wmhack2023.github.io/.
  • Blogging volunteers are welcome to contribute their posts to this blog. To begin writing a post, you can first create an issue in the dedicated repository to ensure no overlap on the topic and identify potential collaborators: https://github.com/wmhack2023/wmhack2023.github.io/issues.
  • Here is more on how to contribute to the blog: https://wmhack2023.github.io/contribute/
  • And here are a few Q&A gathered so far on how to overcome trouble with the blog: https://github.com/wmhack2023/wmhack2023.github.io/discussions
• You can also pick a medium of your choice for blogging.

General guidance

Here are some points that you might want to consider in writing about your experiences at the Hackathon:

• Write for your audience. What can other Wikimedian's learn from your experience? What went well, what did you find thoughtful and interesting, what challenges did you discover and how might we overcome them? Sharing to encourage others is a great way to build interest for other folks. Some topic ideas:
  • Summary of the event including what the event is about, who it is for, and its significance
  • Important takeaways from the hackathon
  • Talk about your experience related to the program’s success for this year
  • Capture developer experiences or conversations with an interesting perspective
  • Any social media mentions. Did folks have an interesting conversation or experience they shared on social media? Write about it!
  • Any unexpected or serendipitous moments
  • Anything that you would like to tell people attending next year
• Keep it accessible. Not everyone is as tech savvy as you! Try and write for a general audience to include the most amount of people. Explaining abbreviations or jargon can go a long way to increase awareness and interest of what the technical community is up to. Keep your writing simple (not everyone is a native speaker!) and try for a total length of the post to about 600 words. Your post can be a little shorter or longer, there's no hard limit. If longer, consider breaking the post up into a series of posts so folks can digest it easier.
• Use a creative headline. "Notes from the Hackathon" is not nearly as useful and engaging as, "Five Lessons for Developers from the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023" or "What I'm going to do after the 2023 Wikimedia Hackathon", "How the Wikimedia Hackathon made me a better mentor", or something even better!
• Choose a nice "featured" image. This can be of you or a group working at the Hackathon, a photo of the venue, or some other picture related to your experience. If that's not easy to do, find something colorful or abstract on Commons related to your work – a rainbow, folks working together, a fun animal. These images will anchor your post on the blog homepage and when shared on social media.

Resources

• Diff editorial guidelines
• General blog guidelines and outlines for topics

Example posts

• WMHACK 17 - What can possibly happen in 3 days
• A Culture Of Knowledge Sharing – Impressions From The Wikimedia Hackathon 2017
• What we learned by making both newcomers and experienced participants feel connected and engaged at the Vienna Hackathon