(This is an evolution of an old proposal at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:R65l2pg88tpky977 )

There is a diagram at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_technical_volunteer_outreach.jpg

We don't need to run any survey to be sure that:

• Plenty of potential technical contributors are regular readers of Wikipedia.
• The big majority of them are not aware that we have plenty of open source projects and activities welcoming developers as well as other technical contributors.
• The big majority of them don't follow mediawiki.org, the Wikimedia Blog, Village Pumps, our mailing lists or our social media.
• Therefore, we are basically not talking to them, even if they visit "us" regularly.

We could explore a collaboration with the projects where these potential contributors are more likely be found. English and German Wikipedias come to mind. We are both interested in turning some of those readers in technical contributors improving (among other things) the software running English Wikipedia.

Notes:

We are talking primarily about tapping new readers, not editors. Editors are important too, but they are already contributing and busy. Proposals here must be visible to anonymous readers and not rely alone on watchlists, Village Pumps, etc.

We need to target well our actions in order to get high signal vs noise ratios, and volumes we can digest. We could potentially reach huge audiences at en.wiki, but also get drowned with noise and a volume of requests we can't handle. Some ideas:

• Agreeing on using the {{mediawiki}} template in Wikipedia pages about topics where we have also information related to them. Someone created it and I actually added it to a few pages as an experiment. Some kept it, but others (more popular and maintained, like "Git") reverted it: en:Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:MediaWiki
• Adding more connections like "For the use of Jenkins in Wikimedia projects, see..."
• Running targeted banners announcing our tech events (WMFr did some of this for the Wikimedia Hackathon in Lyon, I believe).
• Have banners in specific pages for specific dates i.e. imagine a banner in en:Web testing to recruit volunteers for our next Browser testing QA week.