Volunteer coordination and outreach/status

Last update on: 2013-08-monthly

2011-06-01
About 13 new developers were granted commit access in May, among which 6 Summer of Code students, and 2 Wikimedia Foundation employees. Volunteer development coordinator Sumana Harihareswara joined the review team, and will become the primary point of contact for commit access requests.

2011-07-01

 * Open Source Bridge conference (June 21-25, Portland, Oregon, USA) — Sumana Harihareswara presented new features in MediaWiki 1.17 and gathered offers of volunteer help (especially around database support, testing, bug triage, and right-to-left support). She also gave a talk about technology management, and recruited candidates for the Wikimedia Foundation's current job openings (read more).

Volunteer development coordinator Sumana Harihareswara is now the primary point of contact for commit access requests. About 7 new developers were granted commit access in June, among which were 2 Summer of Code students, and 2 Wikimedia Foundation employees.

2011-07-25
About 11 developers were granted commit access in July, among which were 2 Wikimedia employees, and 4 Wikia employees. Sumana Harihareswara attended the Community leadership summit and OSCON in Portland, notably to reach out to potential new developers and testers for MediaWiki. 

2011-08-31
Sumana Harihareswara has been following up on contacts made at OSCON and Wikimania conferences. She has publicized the NOLA Hackathon and encouraged extension, gadget, script, tool, and template developers to attend. Additionally, she has been publicizing the work of the parser and visual editor team, encouraging code reviewers, and finding administrators and developers of other intensive MediaWiki installations to bring them into the larger MediaWiki ecology. In August, 9 developers were granted commit access: six volunteers and three Wikimedia Foundation employees.

2011-09-16
Continuing to follow up on items from my TODO list. Have gotten some response from the OCaml community to get our math code reviewed, and am getting interest from the Lucene community on improving our search extension.

2011-09-30
Sumana Harihareswara reached out to the OCaml and Lucene communities to collaborate on math code and search respectively, and coordinated the testing of 1.18 by volunteers. She also worked on organizing upcoming coding events in New Orleans, India, Brighton and online.

Added 30 Nov: in September 2011, 6 developers received commit access, all of whom were volunteers. 

2011-10-31
Sumana Harihareswara continued to go through the backlog of commit access requests, and participated in a discussion on making it easier to get Subversion commit access. In October, eleven people got commit access, of which six were volunteers and five were WMF staff or contractors. She began to organize a triage of database-related bugs to benefit MediaWiki developers and administrators who use RDBMSes other than MySQL, and encouraged volunteers who are interested in leading hackathons, teaching classes, or attended conferences to talk about MediaWiki. She also followed up with volunteers and potential new developers, notably from the New Orleans hackathon and Google Summer of Code mentors' summit.

2011-11-30
Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts from the New Orleans hackathon and the GSoC mentor summit; she also provided support in the #mediawiki IRC channel. She did a lot of outreach for the India Hackathon 2011 and attended it to facilitate volunteer training and development, and worked on planning for the January 2012 San Francisco Hackathon. She administered the commit access review process and communicated about improved process on wikitech-l. 12 developers received commit access in November, of whom 2 were Foundation staffers. Sumana and Guillaume Paumier started to consolidate training documentation to facilitate the onboarding of new developers.

2011-12-23
<section begin=2011-12-23/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to help plan the Pune and San Francisco hackathons and mentor new contributors. Eleven developers got commit access, all from the non-staff MediaWiki community.<section end=2011-12-23/>

2011-12-31
<section begin=2011-12-31/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts and recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community (especially for commit and patch review), and mentor new contributors. Eleven developers got commit access, all from the non-staff MediaWiki community. Sumana also prepared for the January San Francisco hackathon and the February Pune hackathon, and recruited participants. Partly in preparation for these coding events, Sumana and Guillaume Paumier continued to consolidate training documentation to facilitate the onboarding of new developers.<section end=2011-12-31/>

2012-01-31
<section begin=2012-01-31/>In preparation for the San Francisco hackathon, Guillaume Paumier rewrote How to become a MediaWiki hacker along the lines suggested by Yuvaraj Pandian, and cleaned up the documentation about gadgets. Sumana Harihareswara focused on improving the API documentation, and wrote and edited tutorial references for building the Wikipedia Android application, MediaWiki's web API, and Gadgets. Nine developers got commit access, including seven volunteers. Sumana continued to follow up on contacts and recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community (especially for commit and patch review), and mentor new contributors. Sumana also prepared for the February Pune hackathon and the May hackathon organized by Wikimedia Germany, introduced a friendly space policy for WMF technical events, and recruited participants for upcoming events.<section end=2012-01-31/>

2012-02-29
<section begin=2012-02-29/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts and recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community (especially for commit and patch review), and mentor new contributors. Sumana also prepared for the June Berlin hackathon and the Wikimania hackathon in July and recruited participants for upcoming events. 13 contributors got commit access.<section end=2012-02-29/>

2012-03-31
<section begin=2012-03-31/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts and recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentored new contributors. Sumana also prepared for the June Berlin hackathon and recruited participants for upcoming events. The Berlin hackathon registration page went up and developers from the Wikimedia technical community can now register and request financial subsidy. One volunteer contributor got Subversion commit access, and more than eighty contributors got Git/Gerrit/Labsconsole accounts (developer access).<section end=2012-03-31/>

2012-04-monthly
<section begin=2012-04-monthly/>Sumana Harihareswara and other members of the Engineering Community Team continued to follow up on contacts, recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentor new contributors. They granted developer access and planned upcoming events.<section end=2012-04-monthly/>

2012-05-monthly
<section begin="2012-05-monthly"/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts, recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentor new contributors. She granted developer access and Gerrit project ownership requests, and planned upcoming events.<section end="2012-05-monthly"/>

2012-06-monthly
<section begin="2012-06-monthly"/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts, recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentor new contributors. She granted developer access and Gerrit project ownership requests, and planned upcoming events. The Foundation is also hiring a coordinator for volunteer testers and an engineering outreach coordinator to work on volunteer coordination and outreach.<section end="2012-06-monthly"/>

2012-08-monthly
<section begin="2012-08-monthly"/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts, recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentor newer contributors. She granted Developer access and Gerrit project ownership requests, and worked on planning for the upcoming Bangalore outreach event. Hiring for a volunteer engineering coordinator to work on volunteer coordination and outreach is almost finished. Community discussion topics included Git and Gerrit's difficulty, bug triages, new mailing lists, transparency and collaboration in feature design, MediaWiki releases and a potential community organization, GSoC's effectiveness, code review, and appreciation for each other.<section end="2012-08-monthly"/>

2012-09-monthly
<section begin="2012-09-monthly"/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts, recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentor newer contributors. She granted Developer access and Gerrit project ownership requests, and worked on planning for the upcoming Bangalore outreach event. Hiring for a volunteer engineering coordinator to work on volunteer coordination and outreach is almost finished.<section end="2012-09-monthly"/>

2012-10-monthly
<section begin="2012-10-monthly"/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts (such as those gained at October's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing), recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentor newer contributors. She granted developer access and Gerrit project ownership requests, and worked on getting more volunteer developers +2 status in MediaWiki core: 8 volunteers now have MediaWiki core maintainership. Sumana also published a retrospective of the 2012 Berlin Hackathon and updated the list of towards a better understanding of which parts of the codebase are maintained, and by whom. Hiring for a Volunteer Engineering Coordinator to work on volunteer coordination and outreach is almost finished.<section end="2012-10-monthly"/>

2012-11-monthly
<section begin="2012-11-monthly"/>Sumana Harihareswara started sharing new volunteer coordination tasks with Quim Gil, the new technical contributor coordinator who started working with the Wikimedia foundation in November. They continued to follow up on contacts (such as those gained at October's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing), recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentor newer contributors. The weekly online tech chats continued on Thursdays. Sumana and others continued to grant developer access and work on Gerrit project ownership requests.<section end="2012-11-monthly"/>

2012-12-11
<section begin="2012-12-11"/>The MediaWiki Groups proposal becomes official after going through reviews announced at wikitech-l and mediawiki-l. The proposal has also been discussed with the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee, who provided valuable feedback to integrate these groups with the Wikimedia User Groups initiative.<section end="2012-12-11"/>

2012-12-18
<section begin="2012-12-18"/>First MediaWiki groups proposed: Marketing, Browser testing, Features testing, Bug Squad, San Francisco and Ahmedabad. Two proposals submitted to FOSDEM: How to hack on Wikipedia (lightning) and MediaWiki project: Wikipedia's engine room.<section end="2012-12-18"/>

2012-12-27
<section begin="2012-12-27"/>First MediaWiki groups proposals submitted to the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee: Promotion, San Francisco and Ahmedabad. Process for requesting mediawiki-REGION mailing lists created, based on the request from the Indian community. At least one proposal accepted at FOSDEM: How to hack on Wikipedia (lightning). We have started working on a template for MediaWiki presentations.<section end="2012-12-27"/>

2012-12-monthly
<section begin="2012-12-monthly"/>MediaWiki Groups became official and the first proposals are going through the approval process. As a side effect, a process for requesting regional mediawiki-themed mailing lists has been created with mediawiki-india as the first case. At least three Wikimedia-related talks have been accepted at FOSDEM.<section end="2012-12-monthly"/>

2013-01-08
<section begin="2013-01-08"/>Community metrics December report published with new Social media section. We agreed with Fabrice_Florin from the Editor Engagement team to organize a sprint for Echo/Testing on Jan 30. Details ready by next week. About MediaWiki Groups, Promotion and San Francisco are on its way for being approved by the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee, while the Ahmedabad proposal is affected by a strong opposition from Wikimedia India chapter towards any external user groups. The discussion continues between AffCom and Wikimedia India, with Quim involved as well.<section end="2013-01-08"/>

2013-01-17
<section begin="2013-01-17"/>MediaWiki Groups for Promotion and San Francisco officially approved by the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee. They are also the first Wikimedia User Groups created! Our plans with Editor Engagement and Mobile keep being delayed and Quim proposed a different approach combining regular, time-based QA and bug management activities. Heavy work done with Chris on the top QA pages although some problems remain. Template:MediaWiki_News is now manually synced with social media, bringing fresh updates to the mediawiki.org homepage and News. Quim took the lead organizing the Wikipedia Engineering Meetup in San Francisco on Jan 17.<section end="2013-01-17"/>

2013-01-28
<section begin="2013-01-28"/> QA Weekly Goals proposed and approved as mechanism to organize weekly activities related to testing and bug management. VisualEditor/Testing Non-Latin Characters Input and Behavior and Review 250 open bugs unchanged for more than one year are the first weekly activities, and more have been scheduled already. Quim is working on [[media:How to hack on Wikipedia.pdf|How to hack on Wikipedia]] slides for FOSDEM. In fact they are an intro to MediaWiki / Wikimedia tech contributions and are being designed to be reused by others in more events. We confirmed that Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grants are also open for technical projects.<section end="2013-01-28"/>

2013-01-monthly
<section begin="2013-01-monthly"/>The MediaWiki groups for Promotion and San Francisco were officially approved by the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee, and are the first Wikimedia User Groups created. We helped the Editor Engagement team organize a sprint to test Echo, but our plans to collaborate further with the Editor Engagement and Mobile teams were delayed; Quim Gil proposed a different approach combining regular, time-based QA and bug management activities, in the form of QA weekly goals. Two such events (non-Latin character testing in VisualEditor and a review of old bugs) happened in January, and more are scheduled. Heavy work was done with Chris McMahon to improve the top QA pages, although some problems remain. Template:MediaWiki News is now manually synced with social media, bringing fresh updates to the mediawiki.org homepage and News page. Quim also took the lead on organizing the Wikipedia Engineering Meetup on January 17th. He prepared an intro to MediaWiki & Wikimedia tech contributions, which he tested at FOSDEM, designed to be reused by other presenters. Last, we confirmed that technical projects are eligible to Individual Engagement Grants.<section end="2013-01-monthly"/>

2013-02-monthly
<section begin="2013-02-monthly"/>* We have consolidated the QA Weekly goals as a way to orchestrate testing and bug management activities with the wider community. We run two Features testing activities (Article Feedback's new features and Wikipedia + Commons uploads) and two Bug Days (Article feedback and Git/Gerrit). So far it has been useful to coordinate better testing activities across Wikimedia Foundation teams, but we still need better results engaging volunteers.
 * The (newly elected) Affiliations Committee is working on finding an agreement with MediaWiki Group Ahmedabad and Wikimedia India regarding whether it should be a chapter Special Interest Groups, a user group, or some other structure.
 * Quim Gil went to FOSDEM; as a result, we have now a generic "How to contribute" presentation and video.
 * We are helping the organization of the Amsterdam Hackathon 2013 and also helped the Wikimedia Foundation decide what employees would get travel sponsorship to Amsterdam.<section end="2013-02-monthly"/>

2013-03-12
<section begin="2013-03-12"/>* QA weekly goals: supporting and promoting General MediaWiki reports Bug Triage and Browser automation testing for Wikipedia Search. Fine tuning common structure for landing pages and promotion workflow.
 * Essential Gerrit documentation sorted out. Many newcomers were complaining.
 * Organization of Lua meets Wikipedia meetup in San Francisco on March 14, with the collaboration of the Bay Area Lua Developers meetup.<section end="2013-03-12"/>

2013-03-19
<section begin="2013-03-19"/>* QA weekly goals: supporting and promoting Browser automation testing for Wikipedia Search (see Evaluation). (Re)defining factors for measuring_success in QA activities.
 * San Francisco meetups: Lua meets Wikipedia meetup with good content and interesting audience with questions in the room and remotely. Video streamed (youtube.com/watch?v=PrhzAtC8fCc - move to Commons PENDING). Preparing the next meetup: GSoC and other open source internship programs.
 * Logistics and promotion of Security for developers training session with Chris Steipp.
 * Proposal: Getting contributors involved. Drafting vision and scope of first phase while seeking a round of early feedback.
 * Drafting Main criteria to become an official Wikimedia mobile app and discussing with Mobile Programs & Engineering teams after several requests from individual contributors and Nokia.<section end="2013-03-19"/>

2013-03-26
<section begin="2013-03-26"/>Quim Gil worked on:
 * Starting to look at implementation details of the Contributors' community proposal, defining a first iteration and moving the rest to a roadmap. Details about the one site proposal were removed to concentrate that discussion at Dev wiki consolidation.
 * Helping the Security for developers training meeting and creating the wiki page.<section end="2013-03-26"/>

2013-03-monthly
<section begin="2013-03-monthly"/>Quim Gil focused on:
 * Drafting Wikitech contributors, a proposal to attract technical volunteers and connect them with interesting people and activities in a single site: wikitech.wikimedia.org. Helping define the proposal for distribution of content between Wikitech and mediawiki.org.
 * (Re)defining factors for measuring success in QA activities.
 * QA weekly goals: supporting and promoting our first browser automation activity: Browser automation testing for Wikipedia Search. Also the general MediaWiki reports Bug Triage and the LiquidThreads Bug Triage.
 * San Francisco meetups: organized Lua meets Wikipedia meetup.
 * Helping the Security for developers training meeting and creating a wiki page to be recycled for future editions.
 * Drafting criteria to become an official Wikimedia mobile app in sync with Mobile Programs & Engineering teams.<section end="2013-03-monthly"/>

2013-04-09
<section begin="2013-04-09"/>Quim Gil focused on:
 * Refactoring completely the radical proposal Wikitech contributors into the evolutive Project: New contributors, after the feedback received.
 * QA weekly: Supporting Skin and page rendering bug triage and Weekend Testing Americas focuses in the new Account creation user experience. We are improving.
 * Confirmed our participation as guests in the next Bay Area Linux User Group evening.<section end="2013-04-09"/>

2013-04-16
<section begin="2013-04-16"/>Quim Gil focused on:
 * QA Weekly: Supporting Bug Day for old, unanswered bugs.
 * wikitech-announce list recycled for tech contributors' calls for action.
 * Starting a survey about best times for volunteering.
 * Creating Category:New contributors and adding essential pages.
 * Assuming Tech Talks organization responsibilities.
 * Drafting English Wikipedia first approach for new contributors outreach.
 * Studying the possibilities of the Teahouse & Greeters, GettingStarted and GuidedTours in mediawiki.org.<section end="2013-04-16"/>

2013-04-23
<section begin="2013-04-23"/>Quim Gil focused on:
 * Organizing 3 tech projects receiving Wikimedia grants Tech Talk.
 * Speaking at Bay Area Linux User Group with the help of Daniel Zahn, Rob Lanphier and Brian Wolff.
 * Meeting Bitergia to discuss possibilities of collaboration in Community metrics automation.
 * Pitching Wikimedia tech at Linux Collaboration Summit corridors. Found Carol Sander, browser testing specialist willing to help organizing activities in the Bay Area.
 * First call with Umeå university about Wikimedia tech contributions. We agreed to start with casual involvement in UX feedback and improvements while considering other activities.
 * Completing the survey about best times for volunteering (33 answers).
 * Started drafting Greeters and invited 4 contributors to bootstrap the initiative (all accepted!).<section end="2013-04-23"/>

2013-04-monthly
<section begin="2013-04-monthly"/>Quim Gil refactored the radical Wikitech contributors proposal into the more gradual Project:New contributors based on the feedback received. He supported QA and bug management events, organized a tech talk for 3 tech projects receiving Wikimedia grants, and completed the survey about best times for volunteering (which got 33 answers). He spoke at the Bay Area Linux User Group with Daniel Zahn, Rob Lanphier and Brian Wolff, and requested a proposal from Bitergia to automate the generation of Community metrics.<section end="2013-04-monthly"/>

2013-05-21
<section begin="2013-05-21"/>Quim Gil worked on a template for landing page for wikitech-announce that can be used in other Wikimedia mailing lists. Check the discussion and the source code. He also created a landing page for organizations willing to collaborate with Wikimedia co-organizing technical activities.<section end="2013-05-21"/>

2013-05-monthly
<section begin="2013-05-monthly"/>Quim Gil has been preparing a proposal to get automated community metrics based on vizGrimoire and provided by their maintainers, Bitergia. It is currently being discussed with Sumana Harihareswara and Rob Lanphier for budget approval. Quim also worked on a user-friendly template for the landing page of the wikitech-announce mailing list that can be used for other Wikimedia lists (source code). He also created a landing page for organizations willing to collaborate with Wikimedia to co-organize technical activities.<section end="2013-05-monthly"/>

2013-06-monthly
<section begin="2013-06-monthly"/>The decision of focusing on fewer activities better executed and based on demand seems to be working out, although it's too soon to confirm the trend. Browser test automation is the number one priority to recruit new contributors, and any help to succeed here is welcome. We created the QA mailing list as an umbrella to host people and discussions focusing on software quality assurance in all its aspects. We have more than 40 subscribers and an initial flow of activity. We had a successful first Browser Test Automation Workshop, with 40 participants in San Francisco and a few more online; we will iterate on this model. We have also helped organizing a Tech Talk on Attack vectors & MediaWiki and OWASP ZAP, and the upcoming Solr-based Search.

The project to get automated community metrics based on vizGrimoire and provided by Bitergia has been approved, and a first prototype can be seen at http://korma.wmflabs.org. The project starts effectively on July 1 and includes a one-year period of maintenance. We agreed with the Analytics team that they will assume the responsibility of this area during this period.<section end="2013-06-monthly"/>

2013-07-09
<section begin="2013-07-09"/>Quim Gil focused on the consolidation of http://korma.wmflabs.org, the new dashboard for automated community metrics. We have done good progress already in the first week of the project, but there is more to do with sources, data offered and user identities before we dare to call it "beta". Several bugs and enhancement requests have been filed on GitHub: see mediawiki-dashboard and VizGrimoireJS. The next priority is to identify and aggregate the data of the top 30 contributors to git, bugzilla and mailing lists. We also must decide the key metrics we need in order to make decisions, e.g. average time to resolve on Gerrit changesets or bug reports.<section end="2013-07-09"/>

2013-07-16
<section begin="2013-07-16"/>On Community metrics, Quim Gil asked contributors to identify their data and we have got 71 responses so far. http://korma.wmflabs.org has reached a first stable stage: the basic metrics from Git, Bugzilla and mailing lists are being retrieved on a daily basis. From this point we will be implementing progressive enhancements. We have been planning and promoting the next Browser Testing Automation workshop with Cucumber (July 18) together with the QA team.<section end="2013-07-16"/>

2013-07-23
<section begin="2013-07-23"/>The workshop Browser test automation with Cucumber and Selenium was successful, with 13 participants. It was the second of its kind, this time 100% online. You can watch the session at here (1h40). The experience was useful to agree on MediaWiki-Vagrant as default environment for automated testing and to highlight the list of easy bugs for new QA volunteers.

Quim Gil will introduce Wikimedia an our opportunities for technical contributors at the Volunteer Information Evening organized by the IEEE Santa Clara Valley on August 26.<section end="2013-07-23"/>

2013-07-monthly
<section begin="2013-07-monthly"/>On Community metrics, Quim Gil focused on the consolidation of korma.wmflabs.org, the new dashboard for automated community metrics. We have made good progress on this alpha, including basic metrics from Git, Bugzilla and mailing lists being retrieved on a daily basis, and have filed bugs and enhancement requests on GitHub (mediawiki-dashboard, VizGrimoireJS). We are deciding on the key metrics we need in order to make decisions, e.g. average time to resolve on Gerrit changesets or bug reports. We also planned and promoted a Browser Testing Automation workshop with Cucumber together with the QA team, with 13 people participating online. You can watch the session here (1h40). The experience was useful, as we agreed on MediaWiki-Vagrant as the default environment for automated testing and highlighted the list of easy bugs. Also, the Engineering Community team held its quarterly review.<section end="2013-07-monthly"/>

2013-08-monthly
<section begin="2013-08-monthly"/>We had a team presentation at Wikimania: Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineering, explaining how volunteers can make a difference. Following the work on Community metrics, the five key performance indicators (KPIs) were discussed and agreed upon. We are focusing on the first one: who contributes code. A list of Key Wikimedia software projects has been created to define the scope of these KPIs. Recruiting automated browser testers keeps being our top priority. We are organizing the next workshop in San Francisco and online on September 18: Epic fail: figuring out Selenium test results.<section end="2013-08-monthly"/>