Project:New contributors

'''THIS IS A DRAFT PROPOSAL. EARLY FEEDBACK IS WELCOME.'''

How to attract volunteers and connect them with interesting people and activities?

Contribution engagement tools

 * The problem is similar to engaging Wikimedia editors.
 * Also similar to many other open source projects.
 * Potential to use and improve several MediaWiki extensions.

The short term solution proposed is a single website with semantic contributor profiles connected with our several tools and a mechanism to find and contact contributors interested in targeted topics.

One wiki
Solving the old dilemma Wikimedia / MediaWiki:


 * wikitech.wikimedia.org: infrastructure, tools and support for all developers and other technical contributors.
 * mediawiki.org: MediaWiki software downloads, documentation, support and promotion.

About the new Wikitech:


 * MediaWiki login integrated with Gerrit, Bugzilla, Labs (and Mailman?).
 * Single place for developer documentation and other technical contributors.
 * Unified templates and processes for project pages, status reports and opportunities for contributors.
 * All Wikimedia Engineering content in mediawiki.org moved to Wikitech.
 * All tech content in Meta moved to Wikitech.
 * Invitation to English Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to move their tech development content to Wikitech.

Contributor profile

 * MediaWiki user profile, extended.
 * Based on Extension:SocialProfile?


 * Optional fields
 * Gravatar?
 * Location
 * Languages
 * Interests (mapped to contributions areas)
 * "Looking for a task"
 * "Willing to learn"
 * "Skilled & offering help"
 * OSS projects involved
 * Social media handlers.

Project maintainers interface
For project maintainers to interact with contributors. A new extension based on Echo notifications?


 * Identifying users as project members & roles.
 * Publish tasks for contributors tagging them by interests, location, language...
 * Send notifications to contributors interested in XYZ.
 * Seeing who signs up for an event.

Automatically generated info pages
Based on data from user profiles and projects.


 * Project pages
 * Members
 * Related interests e.g. programming languages.
 * Accepting transcluded descriptions, statuses...
 * Lists of users by project, location, language, interest...
 * All the better if multiple selection criteria is possible e.g. Barcelona AND JavaScript, Lua + Willing to learn.
 * Lists of participants in events.

Later
Contributor profile 


 * Fields automatically updated.
 * MediaWiki stats.
 * Gerrit stats.
 * Bugzilla stats.
 * Labs stats.
 * Mentoring to / Mentored by
 * Showing mentors & entees (in a wide sense)
 * Badges
 * Project membership.
 * Remarkable tasks completed.
 * Participation in events.
 * Contact me
 * Email from other members.
 * Localizable (is it already?)

Project maintainers interface


 * Confirming who participated in an event + special badges.

Automatically generated info pages


 * Lists of top contributors based on stats e.g. top code reviewers of the month.

The problem
We have problems in the whole contribution cycle:


 * Unclear identity and scope
 * Outsiders confused about Wikipedia / Wikimedia / MediaWiki.
 * Insiders differ about project identity and scope.
 * As a result: confusing landing and path for new contributors.
 * Lack of global profiles identifying contributors
 * One contributor = many usernames from MediaWiki/Wikimedia, Gerrit, Bugzilla, Mailman, IRC...
 * User profiles are plain text, relying on manual updates.
 * Lack of semantic data e.g. location, skills, interests, projects...
 * Lack of common memory about contributors
 * Personal lists maintained (or not) manually by various people.
 * Difficult to promote activities to the right people
 * Every time we start almost from scratch.
 * We lack ways to broadcast selectively by topic.
 * Social media and community communication channels are ok but too broad.
 * Manual pokes in user Talk pages don't scale, are unequally effective and are not trivial to follow-up.
 * Difficult to connect new volunteers with a first task
 * It's not trivial to arrive and find a task by yourself.
 * We don't know how many newcomers never dare to ask.
 * Those who ask find that it's not easy to get started.
 * It's not easy to give a task to someone landing with a vague request in an email.
 * Most probably the memory is lost after a few weeks.
 * Difficult to find peers and stay in touch
 * No way for contributors to find who is interested in XYZ and discuss with them.
 * Same problem: spam wikitech-l, hope to find people through Discussion pages...
 * Groups are supposed to help but group creation and membership is heavy.
 * Difficult to find inactive contributors and follow-up
 * We lack the metrics to find out who was active but not anymore.
 * English only
 * Potential communication and activities in other languages are even more disconnected.