Developer Advocacy

The Developer Relations team supports developers using Wikimedia web APIs and software projects to spread and improve free knowledge. Our primary focus is to help developers build and scale successful projects using Wikimedia web APIs. We encourage them to contribute to our free and open source projects as a way to achieve their own goals.

You can find us on IRC at.

We are part of Technical Engagement at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Documentation
Coordination of entry-level and mid-level documentation with a focus on documentation for volunteer contributors that encourages developers to use Wikimedia data and APIs. Coordination of volunteer documentation efforts.

Events
Organization of online and face-to-face events, including the Wikimedia Developer Summit, the Wikimedia Hackathon, Wikimania's Hackathon, and smaller events for hacking, training, and promote new technologies.

Community
Outreach programs for new free and open source contributors. Bug management and facilitation of an OSS development backlog together with Community Tech and other teams and volunteers willing to contribute developer sources. Supervision of community health and metrics.

One key metric
Number of active users of Wikimedia web APIs hosted in Wikimedia Labs and third party servers.

(We don't have this metric today, see T102079 Metrics about the external use of the Wikimedia APIs)

Planning
You can follow our work and get involved. Contributors of all disciplines and skill levels are welcome!

The Developer Relations planning process is based in Phabricator. The team breaks down their planning into several levels: A roadmap (per quarter plus a backlog, in a Phabricator team project), selected quarterly goals, and monthly sprints (in Phabricator sprint projects).

Every significant task that doesn't belong to a regular workflow needs to have its own Phabricator task associated to the team project.

Roadmap
The Developer Relations roadmap can be found at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/developer-relations/

The roadmap presents columns for every quarter. For status information and the exact month, click the column header to get to the workboard for each quarter. We keep a view of two or three future quarters.

The roadmap reflects
 * goals and other actions required to implement the strategy and the WMF annual plan
 * events and other predictable activities
 * other tasks in our backlog

New tasks are placed automatically in the backlog. Then we move them to the column of the quarter that seems more appropriate, usually once a month during a team meeting.

There is no common definition of a roadmap across the Wikimedia Foundation teams. The closest reference is Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2015-16.

Quarterly goals
We followed the process for defining quarterly goals used at Wikimedia Engineering/2016-17 Goals / Wikimedia Engineering/2015-16 Goals. It started around the middle of the previous quarter, about seven weeks before the planned quarter starts.

"The rest of this section has been moved to m:Technical_Collaboration/Planning#Quarterly_goals."
 * See Technical Collaboration/Goals for goals after April 2016, and the corresponding quarterly columns on our Phabricator workboard
 * January - March 2016
 * October - December 2015
 * July - September 2015
 * April - June 2015
 * July 2014 - March 2015
 * July 2013 - June 2014
 * July 2012 - June 2013

Monthly sprints
Tasks targeted for the current quarter on the team workboard get added to monthly sprints (expressed via monthly columns on the workboard of quarterly projects) by task assignees / team members.

Before April 2016, the team used monthly Sprint projects in Phabricator. For older monthly sprint projects before the team name was changed in Sep2015, see Oct2014, Nov2014, Dec2014, Jan2015, Feb2015, Mar2015, Apr2015, May2015, Jun2015, Jul2015, Aug2015.

Quarterly check-ins
The Wikimedia Foundation performs WMF Metrics and activities meetings/Quarterly Reviews, later renamed to Quarterly Check Ins:


 * Jan - Mar 2017: c:File:CE_APRIL_2017_Quarterly_Check_In_(Q4)_Slide_Deck_1.pdf&page=19
 * Oct - Dec 2016: Part 1, Part 2
 * Jul - Sep 2016
 * Apr - Jun 2016, page 17ff.
 * Jan - Mar 2016, page 6ff.
 * Oct - Dec 2015, page 18ff.
 * Jul - Sep 2015, page 8ff.
 * Apr - Jun 2015, page 27ff.
 * Jan - Mar 2015, page 22ff.

Workflows
These are regular tasks that usually don't make it to our goals or backlogs explicitly, but take a significant portion of our time and attention.

Everywhere (within reason)

 * Help newcomers with technical questions, reporting their first bugs, or looking for first tasks to contribute.
 * Help keeping discussions friendly, intervening in specific situations if needed.

Phabricator

 * Scan new tasks, bringing them into good shape and looking for potential issues that need escalation.
 * Triage old tasks in order to push forward bugs or feature requests that require higher attention, or resolving obsolete reports.
 * Oversee the creation and renaming of new projects.
 * Assist Operations in the Volunteer NDA process.
 * Assist Release Engineering handling Phabricator bugs and feature requests, and upstreaming Wikimedia requests.

For a more detailed description of workflows, see Bugwrangler.

Events

 * Plan and run a continuous stream of online Tech Talks and Wikimedia Tech meetups in San Francisco.
 * Find ways to make events accessible to all participants.

Gerrit

 * Check old open code reviews in Gerrit in order to push for updates, bring new reviewers, or close the review.

Team history
Before July 2018, this team was called Developer Relations.

Before September 2015, this team was called Engineering Community. Check the reasons for the change and follow our previous activity in the links on the Engineering Community Team template on MediaWiki wiki.