Developer Relations

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 read our Developer Relations Weekly Summary. You can find us on IRC at.

We are part of the Community Engagement department at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Documentation
Coordination of entry-level and mid-level documentation with a focus on the Web APIs hub 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 Cloud VPS 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!

Please see Developer Relations/Planning for what we are working on.

Quarterly reviews
The Wikimedia Foundation performs WMF Metrics and activities meetings/quarterly reviews:
 * 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.
 * Help organizing logistics Wikimedia Foundation Engineering team off-sites, including in person support when required.

Gerrit

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

Engineering Community team
Before September 2015, this team was called Engineering Community. Check the reasons for the change and follow our previous activity in the links below.