Wikimedia Hackathon 2019/Lessons Learned

There are lessons learned from the Wikimedia Hackathon 2019 which took place in Prague, Czech Republic. This page is a combination of feedback from a survey sent to participants and ideas from the organizers.

This page will focus heavily on improvements for next time and things that went poorly. However remember that 98,8% of the participants that responded to the feedback survey stated that their overall experience with the hackathon was either "Positive" or "Very Positive", 1,2% replied it was neither positive nor negative.

Suggested changes for the next Wikimedia Hackathon:

- space: one hacking area, but try to reduce noises, clear information system if some sessions are taking places in different locations, some for introverts

- usage of different communication forms to spread the information (not only Telegram, but also IRC and physical boards)

- social activities announced more in advance

- newcomers: more opportunities to mingle, navigate them to sessions

The best!:

- the venue: easy to reach, comfortable that everything was in one space

- the people

- the food

- the social activities

The worst!:

- noise and a lot of people in the building

- no warm meal in the evening

Feedback survey background

 * rfarrand created the feedback survey using google forms based on feedback survey questions from past events
 * The Feedback Survey was sent out to participants on May 28th, 2019
 * The Feedback Survey closed on June 14th, 2019
 * The survey received 81 responses (35% response rate)

Considerations for next year
This section is based on the fill-in-the-blank/comment sections of the feedback form. Some of these comments will be contradictory. We are mostly trying to include common themes and issues that were felt by groups of people. This section is a bit more subjective than the #Data section below and suggestions may be paraphrased and combined with each other.

Newcomer Support
What is something that worked well with the support provided to Newcomers at the Hackathon?


 * Friendly Space Policy
 * Project matching, poster session
 * One big hacking room so easy to find people to connect with
 * The mentor pairing session felt positive and welcoming, many mentors with different skills to support different needs
 * Newcomer support desk
 * People were very open and welcoming towards everyone
 * The newcomer / tech support tables
 * Focus areas
 * The open mic projects be explicitly all newcomer friendly
 * Sessions for Newcomers that Growth team organized and Mentor matching program (with posters)
 * I feel that we had enough folks that had been in the movement for a number of years that were able to easily help out the newcomers with sage knowledge and experiences.
 * The poster session made it easy to discuss projects and find people interested working with each other, lowers the threshold of starting a conversation about a project,
 * Finding right people to ask the question ("I don't know about Kuberenetes but if someone and asks, I will forward them to James")
 * Introductory session about phabricator was very useful, as was the willingness of WMDE and WMF staff to help with problems
 * a conference room with a white board to explain regex to two newbies

What is something else that we should be doing to support newcomers at future hackathons?


 * support channels
 * Stop using communication technologies own to the older generation (IRC) and even stronger push modern ones (such as Telegram). Stop using internal but awkward technology to organize the program – Phabricator is rather proprietary, not known to people out of WMF tech community and not designed for organizing an event.
 * The definition of newcomer was not quite clear. Was newcomer meant as in "new to the movement, but with development experience" or "new to development, but active in the movement" or "new to everything"...?
 * Workshops led by experienced users
 * A visual sign for "I can be interrupted" (or by the negative: anyone without a "do not disturb" sign, like a headset on, can be interrupted), and underlining even more in the welcome speech that "hackathons are for helping each others, so just come talk to us!"
 * help connect newcomers to projects in advance of hackathon
 * Still hard for an introvert to meet people. "Icebreaker" activities, something to help people (newbies and returning attendees!) meet new people would be nice.
 * Allow or even request to already propose newcommer-friendly projects in advance. Ideally in a standardized form. Maybe a poster-template?
 * Smaller groups for some introduction sessions
 * More easy workshops
 * I believe it is OK the way it was. Primary condition that all participants should know how to use Phabricator before participating, so that each of us can at least create and match 10 open Taks. The developers are used to work with one or another ticketing system. Participants should be able how to work with such a tool to see what tasks are open and pending, or requiring an owner.
 * Better public announcements about upcoming meetings and sessions
 * There should me more visibility and clarity about how to reach out to mentors(how to find them).
 * A person to help newcomers find a project or task to work on, that are approachable the entire hackathon (like a "networking officer" kind of role)
 * Continue to help the new folks experiment with new ideas
 * The newcomer2newcomer exchange and activity might make mentoring, finding projects and approaching / meeting people easier.
 * Manage expectations about spoken English being mandatory, and/or checking and discouraging as needed attendees that have no match with 2+ others that can translate. Also, it may be worth investing in some basic / cheap speech to text display device from which transcriptions can be read. Google events do this. Can also include translations. For those that only understand written Englishz
 * Make WMF send at least one person from each engineering team. I could not refer volunteer developers to WMF Analytics in the Analytics area. I could not refer volunteer developers to WMF SRE for questions in the SRE area
 * More pre-hackathon meetings

Questions for Newcomers
How did you hear about and become interested in attending the Hackathon?


 * Facebook
 * Twitter
 * WMCZ member
 * The banner in the top of the page.
 * From friend(s)
 * Was promoted within chapter
 * other participants, users, Wikimedianswhen announced to be in Prague
 * mediawiki.org web site
 * Email
 * Hearing from the wikidata community

How did you experience the social atmosphere?


 * Very good / or other very positive words (23+)
 * Too much stress put on codes of conduct, friendly space policy etc.
 * Some people are divided into and stick to regional groups: Western/Eastern Europeans
 * People act to each other friendly and with respect
 * Problem with how to approach people
 * Quite okay
 * Open and helpful
 * Friendly and enjoyable
 * The hackathon being more about the people than anything
 * Having most of the social events in the same physical space as the hackathon made it really easy to participate
 * Chance to discuss with developers several issues, also learn some tools to use in my home wiki
 * The social atmosphere was good, a lot of nice people!
 * Quite good. Judgements from participants for using specific software

After attending the hackathon, would you feel prepared enough to keep working on MediaWiki projects?

Yes (33+)

I think so / I'll try / I'm planning to (7+)

Not yet / Need more practice (5+)

Most of my time I served to others as a volunteer organizer.

It's my job (4+)

No