Technical Community Newsletter/2019/October



Short intro
This is the introductory issue of the Wikimedia Technical Community Newsletter -- compiled by the WMF Dev Advocacy team.

The Wikimedia Technical Community Newsletter provides highlights and news from the past quarter and information about events coming up in the next quarter. We're a big community, and we (the folks putting together this newsletter) are bound to miss some things! We would love to hear from you about the cool work you or other volunteers are doing. Please send news for inclusion in the next newsletter to us @foo.

Features

 * Coolest Tool Award! TBD
 * Cool projects from the Hackathon TBD
 * Wikipedia's Javascript installation on a budget, https://twitter.com/TimoTijhof/status/1174468597965623296, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/live/7/post/175/wikipedia_s_javascript_initialisation_on_a_budget/, https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2019-September/092541.html
 * Cloud-vps Puppetmasters Moved to VMs, thanks to Krenair,https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/176/cloud-vps_puppetmasters_moved_to_vms_thanks_to_krenair/

What's new?
The Wikimedia Technical Community has been up to a lot of great things this quarter!


 * A Small Wiki toolkits working session was held at Wikimania 2019 in August in Stockholm. Participants worked together to discuss ways to support and strengthen their smaller wiki communities. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Building_Technical_Capacity_in_Smaller_Wikis.pdf) (Link to blog post)
 * Google Summer of Code 2019 wrapped up for the year. Wikimedia mentors partnered with mentees from around the globe to support 15 technical projects.
 * Outreachy Round 18 concluded. Outreachy is an internship program that seeks to support underrepresented groups in technology. This round, three interns participated on | projects that helped to improve the overall quality of a variety of Wikimedia technical projects.
 * The first round of Google Season of the Docs entered its Doc Development phase. The program pairs technical writing interns with open source technology projects. This year's GSoD intern is focused on improving resources for technical documentarians and videographers working on Wikimedia projects.
 * Wikimedia hosted three, hour long technical talks. The talks covered a wide range of topics and provided valuable information for the technical community:
 * July: Documenting Wikimedia Projects
 * August: A Deployment Pipeline Overview
 * September: How to compare text across multiple languages

By the numbers

 * Independent commits in Gerrit for quarter: 1,587 (# is July 1 through Mid Sept) -- Rerun closer to newsletter launch
 * New tools:???
 * New Phabricator signups
 * We continued to work on substantive improvements to Toolforge and Cloud VPS technical documentation.
 * The Technical Document (Re)Working Group SIG reconvened after a summer hiatus to review progress of technical documentation improvements across projects and suggest improvements. If you are interested in technical documentation and wish to join the group, contact us through our [wikimedia-techdocs] IRC.

Wikimedia

 * October 4-6, 2019: WikiCon Wuppertal
 * November 8-11, 2019: Wikiconference North America
 * October 4-6, 2019 WikiArabia
 * November 12-15, 2019 Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019
 * November 23, 2019 Česká Wikikonference

Open Source
North America
 * October 13-15, 2019: All Things Open is a "technology conference focusing on the tools, processes and people making open source possible.
 * November 6-8, 2019: Aspiration Summit this "collaborative three-day gathering is designed for everyone from grassroots activists to software developers, bringing together participants from around the world to share knowledge, build relationships, and collectively envision the future of free and open technology to support social change."
 * November 18 - 21, 219: KubeCon | CloudnativeCon North America 2019

Get involved!

 * Are you interested in joining a dedicated and fun community of volunteers who are working together to create and support technology that benefits the world? Check out our resources for new developers.
 * Have you been working on a cool tool or Wikimedia technical project? Are you interested in sharing what you know with others in the technical community? Consider giving a technical talk.
 * Are you interested in mentoring others in the open source movement? Consider applying to mentor for Outreachy Round 19.