Wikimedia Technical Conference/2018

Vision Statement
This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.

Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future years will have have different focuses and themes.

We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme of the event.

The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to look at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of those discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.

We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers. We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and successful.
 * Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals.
 * Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program.
 * Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and sustaining our developer community.

This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual planning cycle which starts in January 2019.

Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.

Participant Selection Process
Based on feedback and the lessons learned from the 2018 Wikimedia Developer Summit we are adjusting the way participants are invited / chosen to attend this years events.

Participant Breakdown
50 Participants Maximum
 * 5 are organizers (10%)
 * 5 are the members of the program committee (10%)
 * 10 are managers and budget owners from WMF (invited directly) (20%)
 * Feedback survey makes it clear that people needed decision makers and budget owners in the room or did not want to have these conversations.
 * These managers will take on some responsibility of reporting out from the event
 * Managers invited will be decided by the program committee
 * 5 are from WMDE Technology (10%)
 * WMDE can fill these spots as they choose
 * 15 are volunteers (30%)
 * Decision process, how decisions will be made and what will hold weight in rankings should be communicated in advance.
 * 10 remaining spots. (20%)
 * Assuming these 10 people are from WMF, they should be decided by the teams that need to be represented and not by position statements.
 * Program committee to decide # of people from each team
 * These attendees should come representing their teams and areas of work

Program Committee

 * Kate Chapman (Chair)
 * Corey Floyd
 * (more to be announced)

Organizing Team

 * Rachel Farrand
 * Deb Tankersley
 * Michelle Park
 * Lauren Miranda
 * (more to be announced)