Project:Calendar/How to schedule an event

Instructions for organizing successful community meeting and events

Generic Event Suggestions

 * 1) Types of events (see Specific Events for more details)
 * 2) * Videoconference - send an email request to Quim Gil, Guillaume Paumier and Rachel Farrand; they will schedule a Hangout-on-air connected to the MediaWiki Google+ page. Your recording will also be saves to the MediaWiki YouTube account.
 * 3) * To reserve #wikimedia-office for an IRC meeting please use this link.
 * 4) * If you have an idea for a tech talk or meet-up and would like to host it in the evening WMF offices please add your ideas at the bottom of this page and email Rachel Farrand and Quim Gil.
 * 5) Upload to Commons any free materials used in your presentation. Categorize them properly under e.g. Category:Wikimedia_presentations.
 * 6)  Contact Rachel Farrand for help publicizing your event.
 * 7) If you are running your event with help from WMF please show up 30 min in advance of your meeting to make sure everything works.
 * 8) If you are going to share your screen, increase the font size of your browser or terminal.
 * 9) Link your entry in the calendar to the video, IRC log, or blog post of the event.

Promotion

 * Guillaume, Quim, rfarrand and ckoerner can distribute the announcement through Tech News and the MediaWiki social media channels. Send them your short text, URLs, and optional free image.
 * WMF can also create an invitation in the Wikimedia Foundation Engineering calendar (visible to employees only) and send an invitation to engineering@ mailing list which goes to most WMF engineers.
 * rfarrand generally sends an announcement to wikitech-l mailing list, otherwise the speaker is in charge of sending announcements on wiki pages, mailing lists, and other channels of your choice. If regular editors are a target audience, you should send a notice to wikitech-ambassadors, in addition to other lists.
 * After the event or meeting, consider writing a post for the Wikimedia blog.
 * Contact Rachel Farrand and Chris Koerner you would like your event publicized on wikimedia/mediawiki google+, twitter or facebook accounts

RFC discussions

 * As part of the Requests For Comment process, create a Phabricator ticket, and when you think it's ready for discussion add a comment requesting discussion.
 * The Architecture committee determines the agenda for an IRC office hour for RFC discussion
 * An Architecture committee member sends announcement to wikitech-l/development
 * Add meeting to Project:Calendar
 * Reserve the IRC channel during meeting time, see IRC office hours
 * People use Meetbot during the discussion on IRC to organize the RFC discussion
 * Afterwards add a link to Meetbot's summary (example) in the RFC's Phabricator task, and maybe the RFC's page on mediawiki.org (in the RFC  parameter).

Tech talks
See Tech talks for previous talks, and nominate new talks there.

Checklist for Speakers

 * 1) Think of your topic
 * 2) Decide on a title for your talk
 * 3) Create a publishable summary for your talk
 * 4) Decide on a talk length. Do you want to do 20 minutes of talking with 10 minutes for questions? Do you want to do 45 minutes of talking with 15 minutes of questions?
 * 5) Decide which individual people should be personally invited to your talk, decide which groups of people (mailing lists, teams, etc) should be invited to your talk.
 * 6) Announce your talk or work with rfarrand to announce your talk. If you are announcing your own talk follow "Tech talk set-up instructions" below.
 * 7) Create your slides
 * 8) Run through your slides to make sure you are not going to be rushed or go overtime.
 * 9) Show up (in person or to the google hangout) 30 minuites in advance of your talk starting time to make sure a/v equipment and screen sharing is working.
 * 10) Do your talk and have fun!
 * 11) Upload your slides to commons!!!

Remote Participation during tech talks

 * If you have people who you know will be attending a specific tech talk, you can invite them directly to the google hangout. They can unmute themselves and ask questions directly to the speaker.
 * Make sure to designate an IRC channel (instructions below in "Tech talk set-up instructions") for your talk. Make sure to assign someone who is not the speaker to monitor questions on IRC and ask them during the talk.
 * Indicate at the beginning of your talk weather you would like questions to be asked at any time that they come up, when you pause for questions or all at the end. Each speaker will have a different preference.
 * We have tried in the past to allow people to ask questions on the google+ MediaWiki page but it never was used.

Tips

 * Ideally we will have at least one tech talk each month. When there are lots of topics and speakers we can have many tech talks. Anyone can volunteer to hold a tech talk or nominate a specific topic.
 * Speakers from outside of WMF welcome and encouraged

Tech talk set-up instructions

 * 1) Find a topic and a willing presenter
 * 2) Find a date and time that works for the presenter. Reserve a conference room (R31, R37, R67 or the 6th Floor Collab space) at WMF beginning at least 15 minutes before the tech talk starts through the end of the tech talk.
 * 3) When using the collab space, submit support request ticket to IT: techsupport@
 * 4) Get a tech talk title and a paragraph+ summary or abstract of the tech talk/information about the presenter(s) to publicize.
 * 5) Using the MediaWiki Google+ Account create a Google Hangouts On Air broadcast for the date and time of the tech talk. Invite presenters to the on air broadcast.
 * 6) Create a named event on TimeAndDate with the correct time in UTC to distribute internationally
 * 7) Add the tech talk to Project:Calendar and include a links to the Google Hangouts On Air broadcast and the TimeAndDate event.
 * 8)  Reserve the  IRC channel for questions.
 * 9)  Add the tech talk to the WMF engineering calendar. Include IRC details and youtube link.
 * 10) Email engineering, wmfsf and wikitech-l with details about the tech talk. This should include your TimeAndDate link, a link to follow along on youtube, a link to join the live hangout, a description of the tech talk/presenters, the meeting room. If the tech talk will be taking place in one of the collab spaces, also send a heads up to wmfsf@.
 * 11) Tweet from the MediaWiki twitter account about the tech talk
 * 12) Create a Facebook post about the tech talk on MediaWiki's Facebook page
 * 13) Add speakers, project members & IT support to to calendar invite
 * 14) Reply to your previous email on wikitech-l and wmfsf and send reminders out about the tech talk: 1 week in advance, 1 day in advance and 15 min in advance or whatever you think makes the most sense for your tech talk.

Day-of instructions

 * 1) Arrive to the meeting room and/or hangout 15 minuets before the tech talk starts. Ask the presenter to do the same.
 * 2) Double check that your google plus youtube and hangout links are working properly.
 * 3) Double check that your microphone and speakers are working properly
 * 4) Make a plan with the presenter before you go live. Who will watch IRC for questions? Who will introduce the tech talk? Who will regularly check the google+ page in case anyone has trouble joining?
 * 5) Change topic in IRC channel and announce meeting in IRC channel at least 5 min in advance.
 * 6) After the meeting
 * 7) * move the Tech talk in IRC office hours, add a link to the meeting log (example, scroll down)
 * 8) * put the IRC log in the linked wiki page
 * 9) * update Tech talks with a link to the presentation video on YouTube
 * 10) * check that the presentation video appears in MediaWiki's YouTube channel.

Meet-Ups
WMF has a physical event space which opened in 2015. We are often willing to hold meetups as long as the content in relevant to our work.
 * Past meet ups and future proposals
 * Add meet-ups to WMF internal calendar

Official San Francisco meetup Group: http://www.meetup.com/wikimedia-tech/

Hackathons
Hackathon tips for organizers

Hackathon 101 - tips for hackathon newbies

Is your chapter interested in hosting the yearly Wikimedia Hackathon? Here are the guidelines.

Past Hackathon Documentation

 * Hosting chapter should publish budget/$ spent. Examples: Zurich, Amsterdam, Berlin.
 * Public lessons from hackathons. Examples: London, Lyon, Mexico City
 * Hackathon metrics: Lyon

WMF Engineering Team Off-sites

 * These off-sites have generally been internal to WMF. They involve WMF engineering teams meeting physically in a location and meeting. Sometimes this includes help from the Team Practices Group and others times it does not.
 * Add offsite to Engineering Calendar
 * If you WMF team needs help organizing an offsite please get in touch with rfarrand.

MediaWiki Developer Summit / Architecture Summit

 * WMF Tech Days 2012
 * WMF Tech Days 2013
 * Architecture Summit 2014
 * MediaWiki Developer Summit 2015: lessons learned
 * MediaWiki Developer Summit 2016 (January 2016)

Lightning Talks
Lightning talks similar to tech talks, but with multiple topics and speakers. Each topic/speaker is given about 10 min and that time should include a quick presentation with slides and time for Q&A. 5 speakers/topics is a great number for an hour long lightning talk session.

Up and coming lightning talks and dates can be found here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightning_Talks

Further Resources
Meetings of Wikimedians: See e.g. en:Wikipedia:Meetup and de:Wikipedia:Treffen_der_Wikipedianer.