Outreach programs/LevelUp

Starting in 2013, every engineer or sysadmin at WMF has a quarterly goal: either to get more domain knowledge on a particular repository/codebase and become a regular code reviewer on that codebase, or to coach a particular mentee to get +2 privileges on a repo. So, some WMFers coach other WMFers, and some coach volunteers. Sumana helps matchmake and find volunteers (including via programs like Google Summer of Code and the Outreach Program for Women), and your manager checks in with you about your progress during your regular one-on-one or status meetings.

You can use this table of who knows the most about all the components of Wikimedia's codebase and infrastructure, including MediaWiki core, extensions deployed on Wikimedia sites, and our server architecture. As it grows, this table will highlight the extension update frequency, number of high-priority open bugs, and potential new maintainers (including recent committers) and mentors.

You can learn by reviewing code and hacking with your mentor, and you can teach by metareviewing your mentee's code reviews, pair programming, and so on.

I predict that, at the end of 1 quarter of this, our code review backlog will be about the same as it is now (statistics). But after 2 quarters, it'll go down, because we'll have more confident reviewers and maintainers. And you'll benefit because you won't have to wait as long to get your changesets reviewed.

How is this different from 20% time?
This is the replacement for 20% time.


 * It's quarterly, not weekly
 * It permanently increases our community engineering capacity
 * It grows you as a technical leader
 * You report to your manager, not Sumana; Sumana checks in with your manager

Opting out
If you prefer to opt out of LevelUp, you can simply spend 1 day a week doing design and code review for new extensions, fixing bugs that affect everyone, increasing test coverage, or something else that helps the whole community. But we'll request that you concentrate on parts of our infrastructure that currently aren't getting much love, as indicated in the maintainership table.