Volunteer coordination and outreach/status

Last update on: 2012-01-31

2011-06-01
About 13 new developers were granted commit access in May, among which 6 Summer of Code students, and 2 Wikimedia Foundation employees. Volunteer development coordinator Sumana Harihareswara joined the review team, and will become the primary point of contact for commit access requests.

2011-07-01

 * Open Source Bridge conference (June 21-25, Portland, Oregon, USA) — Sumana Harihareswara presented new features in MediaWiki 1.17 and gathered offers of volunteer help (especially around database support, testing, bug triage, and right-to-left support). She also gave a talk about technology management, and recruited candidates for the Wikimedia Foundation's current job openings (read more).

Volunteer development coordinator Sumana Harihareswara is now the primary point of contact for commit access requests. About 7 new developers were granted commit access in June, among which were 2 Summer of Code students, and 2 Wikimedia Foundation employees.

2011-07-25
About 11 developers were granted commit access in July, among which were 2 Wikimedia employees, and 4 Wikia employees. Sumana Harihareswara attended the Community leadership summit and OSCON in Portland, notably to reach out to potential new developers and testers for MediaWiki. 

2011-08-31
Sumana Harihareswara has been following up on contacts made at OSCON and Wikimania conferences. She has publicized the NOLA Hackathon and encouraged extension, gadget, script, tool, and template developers to attend. Additionally, she has been publicizing the work of the parser and visual editor team, encouraging code reviewers, and finding administrators and developers of other intensive MediaWiki installations to bring them into the larger MediaWiki ecology. In August, 9 developers were granted commit access: six volunteers and three Wikimedia Foundation employees.

2011-09-16
Continuing to follow up on items from my TODO list. Have gotten some response from the OCaml community to get our math code reviewed, and am getting interest from the Lucene community on improving our search extension.

2011-09-30
Sumana Harihareswara reached out to the OCaml and Lucene communities to collaborate on math code and search respectively, and coordinated the testing of 1.18 by volunteers. She also worked on organizing upcoming coding events in New Orleans, India, Brighton and online.

Added 30 Nov: in September 2011, 6 developers received commit access, all of whom were volunteers. 

2011-10-31
Sumana Harihareswara continued to go through the backlog of commit access requests, and participated in a discussion on making it easier to get Subversion commit access. In October, eleven people got commit access, of which six were volunteers and five were WMF staff or contractors. She began to organize a triage of database-related bugs to benefit MediaWiki developers and administrators who use RDBMSes other than MySQL, and encouraged volunteers who are interested in leading hackathons, teaching classes, or attended conferences to talk about MediaWiki. She also followed up with volunteers and potential new developers, notably from the New Orleans hackathon and Google Summer of Code mentors' summit.

2011-11-30
Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts from the New Orleans hackathon and the GSoC mentor summit; she also provided support in the #mediawiki IRC channel. She did a lot of outreach for the India Hackathon 2011 and attended it to facilitate volunteer training and development, and worked on planning for the January 2012 San Francisco Hackathon. She administered the commit access review process and communicated about improved process on wikitech-l. 12 developers received commit access in November, of whom 2 were Foundation staffers. Sumana and Guillaume Paumier started to consolidate training documentation to facilitate the onboarding of new developers.

2011-12-23
<section begin=2011-12-23/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to help plan the Pune and San Francisco hackathons and mentor new contributors. Eleven developers got commit access, all from the non-staff MediaWiki community.<section end=2011-12-23/>

2011-12-31
<section begin=2011-12-31/>Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts and recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community (especially for commit and patch review), and mentor new contributors. Eleven developers got commit access, all from the non-staff MediaWiki community. Sumana also prepared for the January San Francisco hackathon and the February Pune hackathon, and recruited participants. Partly in preparation for these coding events, Sumana and Guillaume Paumier continued to consolidate training documentation to facilitate the onboarding of new developers.<section end=2011-12-31/>

2012-01-31
<section begin=2012-01-31/>In preparation for the San Francisco hackathon, Guillaume Paumier rewrote How to become a MediaWiki hacker along the lines suggested by Yuvaraj Pandian, and cleaned up the documentation about gadgets. Sumana Harihareswara focused on improving the API documentation, and wrote and edited tutorial references for building the Wikipedia Android application, MediaWiki's web API, and Gadgets. Nine developers got commit access, including seven volunteers. Sumana continued to follow up on contacts and recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community (especially for commit and patch review), and mentor new contributors. Sumana also prepared for the February Pune hackathon and the May hackathon organized by Wikimedia Germany, introduced a friendly space policy for WMF technical events, and recruited participants for upcoming events.<section end=2012-01-31/>