Wikimedia Technical Engagement/Goals

Technical Engagement's main focus in FY 2022/23 lies on making our existing services and programs stronger in order to increase sustainability of the services that we provide to the Wikimedia movement.

The majority of the work that Technical Engagement does is foundational work. This includes maintaining and evolving Wikimedia Cloud Services including support for Striker, Paws and Quarry (Cloud Services). It includes maintaining and evolving Toolhub and the Developer Portal, coordinating the Techblog, and managing service requests around the tech community metrics dashboards (Production or third party services). It encompasses evolving Wikimedia's technical documentation and providing support for users of Phabricator, Toolhub and Cloud Services (Technical Documentation and Support). Finally, it includes coordinating initiatives and programs like Small Wiki Toolkits, Hackathons, Coolest Tool Award, Outreach- and internship programs, contributions to other open source projects, or advocacy for best FOSS practices (Outreach, Community and Capacity Building).

Planning framework

 * Strengthen foundational work to make our existing services and programs stronger (80%).
 * Focus/Experiment: Space for experiments to explore ideas and cross-functional focus projects to move the needle in a specific field (max 20%).
 * Increase synergy effects and reduce SPOFs through cross-training and shared responsibilities.
 * Broad annual direction for the different services and initiatives. Multi-quarter timelines for multi-quarter initiatives. Detailed planning and goal setting in quarterly planning cycles.

Cloud Services
Deprecate Gridengine Ensure alerting and on-call systems are sustainable and scalable - T313444
 * Migrate tools off GridEngine - T313405
 * Migrate at least one tool to k8s
 * Figure out if migrations of “like” tools can be templated and migrated more easily
 * Consolidate Alerting to a single platform (alertmanager)
 * Audit alerts to ensure any pages are required, as opposed to automatically filing a ticket, or simply removing

Release Toolforge Build Service - T194332
 * Implement Harbor
 * Plan Beta Features and Delivery

Update Striker to work with GitLab for Toolforge tool git hosting automation
 * Replace the existing Diffusion (Phabricator) git integration - T296893
 * Migrate ~450 existing tool owned git repositories to GitLab

Implement Kubernetes as a Service (Magnum) - T280792
 * Finish bringing service online
 * Evaluate usage for Quarry/PAWS - T308873, T301469
 * Evaluate usage for community use

Production or third party services
Finalize taxonomy model for Toolhub - T308030
 * Conduct community feedback round on taxonomy model
 * Implement controlled vocabulary tags in Toolhub

Get more people to understand tech community metrics on wikimedia.biterg.io and increase redundancy across the team
 * Create onboarding plan for cross-training a second person - T294870
 * Organise a consultancy hour with Bitergia - T306787

Increase the number of blog posts on the Tech Blog - T313072
 * Draft & publish 4 blog posts from the Technical Engagement team
 * Help 4 WMF staff members to draft and publish blog posts
 * Help 4 technical contributors to draft and publish blog posts

Technical Support and Documentation
Make it easier to assess the state of documentation and contribute meaningful improvements (project board)
 * Identify documentation collections and how to assess the state of the content they contain.
 * Make the results of this assessment publicly available and easy to navigate. (tracking: T313041)

Complete basic content review and improvements for all on-wiki collection landing pages that are linked from the Developer Portal (Tracking: T312997)
 * Review landing pages for Data dumps and Research:Data.
 * Review Quarry landing page.
 * Review Pywikibot landing page.

Provide continuous support in Phabricator
 * See also: Bugwrangler

Outreach, Community and Capacity Building
Coordinate Wikimedia's participation in Outreachy Round 25
 * Recruit mentors and projects for Outreachy Round 25 - T313361

Continue with 2022 Small Wiki Toolkits workshops
 * Organize three small wiki toolkit workshops on the topic of bots and scripts - T312612

Clarify Technical Engagement support on Rapid Grants applications - T304380
 * Setup criteria for what makes a successful grant/project
 * Decide on team capacity and workflow process to assess and review grant applications

Clarify responsibilities around Gerrit privilege handout workflow
 * Clarify who needs to be involved/consulted on making the decision - T273164
 * Update the Gerrit Privilege policy pages - T237618

Coordinate the Coolest Tool Award (multi-quarter project) - T313443
 * Plan the 2022 edition of the Coolest Tool Award

Coordinate the 2022 Wikimania Hackathon

Define timeline and project plan Implement the event
 * Clarify timeline and integration in Wikimania program and platform
 * Define project plan including main deliverables, support needs, and weekly tasks
 * Technical contributors have opportunities to share knowledge and connect socially
 * Present clear resources for individual newcomers (and newish-comers) so they can find the information they need to build what they want.
 * Coordinate community-run sessions and spaces for people to share technical knowledge.
 * Coordinate community-run social sessions and spaces with fun activities.
 * Growing communities of technical contributors can find support and feel welcome at the Wikimania Hackathon
 * Engage with local meetup and affinity meetup organizers from the Wikimedia Hackathon.
 * Ensure that the accessible platform and accommodations are advertised widely.
 * Technical contributors have opportunities to work together and to share outcome with Wikimania attendees
 * Organize the pre-event showcase to help people connect with projects and people. This will include explicit instructions to use Phabricator and come back for the final showcase.
 * Design an accessible and useful platform space for people to collaborate in.
 * Provide Wikimania attendees an opportunity to learn about the hackathon projects at the final showcase.

Experiment Week
We've planned in a few days this quarter to explore two topics:

Research how other open source communities support newcomers
 * Create comparison matrix and summarize key findings
 * Provide recommendation on what Wikimedia could try out or explore further

Identify metrics to measure the impact of a tool
 * Research and summarize available data sources and gaps to define tool impact metrics
 * Create visualization to display raw data