New Developers/Quarterly/2018-01

This is the second edition of the New Developers Quarterly, a report covering activities, metrics, surveys and lessons learned in the Onboarding New Developers program. This report covers October to December 2017.

Your questions and feedback are welcome in the Discussion page.

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Timeline
Newcomer-focused events, programs, and activities between October–December 2017:


 * October 5th How Technical Collaboration is bringing new developers into the Wikimedia movement, blogpost by Quim Gil
 * October 7th WikiFemHack, a Gender Gap edit-a-thon, and hackathon organized by the Wikimedia Community User Group with the help of Open Knowledge Foundation and SheSharp in Thessaloniki, Greece (more details)
 * October 19th Towards building an African Wikimedia Developer Community, blogpost by Felix Nartey and Derick Alangi
 * October 26th Wikimedia is taking part in Google Code-in 2017. 43 mentors will be mentoring students from November 28, 2017 to January 17, 2018 on both coding and non-coding related tasks
 * November 25th How two new Wikimedians spent their time at the Montreal Hackathon, blogpost by Melody Kramer
 * December 1st Wikimedia Foundation funds six Outreachy interns for round 15, blogpost by Srishti Sethi
 * December 9-10th Wikimedia's Developer Relations organized a workshop around Google Code-in for students of the ChickTech organization in San Francisco (more details)

Key findings

 * What did we learn from sending follow-up emails to new developers who attended the Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna and Montreal? What did we learn from conducting interviews with new developers for the post-event audience engagement study? Related task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T163440

New developers metrics and trends
See also Technical Collaboration Metrics - Onboarding New Developers.

Volunteers contributing patches for review
XX volunteers contributed between October–December 2017. (Source)

New volunteers attracted
XX new volunteers contributed between October–December 2017. (Source)

QoQ : xx%. YoY : xx%.

New volunteers retained
Percentage of volunteers active one year (± 3 months) after their first contribution, out of all new volunteers attracted one year ago (between July–September 2016). (Source: Calculation on data)

QoQ : xx%. YoY : xx%.

Review of changesets by new volunteers
xxx changesets were contributed by new volunteers. (Source: Calculation on data . Data as of MM dd, 2017.)

Projects with most new volunteers
xx new volunteers contributed to xx repositories. (Source: "Repos by New Authors")

Outreach programs

 * Google Summer of Code 2017 (May–August 2017):
 * Out of 7 new developers who completed the internship, we retained XX developers
 * Outreachy Round 15 (December 2017–March 2018):
 * Attracted 6 new developers

Survey analysis
Read through below for a quick summary:

We sent a survey to 36 new developers who submitted code for the first time between September–November 2017. The survey was designed using the Qualtrics platform, with a goal of understanding more clearly demographics and background, motivations, challenges and needs of our new developers.

Out of the 36 new developers to whom we reached out, 18 (50%) completed the survey.

Demographics and background information

 * Respondents of the survey were from United States (3), India (3), Germany (2), Cameroon, China, Finland, Italy, New Zealand, Pakistan and United Kingdom
 * A little over half the respondents said they belong to the working professionals category
 * 67% identified themselves as male and 27% as female

Motivations
New developers indicated that they first heard about Wikimedia as a place to contributing code through a MediaWiki workshop in their area, their work colleagues, Outreachy, familiarity with Wikimedia tech already (such as by using extensions, Toolforge, MediaWiki.org, or by hosting a wiki, etc. ).

Challenges

 * Some challenges that new developers face around Wikimedia infrastructure are: understanding the codebase, Gerrit, coding conventions, non-availability of projects in Github, determining who is the project owner or code reviewer, etc. Other behavioral challenges are deciding what task to work on, learning a language, lack of knowledge of MediaWiki, hesitating to ask questions, etc.
 * Learning resources and channels that new developers refer to when they get stuck: IRC, Google, Stack Overflow, MediaWiki pages, Phabricator, PHP manuals, API docs, asking an experienced developer, etc.

Experience contributing to Wikimedia
More than three-fourth of the respondents said they are satisfied with their experience contributing to Wikimedia. More than half of the respondents to this survey said they are likely to recommend Wikimedia for code contribution to friends and colleagues.

Suggestions for improvement
Here are some suggestions made by new developers (responses below have been only slightly edited):
 * How to documentation
 * An automated way to convert files to adhere to the coding style guide
 * GitHub pull requests
 * More volunteers time to help newcomers initially when they begin contributing
 * An IRC channel for new contributors where everyone is there to help one another
 * Easy steps in the task description to reproduce a problem