Project:New contributors

'''THIS IS A DRAFT PROPOSAL. EARLY FEEDBACK IS WELCOME.''' How to attract volunteers and connect them with interesting people and activities?

Contribution engagement tools

 * The problem is similar to engaging Wikimedia editors.
 * Also similar to many other open source projects.
 * Potential to use and improve several MediaWiki extensions.

The short term solution proposed is a single website with semantic contributor profiles connected with our several tools and a mechanism to find and contact contributors interested in targeted topics.

People
Identify yourself and connect with relevant people and activities.

Optional identification:
 * Interests - a predefined lists of OSS activities, programming languages and projects.
 * Availability for each - Send me updates, Looking for a task, Looking for a mentor, Offering mentorship.
 * Locations.
 * Languages.
 * Social media handlers.
 * OSS projects involved.
 * Gravatar.

Automatic fields:
 * Badges - Project membership, Group membership, Events attended, Mentorship programs.
 * Activity stats - MediaWiki, Gerrit, Bugzilla, Labs.

Social:
 * TBD - A way to show related users.
 * TBD - A way to show Wikilove / Barnstars / Likes given to and received from.

Searching people:
 * For lists of people around one tag see.
 * Combined tag searches e.g. Barcelona AND JavaScript, Lua AND Willing to learn.

Groups
People collaborating around a specific topic


 * Each Tag generates a Group page listing the related users.
 * The content area above the list can be edited.
 * Discussion page.
 * Users can sign up explicitly as members, appearing as such in the list.
 * Groups that are officially recognized as Wikimedia User Groups are identified as such.

Projects
A standard way to report goals, members, tasks and updates.


 * Project pages
 * Members
 * Related interests e.g. programming languages.
 * Accepting transcluded descriptions, statuses...


 * Project admins can identify users as project members with roles.

Tasks
A funnel to connect pending work with potential contributors.


 * The way to connect tasks in Bugzilla, Gerrit and others to a common system.
 * Publish tasks for contributors tagging them by interests, location, language...
 * Users can add themselves as mentors for tasks.
 * Users can signal that they are interested in a task.

Events
A standard way to advertise activities and know the people joining them.


 * Events share a lot with Tasks but they are tied to dates and have many participants.
 * Task mentors = Event organizers. Interested in task = Sign up to event.
 * Events are automatically listed to events.
 * People signing up are automatically listed at the event.
 * After the event: organizers distribute badges to actual participants.

Notifications

 * Send notifications to contributors interested in XYZ.

One wiki
Solving the old dilemma Wikimedia / MediaWiki:


 * wikitech.wikimedia.org: infrastructure, tools and support for all developers and other technical contributors.
 * mediawiki.org: MediaWiki software downloads, documentation, support and promotion.

About the new Wikitech:


 * MediaWiki login integrated with Gerrit, Bugzilla, Labs (and Mailman?).
 * Single place for developer documentation and other technical contributors.
 * Unified templates and processes for project pages, status reports and opportunities for contributors.
 * All Wikimedia Engineering content in mediawiki.org moved to Wikitech.
 * All tech content in Meta moved to Wikitech.
 * Invitation to English Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to move their tech development content to Wikitech.

One ontology
A common vocabulary to classify items across all our tools


 * aka Tags.
 * Alignment across MediaWiki, Bugzilla & Gerrit.

The problem
We have problems in the whole contribution cycle:


 * Unclear identity and scope
 * Outsiders confused about Wikipedia / Wikimedia / MediaWiki.
 * Insiders differ about project identity and scope.
 * As a result: confusing landing and path for new contributors.
 * Lack of global profiles identifying contributors
 * One contributor = many usernames from MediaWiki/Wikimedia, Gerrit, Bugzilla, Mailman, IRC...
 * User profiles are plain text, relying on manual updates.
 * Lack of semantic data e.g. location, skills, interests, projects...
 * Lack of common memory about contributors
 * Personal lists maintained (or not) manually by various people.
 * Difficult to promote activities to the right people
 * Every time we start almost from scratch.
 * We lack ways to broadcast selectively by topic.
 * Social media and community communication channels are ok but too broad.
 * Manual pokes in user Talk pages don't scale, are unequally effective and are not trivial to follow-up.
 * Difficult to connect new volunteers with a first task
 * It's not trivial to arrive and find a task by yourself.
 * We don't know how many newcomers never dare to ask.
 * Those who ask find that it's not easy to get started.
 * It's not easy to give a task to someone landing with a vague request in an email.
 * Most probably the memory is lost after a few weeks.
 * Difficult to find peers and stay in touch
 * No way for contributors to find who is interested in XYZ and discuss with them.
 * Same problem: spam wikitech-l, hope to find people through Discussion pages...
 * Groups are supposed to help but group creation and membership is heavy.
 * Difficult to find inactive contributors and follow-up
 * We lack the metrics to find out who was active but not anymore.
 * English only
 * Potential communication and activities in other languages are even more disconnected.