User:Bawolff/Organizing the volunteer developer community

Just jotting down some half-formed ideas.

It would be cool if the MediaWiki volunteer community was more organized. WMF is split into teams, and the teams provide their members with lots of support. However volunteer devs are very dispersed all working on different areas. I think encouraging more connection between the volunteer devs would be good for community health.

Some ideas:
 * have a private irc channel where volunteer devs can help each other and support each other in their mediawiki work and discuss frustrations and solutions.
 * Have regular irc meetings (e.g. once every 2 months) similar to hackathon show and tell, where people can talk about what they have been working on recently, and also find other people interested in helping/cross-fertilize ideas
 * Have some sort of code review swap meeting (e.g. I'll review some of your patches if you review some of mine).
 * create documentation/"bootcamp onboarding" to attract new volunteer developers (In real jobs, often new hires will be subject to some sort of onboarding project or "bootcamp", which is a guided activity where the new person sets up their dev environment, and is guided through making a new feature. Usually with meetings/mentors they can ask questions to)
 * Create a wikimedia user group representing volunteer devs