Developer Advocacy

The Developer Advocacy team is a sub team of the Technical Engagement team. The Developer Advocacy team is tasked with supporting the technical communities who use Wikimedia web APIs and software projects to spread and improve free knowledge. They collaborate with teams in the Wikimedia Foundation, the larger Wikimedia movement, and external organizations to promote the use of the Wikimedia platforms via documentation, sample code, libraries, articles, and reference applications. The team also supports programs to actively recruit and mentor new technical contributors who will become the next generation of Foundation staff and FLOSS project maintainers.

Our primary focus is to help the developer community build and scale successful projects using Wikimedia technology.

We encourage them to contribute to our free and open source projects as a way to achieve their own goals.

To contact us, see 1>#Team|#Team below.



Areas
These are regular tasks that usually don't make it to our goals or backlogs explicitly, but take a significant portion of our time and attention.

Everywhere (within reason)

 * Help newcomers with technical questions, reporting their first bugs, or looking for first tasks to contribute.


 * Help keeping discussions friendly, intervening in specific situations if needed.

Task management

 * Scan new tasks in Phabricator, bringing them into good shape and looking for potential issues that need escalation.
 * Triage old tasks in order to push forward bugs or feature requests that require higher attention, or resolving obsolete reports.
 * Oversee the creation and renaming of new projects.

For a more detailed description of workflows, see Bugwrangler.

Events

 * Organization of online and face-to-face events (except for the Wikimedia Technical Conference or international Hackathons), and smaller events for hacking, training, and promote new technologies.


 * Plan and run a continuous stream of online Tech Talks and Wikimedia Tech meetups in San Francisco.


 * Find ways to make events accessible to all participants.

Documentation
Coordination of entry-level and mid-level documentation with a focus on documentation for volunteer contributors that encourages developers to use Wikimedia data and APIs. See some of our recent efforts around improving MediaWiki Action API & Toolforge documentation on MediaWiki.org.

Outreach programs
Coordinate Wikimedia's participation in Outreach programs (Google Summer of Code, Outreachy, Google Code-in, etc.) to bring in new contributors to our technical projects and introduce them to free and open source software.

Technical Community Metrics
Maintain https://wikimedia.biterg.io which offers some statistics about Wikimedia's technical community. See Community metrics.

Planning
You can follow our work and get involved.

Contributors of all disciplines and skill levels are welcome!

We mainly use Phabricator for planning work.

You can find our workboard at tag/developer-advocacy/.

Every significant task that doesn't belong to a regular workflow needs to have its own Phabricator task associated to the team project.

Our Phabricator workboard columns have the following meaning:


 * To Triage: New tasks are placed automatically in this column. Then we move them to the column that seems more appropriate. Such moving can be done by anyone in the team. If the task does not seem trivial, it is to be brought up in our team meeting as a routine. Ignore the "Priority" value of a task in this column, as it might be the Priority of another team.
 * Backlog: We have looked at tasks in this column. Tasks here could be assigned to a team member but we rather want to avoid cookie licking. If it is likely that we soon want to work on a task, we might give that task a higher priority or move it to Consider for next quarter.
 * Team radar: Tasks that are interesting to us but we do not work on and do not drive these tasks. Hence we do not close these tasks but only remove our team project tag if at all.
 * Consider for next quarter: Tasks we might work on soon. Tasks should have an assignee.
 * Quarterly: Tasks we plan to work on in this quarter. Tasks should have an assignee.

Quarterly goals
We follow the process for defining quarterly goals used at Wikimedia Technology/Goals.

See the "Technical Engagement" section in the corresponding quarter linked on Wikimedia Technology/Goals.

For historical goals, see below.

Also see the corresponding quarterly columns on our Phabricator workboard.

Contact
You can contact the entire team
 * by adding a comment on the Discussion page of this very page, or
 * by creating a task in Phabricator under tag/developer-advocacy/ if you are sure that we are the correct team for a specific task.

To contact individual team members, see the contact information on the individual user pages (linked above).

Historical data
Before July 2018, this team was called Developer Relations.

Before September 2015, this team was called Engineering Community.

Our previous activity is in the links on the Engineering Community Team template on MediaWiki wiki.

Before April 2016, the team used monthly Sprint projects in Phabricator to plan work. For older monthly sprint projects before the team name was changed in Sep2015, see Oct2014, Nov2014, Dec2014, Jan2015, Feb2015, Mar2015, Apr2015, May2015, Jun2015, Jul2015, Aug2015.

Quarterly goals
See the "Technical Engagement" section in the corresponding quarter linked on Wikimedia Technology/Goals.

For older goals:
 * April - June 2018: Wikimedia Technology/Goals/2017-18 Q4
 * January - March 2018 (as part of the Technical Collaboration team)
 * October - December 2017 (as part of the Technical Collaboration team)
 * July - September 2017 (as part of the Technical Collaboration team)
 * April - June 2017 (as part of the Technical Collaboration team)
 * January - March 2017 (as part of the Technical Collaboration team)
 * January - March 2016
 * October - December 2015
 * July - September 2015
 * April - June 2015
 * July 2014 - March 2015
 * July 2013 - June 2014
 * July 2012 - June 2013

Quarterly check-ins
The Wikimedia Foundation performed Quarterly Reviews for a while. They were later renamed to Quarterly Check Ins:


 * Jan - Mar 2017: c:File:CE_APRIL_2017_Quarterly_Check_In_(Q4)_Slide_Deck_1.pdf&page=19
 * Oct - Dec 2016: Part 1, Part 2
 * Jul - Sep 2016
 * Apr - Jun 2016, page 17ff.
 * Jan - Mar 2016, page 6ff.
 * Oct - Dec 2015, page 18ff.
 * Jul - Sep 2015, page 8ff.
 * Apr - Jun 2015, page 27ff.
 * Jan - Mar 2015, page 22ff.