Volunteer coordination and outreach/ECT July 2013 quarterly review

Agenda for the Engineering Community Team's review of Q2 (March through June 2013).

Nurturing volunteers

 * Mentorship and gardening
 * We got ~20 OPW/GSoC interns (compare to 9 last summer), ~30% of them women or genderqueer (compare to: 0)
 * We're up from 11 to 13 non-WMF maintainers of MediaWiki core; other stats are in flux
 * We've helped in shepherding & discussion around controversial contributors
 * We met with Analytics, Ops, and UX to lay groundwork for volunteer onramp in next year
 * We developed information architecture proposal re new tech contributors, decided to park it temporarily in favor of analytics + concentrating on mentorship efforts in the near future
 * We connected volunteers with grant opportunities (IEG/Participation Support)


 * QA
 * We ramped up training, mentorship, list, events
 * The current trainee is working on automated testing for VE, which is a good way to have an apprentice work on a high-priority project


 * Events
 * We moved from the consistency of "the wheel" to a more opportunistic & flexible approach
 * We co-organized the Amsterdam hackathon: 150 participants, great survey results

Tech communications

 * Guillaume created a weekly Tech News summary report which volunteers are helping curate; thousands of readers
 * Sumana led Lua rollout communications
 * We lent Guillaume to VisualEditor effort

Bugzilla

 * Andre made incremental code improvements -- in the Bugzilla front page, weekly report email, etc.
 * Andre led social improvements: clarified admin policy, blogs BZ tips, runs office hours, meets with dev teams

Lessons learned

 * LevelUp was useful for helping people discover what they wanted
 * But without constant metamentorship from ECT, most people disengage because other things are more urgent
 * We'll stick to OPW/GSoC which is clearly under our remit, and leave professional development stuff to contributors & their managers
 * Code review backlog is less urgent than previously (Subversion era backlog blocked release)


 * Volunteer product management/advising
 * LCA is innovating with the Community Liaisons and showing very interesting results
 * It's easier to funnel product management volunteers into community liaising than into feature backlog work
 * ECT (Sumana) has not focused on metamentoring the product management volunteers who do show up, and will start feeding them to Maggie


 * Mentorship programs
 * More gatekeeping and task preparation and more frequent communication lead to better outcomes
 * Running OPW correlates to more women ending up applying for GSoC


 * Lack of awareness
 * Nearly no volunteers know about the grants
 * Key tech contributors don't read parts of the monthly report that affect them

Next
Key goals for the next quarter:
 * We teach several (6) volunteers how to contribute to and fix automated tests, and they do so regularly, improving our capacity for faster deployments.
 * To improve awareness of Wikimedia's engineering needs, we systematically reach out to FLOSS projects we rely on, and grow Tech Ambassadors membership.

Also in the next several months: Starting community metrics, and lending Guillaume to VE communications for July.

Plus our ongoing activities: summer mentorship, tech communications, bug management, and volunteer outreach & events.

Questions
We need your help to best serve the movement. Questions in bold are the most important; we need your answers for the coming quarter.

We want to work well with LCA/Community liaisons.
 * Which projects will be getting liaisons after VE push ends? Should ECT pick up the slack on others?
 * Are we duplicating effort at all?
 * Can we ask the liaisons to help us grow tech ambassadors membership by recommending it to likely community members?
 * A - Yes, and they are doing it (lightly) now. I will further emphasize it, however.

We want to help increase our deployment frequency.
 * Is automated testing the best way to help?
 * Is targeting very popular gadgets & bots like HotCat, Twinkle, and SineBot a good idea? What about user scripts?

We're identifying which upstream open source projects we ought to be making closer relationships with.
 * What should we prioritize?
 * Is there already an inventory?

We aim to help more Toolserver tools move to Tool Labs (including a doc sprint in late July.)
 * What should the specific goal be for December? Proportion of bots/tools moved to Labs?
 * Are there WMF internal tools that we need to move ASAP?