Wikimedia Developer Summit/2016



The Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016 is the main gathering of the Wikimedia technical community to push the evolution of the MediaWiki architecture and the Wikimedia Engineering goals for 2016. We welcome developers and other technical contributors of MediaWiki core, extensions, gadgets, templates, bots, Wikimedia apps and tools, and third party products relying on Wikimedia APIs.

January 4-6, 2016 San Francisco (California, USA)

Registration • Call for participation • Proposals

Registration
Registration is open as of 14 September, 2015. The deadline for travel sponsorship registration is 2 October, 2015.

REGISTER HERE

Participants of this event agree to follow the Friendly Space Policy.

Call for participation
The Wikimedia Developer Summit encourages proposals about updating our architecture, infrastructure and services to better support users and developers. Other topics interesting to Wikimedia developers are welcomed as well.

Deadline for new proposals: October 2. Early drafts are OK. All proposals are expected to be discussed and updated during the months prior to the Summit.

Create a task in Phabricator. You can also recycle an existing task.

Expected fields:
 * main stakeholders added as subscribers
 * Wikimedia-Developer-Summit-2016 project and other projects related with the proposal
 * a description to be kept up to date including:
 * definition of the problem
 * expected outcome at the Summit
 * current status of the discussion
 * links to background information
 * related tasks in Phabricator
 * after creating your task, please define other tasks "blocked by" this one, if any.

Scope of the proposals
The program focuses on organized discussions that start online and aim to reach to agreements during the event. Good examples of proposals include requests for comment, overlapping implementations, need-consensus topics, undefined areas and, in general, complex discussions that have chances to be resolved face to face in the context of the Summit.

Presentations and tutorials are explicitly discouraged during the Summit. These types of sessions are welcomed as Tech Talks or Lightning Talks organized before the event, especially when they can provide background materials to Summit participants.

The schedule of the first two days is build with sessions that have gone through this call for participation. The third day is reserved for unscheduled activities such as hacking, ad-hoc discussions, or networking.

Submissions and selection process
The goal of the Summit is to build consensus on important discussions. The process for selecting proposals aims to bring the strong proposals to the schedule and to filter out the rest, in order to focus better on them. Filling the schedule is not a goal.

This is how the life cycle of a successful proposal looks like:
 * 1) All proposals must have a task in Phabricator associated with Wikimedia-Developer-Summit-2016. You can reuse and update an existing task, or you can create a new one.
 * 2) Proposals must have an owner, a clear title, and a description kept up to date. They must be associated with the #wikimedia-developer-summit-2016 project as well as other projects related with the topic of the proposal.
 * 3) A discussion joined by the relevant stakeholders must take place at the task or in another designated URL.
 * 4) By 2 Oct 2015 all Summit proposals must have been created. Proposals created later can be handled in other venues or purely online.
 * 5) By 6 Nov 2015 all Summit proposals must have active discussions and a Summit plan documented in the description. Proposals not reaching this critical mass can continue at their own path out of the Summit.
 * 6) By 4 Dec 2015 all the accepted proposals will be published in the program. Strong candidates might be scheduled before.
 * 7) During December changes can be made to the schedule in order to avoid overlaps as much as possible. Contributors to each proposal are focusing on planning details, identifying the open questions that need answers, confirmed participants, structure of the session, and expected outcome.
 * 8) On 4-6 Jan 2016 each session runs as planned or better, arrangements for online participation are made by the session owners when needed, notes are taken and posted in the description of the corresponding task, a summary of the outcomes is highlighted, specifying the agreements made, and whether the objective of the session has been accomplished. Action points and next steps are documented as well.

Monday 4 and Tuesday 5
Expect two full days of discussion sessions in four break-out rooms plus a few plenary sessions in the main room.
 * Mission Bay Center
 * 1675 Owens Street San Francisco, California, USA

Wednesday 6
Expect one full day of unscheduled discussions, hacking, and hands-on work.
 * Wikimedia Foundation
 * 149 New Montgomery Street
 * San Francisco, California 94105

Travel sponsorship
We have a modest travel budget that we want to use to bring key participants to the Summit. The registration form includes an option to request travel sponsorship. Candidates for travel sponsorship must be active contributors in ongoing Summit proposals (see Call for participation).

We plan to communicate travel sponsorship decisions to all candidates by 2 Oct 2015. We will keep the possibility to request travel sponsorship as long as we have budget available, evaluating new candidates as they come.

Previous summits
The Wikimedia Developer Summit is a combination of three events organized in San Francisco in the past: the 2014 Architecture Summit, the yearly Wikimedia Foundation Engineering All-Hands/Tech Days event, and the San Francisco Hackathon.
 * MediaWiki Developer Summit 2015

Contact
Organizers and Friendly Space Policy contacts: rfarrand@undefinedwikimedia.org, qgil@undefinedwikimedia.org.