Wikimedia Hackathon 2017/Report

Budget
Exchange rate: 1 EUR = 1,09 USD

Learning and innovation
WMAT has been preparing this event for two years, attending two Wikimedia Hackathons (Lyon and Jerusalem) and several similar tech events from like-minded organisations and communities. This enabled us to create our own vision for the Mediawiki Hackathon and to make it an event that not only has the desired impact on our own local context but also improves the event format for future Hackathons in the wider Wikimedia movement. We can only encourage this process for other Wikimedia events, especially the ones which travel to different countries and communities from year to year. Instead of just copy and pasting things from the past it can be worthwhile to be bold again and question and re-think exisiting patterns and also look for inspiration outside the Wikimedia movement.

What we learned from others

 * Amsterdam / Zurich / Lyon Hackathons: One of the big learnings of previous hackathons was that hacking and sleeping at the same venue together with a constant supply of food and drinks 24/7 is the best way to cater for the needs of our tech community and provide the basic conditions for a productive event. Hence, we put a lot of thought into choosing the right venue and decided to make the not unrisky financial decision to rent out the complete venue exclusively for the weekend. It required us to make the Hackathon bigger (in terms of participants) - one of the biggest so far in fact - in order to scale the investment and making it worthwhile.


 * Jerusalem Hackathon - two new ideas that started in Israel were incorporated and refined in our concept for the Hackathon:
 * Pre-Hackathons: There was one held in Palestine just before the main event in Jersualem in 2016. While this event was a reaction to the challenge of closed borders and limited geographical mobility, we decided we want to use the same idea but to celebrate the freedom of mobility and absence of borders in Europe, by cooperating with our partners in the CEE region to host local Pre-Hackathons there and invite the organizers and some of their newcomers to the main event in Vienna. Thanks to the great spirit of collaboration the CEE community, there were Pre-Hackathons in Greece, Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. This helped to spread the impact an event like the Hackathon can have beyond the borders of the hosting country.
 * Hackathon preparation meetings: Related to the idea of Pre-Hackathons was the a local pre-event in order to help newcomers to get started with Mediawiki and get the best possible preparation for participating in the main event. Wikimedia Israel invited all registered newcomers shortly before the main event for an install party of Mediawiki and a general introduction to the Wikiverse. We build on this idea by hosting two pre-events (one for female/non-binary only (see below) and one for all genders), but organized them 6 weeks prior the main event and opened them for all interested participants (not only registered Hackathon attendees) as we thought some newcomers might need to get a taste of the Wikiverse before they want to commit a whole weekend to an event.


 * Jugend hackt / Ladies that FOSS / Rails Girls: We learned about the concept of mentoring programs by attending the Youth Hackathon "Jugend Hackt" in Linz in 2016. We were impressed by the results this event has in teaching young people to code, enabling them to generate first results and success stories in the course of a weekend and creating a sense of belonging in such a short time among a group of strangers. By adapting these pedagogical concepts for our vision of a Hackathon, we realized similar things have been tried before in even more like-minded communities and expanded our benchmarking to these ressources by talking to organizers from Rails Girls and Ladies that FOSS, whch was co-hosted by WMDE. Many of their ressources (e.g. handbooks, training material for mentors etc.) and learning went into the creation of our mentoring program and can be found in the documentation we created together witch our outreach freelancer around Hackathons.

New things we tried

 * Outreach and Mentoring coordinator: As growing the international and national tech community was one of the main goals of the Hackathon, we reflected this emphasis by establishing the role of a outreach and mentoring coordinator. The goal was to find new contributors (from like-minded communities etc) in Austria and coordinate with similar efforts by the WMF on an international level. In addition, it was the first time a mentoring program was applied to a Wikimedia tech event, we needed to adapt the concept, onboard potential mentors and coordinate mentors and newbies. As we did not have the capacity for this in our team, we hired a contractor to specifically work on these topics, as diversity and inclusion take time and resources, especially if we want to reach new audiences and promote equity in our movement. In the long run, if the mentoring program will continue we believe that a lot these tasks can be done by a group of experienced mentors but until then we recommend to allocate sufficient resources as part of the event team. The success of Vienna Hackathon shows that this is time and money well invested.
 * Post-event engagement: In addition to the Pre-Hackathons we also wanted to create opportunities for post-event engagement. As Wikidata was the most accessible project for many newcomers we hosted a Wikidata workshop in Vienna in fall which was organized by hackathon participants and also send two of them to attend WikidataCon to Berlin. Further similar activities are planned for 2018.
 * Plushie friendly event: Stuffed animals and mascots (some of them organized in the so-called Wikimedia Cuteness Association) became an integral part of our movement. Cuteness is the perfect ice-breaker between strangers and adds to an overall more fluffy and welcoming atmosphere at events. In addition there is scientific evidence that cuteness promotes productivity and positive social motivation. Hence, we proactively wanted to encourage cuteness at the Hackathon, inviting participants to bring their plush friends and making them feel welcome and appreciated by preparing special tiny name tags for them. We also had a cute welcoming committee at the registration desk, which became one of the most popular photo subjects of the event. The name tag idea already caught on and was successfully replicated at WikidataCon in Berlin.