Wikimedia Developer Summit/2016/Scope

As stated in the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016 introduction, 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. This page attempts to enumerate and organize the areas of focus to collaboratively build a productive and fulfilling event. As of this writing in September 2015, this probably doesn't represent an exhaustive enumeration of all focus areas, and editing/commenting is welcome.

Backend internals
Stakeholders: TechOps, Readers, Editors (anyone helping improve our performance, privacy, security, and stability of Wikimedia software)

Areas of focus: Configuration, debugging, storage services, linking, media backend, parsing architecture and iterative improvements, backend efficiency, database use

APIs/Interfaces/Protocols
Stakeholders: Developers wanting to build applications with access to Wikimedia-hosted data, Tool labs, Wikidata

Areas of focus: Action API, RESTBase, CentralNotice, HTML templating, metadata, data presentation (e.g. mobile frontend), parsed output access, SOA, thumbnail access and storage, Wikidata/Wikimedia-site integrations

User interface presentation
Stakeholders: Readers (usability), Editors (usability)

Areas of focus: styling, interface responsiveness, media presentation, skins

Software management
Stakeholders: Developers wanting to build dev/test instances, non-Wikimedia MW maintainers

Areas of focus: software management, assembling backend code modules (e.g. Composer), installing MediaWiki and supporting components, release strategy (e.g. performing updates and impact on dev work), how outside open source gets used on Wikimedia infrastructure, and if/how it gets distributed from Wikimedia (e.g. as part of MediaWiki tarballs).

Functionality
Stakeholders: Curators/Moderators, Editors, Readers

Areas of focus: improving user experience through increasing productivity and/or increasing joy in using our software. Improving our site by making quality contribution easy, and making it easy/automatic to counteract negative contribution. Making it easier to learn how to use our sites."The initial version of this page is based pretty closely on the 'RfC cluster' structure of the 2014 meeting, and borrows a lot of structure and wording from it."