Volunteer coordination and outreach/ECT July 2013 quarterly review

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

Nurturing volunteers

 * created a QA list & have ramped up training & mentorship
 * got ~20 OPW/GSoC interns, ~30% of them women or genderqueer
 * using lessons learned from previous rounds to ensure more frequent communication & clear expectations of outcomes
 * current trainee is working on automated testing for VE, which is a good way to have an apprentice work on a high-priority project
 * moved from the consistency of "the wheel" to a more opportunistic & flexible approach
 * met with Analytics, Ops, and UX to lay groundwork for volunteer onramp in next year
 * up from 11 to 13 non-WMF maintainers of MediaWiki core
 * including shepherding & discussion around a controversial contributor
 * 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
 * Amsterdam hackathon
 * [talk about stats]
 * roughly a third of all Toolserver tools/bots have now moved to Labs?
 * Connected volunteers with grant opportunities (IEG/Participation Support)

Tech communications

 * Tech News
 * volunteers are helping
 * part of release management
 * Lua rollout
 * lent Guillaume to VisualEditor effort

Bugzilla

 * incremental code improvements -- in BZ, front page, weekly report email, etc.
 * social improvements: admin policy is clear & stated, bz tips blogging, office hours, team meetings

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
 * will stick to OPW/GSoC which is clearly under our remit, and leave professional development stuff to contributors & their managers


 * Volunteer product management/advising
 * LCA is innovating with the Community Liaisons and showing very interesting results
 * ECT (Sumana) has not focused on metamentoring the volunteers who do show up, and will start feeding them to Maggie


 * Mentorship programs
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_5
 * [check where the women came from who applied to GSoC/OPW - how they heard/decided to apply]


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

Next
For the next quarter:
 * We teach several (10+) 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[1], and grow Tech Ambassadors membership.

In the next several months: Gathering community metrics (using Grimoire), plus our ongoing activities re summer mentorship, tech communications, bug management, and volunteer outreach & events

Questions
We need your help to best serve the movement.

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

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

We want to work well with LCA/Community liaisons.
 * Which projects will be getting liaisons after VE push ends?
 * I think we're avoiding duplicating effort reasonably well - am I right?
 * Can we ask the liaisons to help us grow tech ambassadors membership by recommending it to likely community members?

We want to fix coding and review bottlenecks.
 * are JavaScript and security the top priorities?
 * Tech talks & helping produce & curate videos/tutorials - ok approach?
 * What about performance and Puppetization?
 * (Not addressing possible idea of an additional review level.)

We want to help increase our deployment frequency.
 * how much will automated testing help?
 * where should we target it?
 * targeting very popular gadgets & bots like HotCat, Twinkle, and SineBot - good idea?
 * user scripts - out of scope?