Developer Relations

The Engineering Community team supports software projects aiming to create and share free knowledge in the context of Wikimedia. We are part of the Community Engagement department at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Our primary focus are developers of MediaWiki extensions, apps, tools, gadgets, bots, templates, and other users of our APIs. We also engage with editors contributing technical feedback and documentation.

Our purpose is to
 * promote community health: communication, outreach, partnerships, onboarding, retention.
 * maintain community workflows: collaboration tools, documentation, processes.
 * support community events: online, offline, internship programs.

Since July 2014 we have three main goals that provide direction to our activities:
 * A sane developer experience
 * One developer platform
 * Engage established communities

For more details, you can check the Engineering Community team 2014-15 quarterly goals.

We use Phabricator to plan and execute our tasks. We have an Engineering Community team workboard and we organize monthly sprints.

We're on IRC in the (low-traffic) channel,. You should probably discuss topics of broader interest in the broader relevant channels, such as or.

Main areas

 * Bug management
 * Phabricator/Migration
 * Outreach programs
 * Events/Coordination
 * Documentation/Improvement

Regular activities
These are regular tasks that usually don't make it to our goals or backlogs explicitly, but take a significant portion of our time and attention.

Everywhere (within reason)

 * Help newcomers with technical questions, reporting their first bugs, or looking for first tasks to contribute.
 * Help keeping discussions friendly, intervening in specific situations if needed.

Phabricator

 * Scan new tasks, bringing them into good shape and looking for potential issues that need escalation.
 * Triage old tasks in order to push forward bugs or feature requests that require higher attention, or resolving obsolete reports.
 * Oversee the creation and renaming of new projects.
 * Assist Operations in the Volunteer NDA process.
 * Assist Release Engineering handling Phabricator bugs and feature requests, and upstreaming Wikimedia requests.

For a more detailed description of workflows, see Bugwrangler.

Events

 * Plan and run a continuous stream of online Tech Talks and Wikimedia Tech meetups in San Francisco.
 * Help organizing logistics Wikimedia Foundation Engineering team off-sites, including in person support when required.

Gerrit

 * Check old open code reviews in Gerrit in order to push for updates, bring new reviewers, or close the review.

State of the Communities

 * Elaborate a summary of relevant Engineering Community events for State of the Communities, an internal weekly report from Community Engagement to Lila Tretikov.
 * From these weekly summaries, select a few to be showcased in State of the Communities at the monthly Metrics meeting.

Past activities

 * MediaWiki architecture document
 * Wikimedia blog maintenance
 * Summer of Code 2011/management
 * Summer of Code 2012/management
 * Wikimedia engineering 20% policy
 * Project management tools/Review
 * Technical communications
 * Volunteer coordination and outreach