User:CKoerner (WMF)/Notes from the second EMWCon

First, let me be totally forthcoming that I love MediaWiki and have done so since before I joined the foundation. The fact that there exists a yearly event to talk specifically about the software as a tool people can use in their endeavors is something I find incredibly exhilarating. I was the Program Chair for this event in my volunteer capacity. I attended and presented somewhere in-between. :)

In short, I'm a biased MediaWiki fanboy.

Organization
The Enterprise MediaWiki Spring 2017 event was held in mid-March in McLean, Virginia USA, a short 20 minute metro ride from Washington DC. The event was organized by volunteers, many of which have a history of participating in MediaWiki development as volunteers and MediaWiki usage as professionals.

Administrators, developers, users, and consultants all came together to share their projects and learn from what others are doing. The event was 3 days long. The first day consisted of sessions with multiple 15 to 45 minute presentations. The day ended with a panel stocked with representatives of 6 US government agencies discussing their use of MediaWiki inside organizations such as the CIA, NASA and the Department of Energy. Panel members also spoke about their use of wikis that support cross-agency support such as Statipedia.

The second day started with a presentation from Victoria Coleman, the CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation (video). In her presentation she shared the work within the foundation to support the use of MediaWiki - from Wikimedia Cloud services, to the new MediaWiki core team, to the support Technical Collaboration will provide for outreach to third-party users. The remainder of the day was a standard schedule of sessions and ample breaks for discussion.

A third day titled "Create Camp" ended the conference. This day hosted a round of short lighting talks in the morning on topics that came up during discussions. The remainder of the day was organized to allow folks to break out into groups to discuss tactical work in the areas that interested them.

Reception
34 people attended the event, with a peak of about 20 folks watching in the YouTube live stream (during Victoria's presentation). There were 20 scheduled presentations, one panel, and a smattering (about 6) lightning talks. One member was a recipient of a Wikimedia Travel and Participation grant. 4 folks came from outside the United States. 4 attendees, including myself, were from the Foundation - a first as far as I'm aware for a Wikimedia-related, but not Wikimedia-funded event.

The reception from attendees during and after the event was generally positive. One Wikimedia developer stated, "I got more out of this event than I did the Developer Summit." [Which I think is high praise, but gratuitous. :)]

The edit-a-thon hosted by Wikimania DC was attended by about a dozen or so EMWCon attendees along with members of the local chapter. By the end of the night upwards of 60 English Wikipedia articles were improved (by fixing broken links to whitehouse.gov).

Outcomes
At a local level there is more awareness of how other federal agencies are using MediaWiki. The community there already holds monthly online events and for a few individuals in attendance this was the first time to meet their peers in person. Many folks expressed this to myself and Cindy Cicalese, the general chair of the event.

One significant outcome was the fulfillment of a request from Victoria during her time at the event. She asked Cindy and others in attendance to help "prepare information on how the third-party MediaWiki community benefits the Wikimedia Foundation and what support the community would like from the Foundation."

The result was a very thorough and appreciated email to Victoria with participation from 13 participants. I'm happy to share the email if requested.

A few other notes:
 * Wikiapiary is moving to Labs (currently hosted on AWS) and there’s discussion of integrating it with pingback. Mark Hershberger and Gergo worked on it during our Create Camp day.
 * Two new extensions added to MediaWiki.org that didn’t have an entry before! We encouraged a few others to add theirs, but they haven’t yet.
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PluggableSSO
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PageNameFormula
 * Gergo was very helpful in discussing how the foundation and third-party MediaWiki users can work together. It was insightful hearing from a WMF developer on what could work at the event. (video)
 * Yaron Koren, an active community member and extension developer, announced the release of the second edition of his seminal book "Working With MediaWiki". For the first time the book is available to read online in its entirety. eBook and physical versions are also available.
 * The MediaWiki testimonials page hasn't seen any love in a few years. Gergo mentioned it during the event and I adopted it. Submissions are encouraged and welcomed!

I was asked by my team, Technical Collaboration, to find out how people kept aware of software changes to MediaWiki and surrounding ecosystem of extensions, scripts, and services. The majority of responses stated that they use the mailing lists (mediawiki-l and wikitech-l) along with following tasks in Phabricator.

As the program chair I had the fortune to open and close the event with two sessions. The first was a traditional 'introduction' where attendees went around the room and introduced themselves. I prompted the discussion with a few questions pertaining to their experiences working with MediaWiki. The last session of the second day was titled, "Building confidence in your wiki" where I then took some of the best practices, challenges, and remarks I heard during the event and prompted attendees to edit an Etherpad with me to add their notes. The result was the start of a new page on Mediawiki.org titled Best practices for using MediaWiki. A resource for current and future MediaWiki users on how to best introduce and utilize a wiki inside organizations.

While not directly related to EMWCon, the Vienna hackathon track for the MediaWiki Stakeholders' user group (titled, "Fantastic MediaWikis and How to Maintain Them") will, in part, continue the discussions around how third-party contributors can work with the Foundation to create a shared future for MediaWiki.

Conclusion
I found the conference to be more of the same given my MediaWiki-centric background as a volunteer. However there was a promising twist with the attendance of Victoria and two WMF developers. It was great opportunity to meet new contributors, encourage existing developers to participate more (like adding their extensions to the MediaWiki.org repository!), and to discuss the future use of MediaWiki as a tool for sharing knowledge. I walked away from the event satisfied that it was well worth the time of the people who attended, valuable to the folks that presented, and successful in furthering the relationships within the MediaWiki community.