Pune Hackathon Feb 2012/Postmortem

From mediawiki.org

Plans (reverse chronological[edit]

Notes from the event: http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/123

Notes from Sumana, 10 Feb 2012[edit]

What I'm hearing about the event:

  • about 40 attendees on Saturday (how many Friday and Sunday?)
  • From preilly: "we didn't have too many qualified people and things were a bit of a mess" on Saturday
  • questions re lab setup, expertise level of attendees
  • lots of MediaWiki flyers got handed out -- good!


Notes from Sumana, 9 Feb 2012[edit]

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation/Tutorial is now up https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile/PhoneGap/Tutorial is up the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pune_Hackathon_Feb_2012/Topics page is fairly usable working on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker/Workshop for Arthur to use parts of


31 Jan 2012[edit]

Alolita, Tomasz, Rachel, Siebrand, Sumana

12 hours ago, banners started. Now at 130+ requesters (which is 60 more than it was yesterday)

  • TODO: Alolita will ask Kaldari to take banners down ASAP
  • Alolita to add input today on the people who have requested invitations.
  • Siebrand to go through requesters/registrants tomorrow, then get Sumana's help

Alolita notified & invited teams & asked them to register:

  • Red Hat
  • Canonical
  • IBM
  • CDAC
  • Alolita will send another ping by end of day today to understand that we're gonna close registration

Brion Vibber will not be coming. DAMN! So, how do we cover gadgets? Considering getting Santhosh & Amir to brush up with tutorial (or whoever is going to do gadgets portion).

  • Alolita & Tomasz to consider restructuring hackathon to remove gadgets focus and just say "mobile, i18n, & OTHER STUFF"

Gadgets: Srikanth & Arun have looked in the Indic namespace for the desired gadgets

  • 1) user profiles, saving plug-in settings
  • 2) local geo coordinates - when you log in you will get relevant content to your location

These will be sprint ideas, not necessarily goals.

  • Sumana to ask Maggie Dennis whether these exist already

Final WMF: 1. Tomasz 2. Siebrand 3. Alolita 4. Santhosh 5. Yuvi 6. Amir 7. Patrick 8. Arthur 9. Rachel


Alolita brings up ideas of social networking integration work, APIs - is this something that people might want to work on at hackathon? (community-developed Extension: WikiShare -- to iterate) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiShare

Alolita: she'll lead the addition of ideas re i18n and mobile

At SF hackathon, Alolita led an i18n tutorial; At the SF hackathon in January, Alolita taught a few people about internationalisation and localization and captured some links in this Etherpad: http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/i18hackathon which we are editing to create a better tutorial

She gave a general intro to problem, explaining where we are. She walked through each of the major extensions that i18n has developed, breaking down where functionality lives regarding: 1) input 2) output 3) searching

She went through it from a tools perspective and from a user perspective, including overviews of the major extensions:

  • Narayam
  • WebFonts
  • Translate (I might have gotten this wrong)

One of Alolita's students was Korean, so she worked with him to show him what Korean fonts were available and to see how one would add them to add to WebFonts. She suggested that we could do the same with translate.

Then she wrote a simple unit test for one of the i18n extensions, with Jeremy.

All in all, this took about 75 minutes, including Q&A.

Alolita is happy to work with me and work with the i18n dev team to make sure we have the right hands-on exercises. Perhaps something involving looking at Narayam, taking the example of a specific language, and walking through webfonts? I'm sorry to say that I didn't catch specifically what the exercise idea was.

Alolita is happy to work with Sumana, work with i18n dev team to make sure we have the right # in terms of exercises


Question: what will Friday tutorial session (1pm-6pm) be? Alolita: Intro to MediaWiki (write an extension) and then breakout into: Intro to Mobile Intro to i18n - http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/i18hackathon Intro to Gadgets MAYBE

Tomasz asks: is doing them all on 1 day better? Friday's best because it conflicts less with GNU stuff and we could rerun tutorials Sat if needed


Alolita plans on setting up Symbiosis labs computers with LAMP + MediaWiki on Friday if that's already set up

  • Alolita to talk to Harshad tomorrow morning

What's necessary? LAMP MediaWiki Android SDK already downloaded w/ Android SDK 2.3.3 full SVN checkout of MediaWiki & extensions full git clone of .... mobile app, +?


Prefer to have / use your own laptop for development Alolita will ping Arthur for leading the Mediawiki intro with hands-on example Use Andrew Garrett's talk for the MW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zlGo-hrnt8

We're asking everyone to bring laptops, but we'll also have labs machines available. About 40 computers in 1 room and 60 in the other

So, people arrive at 1pm speech Allot an hour for setup Arthur to do Intro to MediaWiki Extensions using https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker/Workshop as a basis. Follow the example given by Arthur https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zlGo-hrnt8

  • Alolita to check with Arthur
  • Alolita to ask Harshad whether he has any video capabilities in these rooms

Most important to record: Internationalisation tutorial & Intro to MediaWiki tutorial. Video is best, audio is great.

26 Jan 2012[edit]

Rachel, Tomasz, Alolita, Siebrand

  • Gadgets - 1) user profiles, saving plug-in settings, 2) local geo coordinates - when you log in you will get relevant content to your location
  • Mobile
  • Language


Workshop - half a day on the first day of the hackathon(10th), everyone that registers for the hackathon has to go through the workshop.

Attending: -Engineering students, undergrad/grad school - Java, Php, Ruby -Open source developers - ubuntu, etc. -Professional developers 1/3 - have some significant dev. exp. ratio mentors/attendees: 1/10

TODO -Two email threads @engineerings at:

  • geolocation - article recommendations
  • poke Brion & others- for "cool gadget ideas, also post on the media wikipage

-Alolita: poke Praveen -Central notice Sat&Sun -

Other: -Siebrand has about 25 bugs for a "bug squash sprint" -Build out indic landing page


18 Jan 2012[edit]

Alolita, Rachel, and Sumana

We're at 60 attendees want to get at least 40 more

We have the banner ready

Rachel will ask Heather to print sticker design, banner, website banner, and tee shirt design


  • Sumana to email got@gnunify.in (GNUnify org team) -- DONE as of 20 January

Ashish Ashwin Harshad Sudhanwa Srikanth Arun Ganesh


We need to map out ideas with Tomasz & Siebrand

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects/features#Potential_features

update the webpage

This Fri the 20th, use the banner, GeoIP across India via CentralNotice

Alolita has talked to Shantanu of GoT, who is coordinator for our conference.


Shantanu has multiple people interested in joining hackathon & participating in workshop. Alolita asked him to ask them to register.

  • Alolita to send him the reg URL in an email, to got@gnunify.in, and addressing to Shantanu.


Tomasz, Siebrand, Alolita, Sumana to talk about topics & projects for Pune hackathon -- Monday 30 January? and then Alolita will get Heather to update wikipage.

Alolita has confirmed some folks like Ashish Dubey from Delhi. Alolita has added him to spreadsheet Arun Ganesh is coming Srikanth is coming Yuvi is recommending someone

All the folks from Pune

We will have a gathering there after hackathon, in the evening

We will talk 1:1 to some select attendees

  • Alolita to look at Mumbai attendee list to find Planemad (Arun Ganesh) + additional UI designer that Phil was seeking. DONE as of 20 Jan -- Phil already talked to Arun and it was not him.
  • Rachel to set up Alolita/Siebrand/Tomasz/Phil/Brion(optional) meeting on Mon or Tues next week for project discussion

Sumana can read it offline and then follow up with possible 30 Jan 2012 talk.


Learning materials:

  • Language --- for extensions such as narayam, webfonts, different extensions --- current sprint adds user docs to all those extensions.
  • Mobile --- will improve via SF hackathon
  • Gadgets -- will improve via SF hackathon, and via varnent's IRC workshop
  • Sumana to ask Siebrand to put down lessons learned from the last time that he taught Intro to MediaWiki in Pune last year.

Arthur did a How To Become a MediaWiki hacker presentation at GNUnify last year.

  • Sumana to ask him for his thoughts, ideas, contributions.
  • Alolita to move forward with CentralNotice banner, get Language pluralized, possibly Register Now turned into Request an Invitation, and then push forward to get it launched as a geonotice.


21 December[edit]

Do we go for quality or volume?

60 people can comfortably work in each lab?

We will get about 60 serious participants each day, Alolita thinks.

Since we have 6 good engineers at least...

Does Phonegap/Nitobi have any experts in the area who can come?

Alolita says there are MediaWiki folks in and around Pune & Red Hat. Ramki, for example, worked on MediaWiki as a CMS for a RH education program. Ramki Sudhanwa Sankarshan Harshad's lab folks

  • Alolita will get Sumana those names & emails by Friday

We'll send out invitations to 160% to 200% of the number of participants we want. Bias to local cities.

  • Siebrand to add that question to the reg form

"are you local or are you traveling from another city? if so, where? mandatory question


70 in 1 lab, 45 in another. Remove 10 slots for WMF people...

about 8 engineers + 4 local mentors = 12 mentors. 12 * 6 = 72 participants to try to get in the door each day so, target approx 140 confirmations (send about 140 invitations)


21 Dec 2011[edit]

Present: Siebrand, Sumana, Alolita, Rachel

To discuss: registration & Pune volunteers

Registration

  • Alolita to ensure that Harshad gets us listed on GNUnify website, have a reg link to our "request an invitation" page on the GNUnify registration page. Will cc us.

We'll be listed on the main conference program.

we need to do expectation setting around walk-ins

What if we have filled up and cannot let people in?

we have 2 large labs. Should we use 1, use 2, have breakouts on the same floor (one lab is ~40 Linux desktop PCs, the other is 70 Windows 2008 SP2 terminal clients)


Eventbrite or GDocs?

  • can you do a survey, throw people into a waiting list, & then approve or not? -> Google Docs

Siebrand will just copy and paste previously used Mumbai form. -> DONE

Pune volunteers:

  • sudhanwa jogelekar - chapter poc
  • Harshad Gune
  • ashwin baindur - wikipedian from pune = non-technical but interested in outreach - wikipedian / language support
  • Mandar Kulkarni .... Alolita to get his e-mail

Arthur Richards Siebrand Mazeland Alolita Sharma Rachel Farrand Santhosh Thottingal (local) Amir Aharoni Brion Vibber Tomasz Finc Yuvi Panda (local) Patrick Reilly

Total: 10 staff members

This allows for about 9 * 6 = max. 60 attendees.

TODO[edit]

  • get updated e-mail address on OTRS queue (Siebrand)
  • set up Google Docs form/spreadsheet (Sumana/Siebrand) - DONE
  • Alolita to ping Kul
  • Mandar Kulkarni .... Alolita to get his email
  • Alolita to ensure that Harshad gets us listed on GNUnify website, have a reg link to our "request an invitation" page on the GNUnify registration page. Will cc us.

14 Dec 2011[edit]

Present: Siebrand, Sumana, Erik, Phil, Tomasz, Alolita, Dana I.

Kick off planning for Pune hackathon (10-12 February 2012). https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pune_Hackathon_Feb_2012

Background[edit]

Alolita: Folks from Symb. Uni have offered to host the event; college of Computer Science. Some WMF people have already been there before. In November or before that. Have been teaching open source for 12 years or so already. GNUnify conference is having its 10th anniversary.

Good pool of candidates to work on mobile, language, APIs

Good infrastructure. Good wifi. 2 floors with computer: 40 Linux PC's, 70 terminals - Windows 2008.

Harshad is main contact for this event.

Budget: 180K for all hackathons in this fiscal year, already a bit over for SF and Mumbai hackathon. EM does not want to spend too much money on it, will help us reach the goal of 6 hackathons/year. Main expenses are travel expenses - food, venue, wifi will be provided, lodging likely $40/night. Wants to keep event capped at 15K total. Should be able to sponsor a few volunteers, but not a large group.


(hackathon budget for this fiscal year is including Berlin in April/May + possibly 1 additional event)


Previous talks @ GNUnify

  • Training event - shape and ownership

Who at WMF will own this project? Alolita.[edit]

Sumana: busy with SF hackathon, WMDE hackathon, Wikimania hackathon. Can do outreach and prepare materials (e.g. tutorials), would prefer if someone else could own registration process, event management, etc. EM prefers that Rachel + Alolita do event mgmt. If Sumana is not there, EM wants someone else to fill her role - maybe Tomasz? Tomasz vetoes Yuvi. maybe Brion? Brion would be great for the training sessions, but who will do the catherding? maybe Arthur? help from Santhosh.

Tomasz and Sumana to circle back re site facilitation

Outreach: Sumana Ahead-of-time online work: Siebrand Symbiosis relationship: Alolita Owner of event: Alolita

help from Chapter folks for outreach, Alolita to send Sumana contact details of people ASAP

Symbiosis has relationship with Global Education program, should check-in with Global Education.

Who's the audience, & how many?[edit]

Audience for GNUnify -- primarily these students? About 50/50. Lots of industry developers as well.

How much screening & audience control should we do? 

We should conduct a MediaWiki workshop, halfday or something, on Friday the 10th, that is mandatory for everyone whether they have experience or not.  Qualification event.

About the same size as Mumbai, targeting 120-150 participants. We may get 70-80 people each day. Developers, students, interns.

Travel[edit]

How many Wikimedia experts should we fly in, and whom? (1 seed on 6 attendees) Looks like SFO-BOM vice versa is about USD 1300.00. 1, Brion 2. Tomasz 3. Siebrand (see proposed travel schedule below) 4. Alolita 5. Santhosh 6. Yuvi (can travel there cheaply) 7. Amir 8. Patrick 9. Arthur 10. Rachel 11. [maximum in budget?]

  • Sumana can go if necessary
  • Arthur? <- yes please. Very outgoing. Can teach about gadgets
  • Patrick?
  • Max Semenik?
  • Phil?
  • TODO:
    • Sumana to create spreadsheet
    • Dana to update Rachel and Laura on event
    • Dana to send email end of month asking team if they want to attend FOSDEM (Feb 4-5, Brussels, Belgium) and/or continue on to India, get managerial approval


What topics should we focus on at the event (probably within gadgets, localization, mobile and offline)?[edit]

Alolita: proposes gadgets because she thinks there's a lot of interest from JavaScript developers that can contribute in user space. Good area to develop since it ties in to mobile apps world, is a good landing place for people to get started.

Sumana: who can teach on that? (besides Brion)

    • Maybe Roan can provide material

Let's consider removing offline... limited resources...

  • Maybe do a one-hour workgroup, remote in with Emmanuel

OK, so, remove offline. (instead, Tomasz & Sumana to work with Emmanuel on strengthening offline volunteer community in general)

  • Alolita, Tomasz, Brion to talk with Erik about what topics the eng department wants out of GSoC, tell Sumana

What will our Symbiosis contact cover, and what will WMF cover?[edit]

Harshad is our contact They will cover food

Local volunteers -- get list from Alolita? Siddhartha?

they can do outreach

  • TODO: Alolita to give Sumana

Postmortem[edit]

Pune Hackathon 2012 Feedback: Feb 10-12, 2012

What worked well[edit]

  • Multiple Choice Questions worked to weed out attendees that would not be able to keep up.
  • Doing the tutorials the day before was a huge help
  • Meeting people, communicating and learning people's needs was great.
    • In particular, meeting the organization volunteers and the participating students a day before was excellent - both for mingling and for actual work. I found a new localizer for the Bhojpuri language thanks to this - i would probably miss him during the event itself. (He's still active.)
  • Preparing USB drives with MediaWiki and mobile SDK was a very good idea.
  • The fact that there was a Mozilla event at the same time, allowed cross-pollination. We had participants from them, and we participated in their event. This was extremely useful and productive.
  • Food and drinks during the event were fine.
  • Because we screened after the workshops, the seed ratio was manageable. Without it, it wouldn't have been.

What didn't work well[edit]

  • WIFI was a huge problem at the start
  • Not enough whiteboards
  • Unbalanced work groups
  • Small but focused turnout
  • Not enough domain experts for MW Core and gadgets
    • the mobile team had to backfill this
    • Would be great to have core platform devs
  • Need more mentors (WMF engineers) for each project group (or fewer projects if the funding is lower)
    • Should focus on building local mentors so we don't necessarily need WMF employees to lead these.
  • Commuting. A lot of time was wasted on the roads. -> hotels closer to venue is paramount.
  • i18n / L10n general technical documentation needs more structure (being addressed by Jon Harald in the next month)
  • Our participant selection process is based on just text input from subscribers. We had to send 50% away after a workshop and an easy questionnaire. We need to screen before inviting people. Solutions TBD. People don't need to know everything, but we need to find out if they're smart enough to participate. -> proposed solutions: require open source commit links, actually talk to people beforehand, or at least have an e-mail conversation (takes a lot of effort, though).
  • We need a clear definition of "Hackathon" , in hackathon page, that anybody understand and not confuse with Hacking in security context. I think we should even consider rebrandig it in India (and possibly everywhere). -> the bad connotation might scare the right people off. Having something more neutral ("developer days" is used by Yahoo!), might attract more of the right people.
  • Internet connectivity was pretty flaky the first day. Even though user/pass was announced clearly, it wasn't clear that an authentication window shouldn't be closed. -> ???
  • No group photos to publish. There was a photographer, but despite promises, no pictures were shared. -> spam India contacts to make a priority of this, and get more info on this beforehand.
  • Mass communication during and immediately after was badly organised. Gerard wanted to blog and had the time, but he wasn't fed with stories. -> Own responsibility?
  • Follow-up: we need to retain the champions and provide some further career opportunities.
  • Platform inconsistencies in computer lab
  • Cultural issues in communication around computer lab setup
  • Not enough knowledge/understanding around revision control (SVN, git)

What still puzzles us[edit]

  • Attracting i18n developers from FOSS projects- eg: Debian, and Local language computing projects(SMC, FTC). Those developers are not connected to Mediawiki or not wikimedians. -> use the cross-pollination approach? (always have two events at the same venue). If we connect our dev days events always to another conference or dev days meetup, we will naturally have cross-pollination.
  • How to get exactly the people that we want if we don't know them yet, or if there are no online sources about them.

Ideas for next time[edit]

  • Need to develop a pre-qualification test (Coding test) for walk-ins;

(we had 50 walk-ins, and only 2 or 3 were qualified and good value)

  • Run Revision Control workshop at the begining of the hackathon (tomasz) -- http://openhatch.org/missions/git
  • Maintain the "easy bugs" list. It's really nice for novices!
  • Have remote experts on-call (via IRC, video chat where possible)
  • Prepare VM with the necessary software stack using VirtualBox and preload on USB sticks to avoid set-up nightmares
    • send a note out to wikitech-l to see if someone is interested in helping to prepare something like that
  • Point participants to openhatch.org revision control 'training missions' (or similar) beforehand: http://openhatch.org/missions/svn , http://openhatch.org/missions/git
    • Tell people 2 weeks ahead of time to do various tutorials - send them materials ahead of time

There are a few FOSS developers, language technology contributors outside Mediawiki developer/user community. They are also outside wikimedia editor community. They are already pre occuppied with their own pet projects and community activities. We need to think about how we can attract them. eg: My own petproject codevelopers

Link to gdoc with names of people WMF staff liked and wanted to keep in contact with. https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqAl4MqhrMUYdDVSa1dQM3RiRW9UOWFIM3BhUzBiNVE

About 20-30 people over the weekend. Good quality people. And it was, by then, a good expert-to-newbie ratio, and a very heavy WMF-to-volunteer ratio (1:2 or 1:3).

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