Wikimedia Technical Conference/2018/Session notes/Report Outs and Closing

From mediawiki.org
  • What did you learn, who do you want to thank,
  • Bryan - thanks to Josh for last session and deck, for getting mostly engineers to engage in product planning.
  • Fisch:  I learned a lot about facilitating sessions that get a lot of engagement.  People seemed really engaged. And we made good progress on action items. Lots of involvement by everyone.
  • Brion: I learned some exciting things about administration tools around wiki farms - we at foundation need to up our game on working with people doing this stuff, and share a little more. Shout out to notetakers, important work and thankless.
  • Jon: I want to thank the organizers for including product.  It was great hanging out and taking part. It felt really inclusive.  I was even able to understand some of our technical issues more. Also want to thank ?? for helping us understand some of the issues translators face.
  • Daniel: Thanks to product people for listening to technobabble and getting feedback.  We often come to a point in tech discussions where we think we can’t make a tradeoff and tend to end there. Establishing feedback loop, this is what we want, this is how we can do things differently, important to share.
  • Subbu: Liked the fact that it was more workshoppy than presentation-based
  • Aaron: I’m excited about some of the convos we’ve had around the core mediawiki platform, e.g., growth of the revision table, grateful to Tim for promising to take that on to some extent, and I commit to helping out with that
  • TheDJ: At times it's been said we're not great at planning and brainstorming and etc, but when we're kept on the rails we really are! Thanks for input to some of the sessions, that not only came out of registration forms, but a lot of work by the platform team, interviews by people like greg cindy deb corey, registering and working it out, lydia and birgit, thanks.
  • Nick: shout out to Michael and Irene for doing an equal or more job on notetaking, and all people helping transcribe sticky notes, addshore and alex and others, when all others were talking.
  • Josh: possibility of crusher extension, 3rd party solution for making tables more manageable on mobile - looking forward to looking into that. Thanks to all for giving energy in last session.  Thanks to organizers for all the work put in.
  • Alexia: Thanks to Cindy for nominating me and giving me the opportunity to come here, to WMF for scholarship.  As a dev it’s nice to meet people in person rather than just interacting through bug reports. Makes it more about working together and coming to common understanding, and not just being angry at each other.

Toby

  • I want to thank you all.  When Victoria was leaving yesterday, we had a moment. I said thank you for inviting my dept, the collaboration is great - she thanked us for coming.
  • On behalf of Victoria, who is currently in Taiwan making the internet safe, we both found this conference to be really inspiring, coming together, collaborating. This was a doing conference.
  • Special thanks to those who came from really far away. All Foundation depts, WMDE, Community members, users of MW from outside the Foundation.  Let’s continue to work together and show the world the strength of open collaboration and free knowledge.
  • Thanks to the people who made it possible. The program committee - TheDJ, Birgit, Greg, Kate Chapman, Corey Floyd.
  • Organizing team: Rachel Farrand, Deb Tankersley, Lauren Miranda, Irene Tait
  • Notetakers: Nick Wilson, Michael Holloway, Irene Tait

Corey

  • Thanks to everyone. We know this is a different conference than we're used to. Everyone put in a big effort. Big ideas at the beginning, and worked through the problems.
  • Interesting to see people go through these big ideas.  We talk a lot about collaboration but there’s a lot of hard work when you dig into things.
  • There's a LOT of follow-up work.  This conference has strong commitments coming out of it.
  • We’re going to be going through all of these things, looking at the action items, we might be doing some things ourselves but it’ll also lead to lots of work for other teams.
  • Process stuff: We've identified many gaps, and we’re already getting commitments from Toby on some of them.  Fit in maintenance planning. Not waste volunteers’ time.
  • Greg: Thanks to Corey and Kate specifically for doing a ton of work.

Deb:  

  • Thanks to program committee for turning up to early meetings, doing vast quantities of work, talking to stakeholders and participants before this.
  • This was a very different conference. Victoria gave us less than 6 months to plan it. We wanted it to be specific to a topic, not just come and talk for 4 days.
  • This event was something that we hand-picked all of you here, and you all showed up and participated.  That’s a lot of energy.
  • Housekeeping: next is docs session, photos are going up on Commons and also in phab tasks.
  • Thanks to Rachel for being an awesome Event Manager. Really missed her when she was on sabbatical.

Rachel

  • Please submit ideas for the feedback survey - things we should do differently next year and other questions to ask.
  • [logistics for tonight]