CIS-A2K/Community Collaboration/Form/Submitted/Indic Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 Bhubaneswar

Basic Information

Name of the Event/Activity

Indic Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 Bhubaneswar

Type of Event/Activity

Hackathon (in-person)

Purpose of the Event/Activity

The Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 is an event organized by the Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group (aka, Indic-TechCom) in collaboration with the Odia Wikimedians User Group. It will take place in Bhubaneswar during 20-22 December 2024 (19 Dec is Day 0).

Wikimedia hackathons are spaces for developers, designers, content editors, and other community stakeholders to collaborate on building technical solutions that help improve the experience of contributors and consumers of Wikimedia projects. The event is intended for:
- Technical contributors active in the Wikimedia technical ecosystem, which includes developers, maintainers (admins/interface admins), translators, designers, researchers, documentation writers, etc.
- Content contributors who have an in-depth understanding of technical issues in their home Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc., and can give developers their insights as to how the tech aspects should work.
- Contributors to any other FOSS community or have participated in Wikimedia events in the past, and would like to get started with contributing to Wikimedia technical spaces.

Expected start date and end date of the Event/Activity

We are currently in the prep stage. The event dates are 20-22 December 2024 (Dec 19 is Day 0). We expect to close all related proceedings of the event (such as reimbursements etc.) by 31 December 2024.

List of users who proposed the Event/Activity

All organizers can be seen at Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneshwar 2024

For CIS-A2K point of contact:

From user group:

New Organizers in the user group:

Organizers from Odiya Wikimedia User Group:

Official UG email: contact indicmediawikidev org

Program and Metrics

Agenda/Program of the Event/Activity

Drawing from our experiences with the past few hackathons, we are introducing a slightly revised program format and participation structure for the upcoming event. Traditionally, tasks are published a few days before the event begins, and participants then select their preferred tasks on the first day. While this approach works, it poses a challenge as some participants may find themselves without tasks that align closely with their skill sets or interests. Additionally, although bugs can be addressed during the hackathon, measuring collective impact can be challenging. To address this, we have curated the tasks for this hackathon in such a way that a set of tasks collectively contributes to the substantial development of a tool or workflow, thereby progressing it to a stable version. We hope that this approach not only fosters engagement during the event but also encourages continued participation post-event, allowing developers to collaborate further on tasks until they reach completion.

You can see the list of curated tasks on this Google Spreadsheet

As part of the scholarship application, each applicant has been asked to indicate at least two tasks they would like to collaborate on. After the scholarship selections are made, each mentor/facilitator will coordinate with the respective scholarship recipients of the project, and have an orientation call with them. During the orientation call, the goal will be to make the participants (especially newcomers) familiar with the Wikimedia technical spaces, setup and create a plan for 3-days of the hackathon for the respective projects. The idea is to set some goals and a broad implementation plan for the hackathon, and scope what can be achieved in 3 days. If time permits, some work may start before the event.

During the event, participants will briefly share about the projects and get started to work on them. As we would have done preparatory work already, we want to kickstart work on the hacking projects as soon as possible. We expect to spend 80% of the time during the program on hacking tasks. Rest of the 20% of the program will be reserved for sessions such as intro, showcase, social activity and any session that might be of interest to the participants.

Expected Outcomes from the Event/Activity planned

We have curated 17 projects and some participants have proposed self-defined projects. While it is not possible to complete all of them, we hope to complete at least 10 projects/tools substantially, to the stage where they can be used more widely by the community and other stakeholders. This is a minimum target. In addition, as it is with any other in-person event, one of the key takeaways for participants will be improving connections, which is much needed for the technical community in India. We have allocated scholarship slots in such a way that there is a balance of newcomers, experienced users, various genders, and various technical groups active in India, such as VGLUG, RoadtoWiki, IIITH etc. This will ensure minimum representation from each of these groups, and thereby building collaborations across the technical community in India.

In addition, we have included 3 new organizers and 2 new organizers for a hackathon in the team, and some of them were TTT participants. This will help to apply their learnings in organizing the hackathon and foster new leadership in the user group.

Expected number of attendees

50-55 (including organisers)

Post Event/Activity Engagement

Follow-up engagement plan post the event/activity

Post event, we will invite all participants to join the Indic Wikimedia technical forum telegram channel and continue engaging in the discussions there. In addition, having pre-event curated hacking tasks will give us the advantage of using them as a follow-up as well. If there is still some pending work to get a project to completion, towards the end of the hackathon, the respective project groups will brainstorm about the next steps and timeline. We will use that to continue working on them post hackathon as well. In addition, if there are any projects that haven’t been taken up during the hackathon, we will re-group participants who have completed their tasks and continue engaging them post hackathon.

Budget

The budget we’re requesting is INR 200,000 to INR 250,000.

Please note that this will be an extension to the funds we have from the User Group Annual Plan grant.

We received an enormous response to the call for scholarships with over 180+ applications from various groups like experienced developers, RoadToWiki, VGLUG, amFOSS, SATI, IIIT-H, editors with technical knowledge, new developers, local and state participants. With the funds available to use, we will only be able to provide scholarships to 25-30 people. This additional budget will help us to expand the scholarship support to additional 6-8 people. We estimated that the cost of each scholarship participation is around INR 35,000 (considering air travel, 4 nights of accommodation, and incidental expenses).