Grants:Project/Rapid/SuperHamster/Hackathon 2022 District of Columbia/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2022-23 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

• To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/SuperHamster/Hackathon 2022 District of Columbia.
• You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
• You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Links

• DC Hackathon 2022 event page
• Photos on the Wikimedia Commons

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

With strong interest from participants, we expanded from our original plan of one day of hacking to three days of hacking (Friday through Sunday). On Friday, we had the fortune of using WeWork space provided by the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as our Friday night social as Duke's Grocery in Foggy Bottom. On Saturday and Sunday, we had two rooms at the Cove coworking space in DuPont Circle to use for collaboration and watching presentations. Thanks to donated space, good pricing, and fewer participants than planned, we managed to run the event under budget despite expanding to three days.

We had a healthy number of participants show up throughout all three days, some of which came in from outside the DC area - including one that flew in all the way from the West Coast!

Participant activities included, but were not limited to:

• Watching global hackathon sessions together online
• Two attendees presented two global online sessions ("Documentation to conquer the dungeon" by Tricia Burmeister and "Hacking Wikidata Knowledge Graphs" by Andrew Lih / Fuzheado)
• Networking between new and old faces alike, especially between volunteers and Foundation employees from the DC area
• Watched a local presentation on ARTT and discuss the future of the project and ORES
• Learned about and contributed nearly 200 depicts statements to the Wikimedia Commons via the ISA Tool
• Discussed and worked on new features for Extension:Cargo
• Started work on a new site diagnostics extension
• Debugged and upgraded PanoViewer on Toolforge
• Discussed improvements for the Cite Unseen user script
• Worked on a browser extension to redirect readers from wiki farms to independent wikis

Overall, I believe we hosted a successful event, and Wikimedia DC is pleased with the participation and outcomes.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets. Please be sure to review and provide metrics required for Rapid Grants.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
25 participants	15 participants	Details about the event were finalized relatively late, so we did not publicize widely as early as would be ideal, and people had limited time to plan and travel. That being said, we still had a healthy, diverse turnout of people from both the DC area and far beyond.
At least 4 technical projects worked on	At least 4 technical projects worked on	Participants collectively worked on at least one MediaWiki extension, user script Toolforge tool, and browser extension, as well as discussed and brainstormed for ARTT, among other things.
At least 3 training sessions	At least 3 training sessions	Participants at the local event learned about the Wikimedia Commons ISA Tool and ARTT. Two participants also hosted sessions in global online event ("Documentation to conquer the dungeon" by Tricia Burmeister and "Hacking Wikidata Knowledge Graphs" by Andrew Lih / Fuzheado), which we collectively tuned into. We did not focus as much on Wikidata and SPARQL as we had originally planned, as the event ended up not being very GLAM-focused. We also did not want to present too many local trainings as the online schedule was quite full of content already for attendees to participate in.

Gallery

• 
  Wikimedia Hackathon stickers
• 
  Some of the participants from Friday's hacking event
• 
  Watching the ARTT presentation on Friday
• 
  Participants on Saturday
• 
  Participants watching a presentation together
• 
  Contributing to Commons via the ISA Tool
• 
  Printing out mini barnstars and logos

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

• What worked well?
  • Great mix of attendees, including Wikimedia Foundation staff from the DC area, and Wikimedia volunteers from various projects. People came in from different areas of the country, including New Jersey, Texas, and Oregon.
  • The spaces we had (WeWork and Cove) were fantastic for collaboration, presentations, and comfort.
  • Excellent knowledge sharing about Wikimedia Commons tools and ways to easily contribute using them.
  • Excellent networking, especially between volunteers and Wikimedia Foundation staff members who were previously unconnected.
  • Excellent work on discussing, debugging, and working on new features for Cargo.

• What did not work so well?
  • Due to our typical event partners not having space available for the weekend, we took some extra time to find space and finalize details, so we could not promote the event as broadly and as far as in advance as ideal, limiting the number of people who could attend or present training sessions.
  • Intermittent connection issues with Jitsi / Wikimedia Meet.
  • While work was done on technical projects, not a lot was shipped at the end of the event.

• What would you do differently next time?
  • Finalize event details earlier to provide more time to promote the event.
  • Participants were interested and excited to learn about tools to contribute to the Wikimedia Commons (such as ISA Tool for the Wikimedia Commons). In a future event I would focus even more on these tools as they are easy for everyone to use and can lead to a great number of contributions.
  • Come prepared with more specific project ideas so participants can hit the ground running on them and hopefully finish more projects by the end of the event.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

Item	Expenses	Budgeted	Leftover	Notes
Space reservations	$1,504	$2,000	$496	Space reservations at Cove for Saturday and Sunday
Friday night drinks and appetizers	$433.06	$900	$466.94
Lunches	$475.09	$500	$24.91	Meals for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Snacks, coffee, soda, water	$68.68	$300	$231.32
Attendee materials	$58.74	$50	-$8.74	Hackathon stickers and COVID-19 rapid tests
Office supplies	$0	$50	$50
Unforeseen costs	$0	$300	$300

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

Remaining funds from this grant have been returned to WMF in the amount of US$1,535.43, which reflects remaining funds of US$1,560.43 minus bank fees.

We have $1,560.43 in leftover funds, which we will return to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

Thank you to the Wikimedia Foundation for supporting local events for this year's hackathon. In DC, this was one of the few in-person events we've had since the pandemic started, so it was great to be able to get people together, and connect new and old faces in the community. As Wikimedia DC typically hosts GLAM-related events such as edit-a-thons, having a more technical event was a nice change of pace, and hopefully we can host more similar events in the future.