Grants:TPS/Harsh4101991/FOSDEM

User name

Harsh4101991

User location (country)

India

Event name

FOSDEM

Event Web site

FOSDEM

Event date(s)

1-2 February, 2014

Event location (city)

Brussels

Amount requested (remember to specify currency!)

USD 1500 US$1452 US$1527 US$1587

Endorsements

• Harsh is a prolific coder and his contributions to MediaWiki are notable! He has worked for a long time with the Language Engineering Team and also participated in various outreach events. Infact he was the one who took online sessions for me to get started with gadgets on MediaWiki. He has spoken for Wikipedia and other FOSS technologies at several outreach events and he is a great speaker! Undoubtedly, in my opinion, he would be able to create a good impact on other developers attending FOSDEM and get new users for the MediaWiki community. Hence, I would definitely like to endorse this grant request! All the best, Harsh! BPositive (talk) 10:24, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
• His contributions in creating awareness about getting volunteers for MediaWiki and Wikipedia are notable and outstanding. I would like to support his request for Grant. --Rangilo Gujarati (talk) 17:32, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
• Harsh is one of the active MediaWiki guys in the Indian Wikimedia community. He is also extremely generous with his support to other Wikimedians. This is a wonderful opportunity for him to further hone-up his skills and build global network. I would like to endorse this grant request. --Visdaviva (talk) 10:58, 3 January 2014 (UTC)
• Harsh was a Google Summer of Code 2013 student and has worked on the Language Coverage Dashboard project of the Wikimedia Language Engineering. Along with his co-speaker Sucheta Ghoshal (of the Wikimedia Language Engineering team), the [1] about this project would be an interesting session to showcase the project and experiences that Harsh has acquired during the GSoC and beyond.--Runab WMF (talk) 03:38, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
• Apart from being an active contributor to MediaWiki, Harsh is also a leader in community building. He has played a big role in promoting Wikimedia projects in several conferences and workshops. He also supports other Wikimedians and developers in his capacity as a volunteer. Participating in FOSDEM will help him to expand his network and attract new users to Wikimedia community. I am endorsing his grant request. --Netha Hussain (talk) 16:18, 8 January 2014 (UTC)
• His passion and activities around Mediawiki projects in India are always notable. He would surely be able to continue inspire and motivate others on global platforms such as FOSDEM. I am endorsing his grant request. -- Omshivaprakash (talk) 02:08, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Budget breakdown

• Travel (Round-trip economy class fare from India to Belgium and back): USD 1100
• Accommodation : http://www.funkeyhotel.com/home/prices, and the price of small room is 59 EURO - (82-84 USD) * 3 days = USD 245- 252 = USD 300 (rounded)
• Visa : USD 100
• Total : 1100 + 300 + 100 = USD 1500

Proposed Participation

About Me

This is Harsh Kothari, from Gujarati Wikipedia Community. I have been a Google Summer of Code intern in Wikimedia Foundation in summer, 2013. Moreover, I am mentoring at Google Code In for Wikimedia Foundation. I have been contributing in Wikipedia and Mediawiki for last 2 years, and as a volunteer I have been working on various MediaWiki technologies and have developed Extension : TwitterCards, have localized and ported different gadgets in Gujarati Wikipedia as well as other indic wiki. i.e HotCat, Reference Tooltip, PopUps, actively participated as a promoter of the first Mediawiki group of India. I have also been involve with different outreach programs across Gujarat.

Apart from Mediawiki, I am also an active contributor of several open source communities such as Mozilla, fedora etc.I am also the ambassador of FOSS program of Government of India and Promoting open source technology across Gujarat.

• Open Source Language Summit, Pune
• Google Dev-Fest, Rajkot
• Open Source Bridge, Portland, Oregon
• Mediawiki Gadget Kitchen workshop at GNUnify.
• Mediawiki Gadget Kitchen workshop at avenir .
• 1st ever wikipedia workshop of Gujarat at L.D. College of Engineering.
• wikipedia workshop at lets nurture, Ahmedabad.
• Presented gujarati wikipedia at Gujarati Sahitya Parishad.
• Presented gujarati wikipedia at Ahmedabad National Bookfair.
• Conducted outreach session for wikipedia at Rajkot and various places across gujarat.

My Talk

I have two talks that got accepted at FOSDEM

1. Useful and Necessary Mediawiki Gadgets
2. Coverage for basic language support components -- A Dashboard view with my Co- speaker Sucheta Ghoshal

Contribution to Wikimedia Foundation Mission:

Two of my proposals got accepted at fosdem 2013, where i am supposed to present on necessary and useful Mediawiki Gadgets and Language Coverage Matrix Dashboard. Gadgets are very useful thing. I will demonstrate different useful gadgets which will lead to - Easy editing - increase in contributor - Easy in Reading - increase readers count - People will get more joy and easiness in editing as well as reading after getting knowledge of these gadgets. I will also introduce technology behind this Gadget so that developers can also develop some useful Gadgets for Mediawiki and it will provide benefit for readers and editors.

Goal and Expected Impact

Goal

Of the two talks that I am supposed to present there at FOSDEM, Useful and Necessary Mediawiki Gadgets aims to present the very idea of MediaWiki gadgets. The ultimate goal is to make the participants familiar with the gadget, userscript, concept and technology behind it. Gadgets are very useful and essential thing for Wikipedia. In this talk I will demonstrate some of very essential and very much useful gadgets.

For the other talk, that goes by the title: Coverage for basic language support components -- A Dashboard view -- I am going to copresent this along with Sucheta Ghoshal from the Language Engineering Team of Wikimedia Foundation.

This was my Google Summer of Code Project. Language Coverage Matrix Dashboard was developed with the idea of having a repository of all the information on the Language Components, technologies that Wikipedia and its sister projects support.

Expected Impact

Planned Collaboration

I am expecting to collaborate with more experienced developers, and I think it would enhance my skills as a developer. Also, I plan to work collaborately with the people interested on planning out new gadgets and implementing them. Project: LCMD would be benefitted by the various inputs from the developers and Language Engineering enthusiasts. As, this is a project that absolutely serves their purpose. So, I am hoping to collaborate there as well.

Anticipated Impact

1. FOSDEM, being a renowned conference in the Free and Open Source field, I am expecting to see quite a lot of developers from across the globe. This is important, as I am hopeful about getting useful feedbacks on the project I have been working on. It would be quite helpful for me, as well as for the project. We are expecting to get useful data materials and feedback on the visualization part, which is the enhancement we are currently working on. This will be very useful of Language Engineering Team Wikimedia Foundation.
2. Gadgets and Userscripts are one possible way to start contributing to MediaWiki. Enhancing the process, and just letting people know about it would be of lot help to the newcomers. I would like ro demo a quick way of getting involved into programming gadgets as well.