Grants:TPS/Valeriej, DNarvaez/Grace Hopper Open Source Day/Report

Grace Hopper Open Source Day:

Description of your participation: During this event we showed ways to get involved with different projects of the Wikimedia Foundation through a set of tasks targeted to different levels of technical expertise. Tasks ranged from simply editing articles in the english Wikipedia to developing bots to achieve specific tasks using Wikidata. A total of 5 people worked on these tasks from 10:30 am to 3:30 pm, and at the closing event one of these people presented a demo of one of the tasks. Other organizations that participated in this event include Wordpress, Mozilla, Google and Microsoft. You an refer to the event web page for a complete list of organizations.

What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events? The Open Source Day is a hackathon, not an event to showcase different activities to get involved with the organization. As such, in future participations WMF should bring a single relevant project with specific tasks to undertake on that project that can be tackled in a 5 hours time span. From a look at the projects brought by other organizations, we recommend bringing projects that are both easy to tackle from little to no experience, but visually relevant to be demoed at the end of the event and pick a few specific bugs at different difficulty levels for contributors to work on, e.g., Visual Editor UI fixes. Connecting with regular contributors (relevant to the selected project) remotely (e.g., through IRC) could help, but Internet connection issues at the venue could make that difficult so this is something to be taken into consideration in advance while planning for the event.

That being said, we also think the hackathon experience should be mixed with learning activities like the ones we offered during this participation. In this way, people that undertake hackathon tasks and finish these before the closing time of the event, can still learn about how to contribute to other parts of WMF projects, e.g., by having a tutorial on setting up their development environments or using Eclipse + Gerrit to contribute a patch.

Also, while the RSVPs to work with WMF were already full several weeks before the event, by the time of the event many participants did not show up for various reasons. This should be taken into account when planning for future participations and resource investment on this event.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation? This event in particular helps reducing the gender gap that has already been documented regarding the involvement of people with the Wikimedia Foundation. Just by participating in this event, WMF shows it cares about closing that gap and is working towards this goal. Also, this event helped us leverage the marketing engine of other organizations that participated in it, since we were listed next to other organizations that have more reach in the computing field.

Detail of expenditures:

DNarvaez

• Plane ticket Rochester- Minneapolis: $394.60
• Registration : $35.00

Valeriej

• Plane ticket: $286.60
• Bag check fees: $70

Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency):

Valeriej

• Amount requested  : $369
• Amount used  : $356.60
• Amount under spent: $12.40

DNarvaez

• Amount requested  : $594.70
• Amount used  : $429.60
• Amount under spent: $165.10

Total under spent: 177.50