[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing the Wikimedia Technical Conference

[Pine W]

Forwarding.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
-------- Original message --------From: Victoria Coleman <***@wikimedia.org> Date: 4/2/18 4:46 PM (GMT-08:00) To: "Staff (All)" <***@lists.wikimedia.org>, MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-***@lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing the Wikimedia Technical Conference
Hi everyone.

This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.

Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future years will have have different focuses and themes.

We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme of the event.

The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to look at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of those discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.

We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers.

Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals.
Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program.
Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and sustaining our developer community.

We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and successful.

This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual planning cycle which starts in January 2019.

Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.

Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018> for more details.



Best wishes,

Victoria Coleman

Chief Technology Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104

[phone]

***@wikimedia.org

[Pine W]

Hi Victoria,
I hope that you are OK with discussing this announcement on Wikimedia-l, which seems to me to be the most applicable mailing list for my questions.
I have two questions and one comment.

I think that I understand the desires here. However, it is unfortunate that a likely side effect of this scheduling is an increase in total costs and time spent traveling for those who will attend this conference and WMF All Hands, and additional costs from the lengthening of the All Hands conference. Since there are so many options for remote collaboration for WMF staff for follow up to All Hands discussions, and the additional costs for these combined changes sound likely to be in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, I am less than enthusiastic about this aspect. Can you explain the cost-benefit analysis further, and why remote collaboration options at much lower cost are inadequate for extending the conversations from All Hands?
Please ensure that the dates for this conference don't conflict with Wiki Conference North America.
The cap of 50 participants, as stated on the MediaWiki page, seems to me to be low given the stated goals of the conference. Have you considered a higher cap?
Thanks,
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
-------- Original message --------From: Victoria Coleman <***@wikimedia.org> Date: 4/2/18 4:46 PM (GMT-08:00) To: "Staff (All)" <***@lists.wikimedia.org>, MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-***@lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing the Wikimedia Technical Conference
Hi everyone.

This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.

Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future years will have have different focuses and themes.

We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme of the event.

The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to look at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of those discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.

We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers.

Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals.
Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program.
Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and sustaining our developer community.

We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and successful.

This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual planning cycle which starts in January 2019.

Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.

Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018> for more details.



Best wishes,

Victoria Coleman

Chief Technology Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104

[phone]

***@wikimedia.org

[Robert Fernandez]

Thanks for pointing that out Pine. I believe WikiConference North America
will be on October 18 to 22 in Columbus, Ohio.

Post by Pine W
Hi Victoria,
I hope that you are OK with discussing this announcement on Wikimedia-l,
which seems to me to be the most applicable mailing list for my questions.
I have two questions and one comment.
I think that I understand the desires here. However, it is unfortunate
that a likely side effect of this scheduling is an increase in total costs
and time spent traveling for those who will attend this conference and WMF
All Hands, and additional costs from the lengthening of the All Hands
conference. Since there are so many options for remote collaboration for
WMF staff for follow up to All Hands discussions, and the additional costs
for these combined changes sound likely to be in the tens to hundreds of
thousands of dollars, I am less than enthusiastic about this aspect. Can
you explain the cost-benefit analysis further, and why remote collaboration
options at much lower cost are inadequate for extending the conversations
from All Hands?
Please ensure that the dates for this conference don't conflict with Wiki
Conference North America.
The cap of 50 participants, as stated on the MediaWiki page, seems to me
to be low given the stated goals of the conference. Have you considered a
higher cap?
Thanks,
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
-------- Original message --------From: Victoria Coleman <
Announcing the Wikimedia Technical Conference
Hi everyone.
This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia
movement. We are evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare
the movement for the future to realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as
a Service and Knowledge Equity.
Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed
decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical
community engagement and enhancing our product vision. We want to be able
to gather and discuss to determine our future direction and that of our
shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product vision and to
build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future
years will have have different focuses and themes.
We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically
oriented events to improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give
ourselves the time and space to have informed, substantive, and timely
conversations — this all starts with the overall theme of the event.
The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a
broad goal to look at ways that technology can support our strategic
direction. A concrete outcome of those discussions was acknowledging the
need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In light of that
outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving
priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement
with technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on
Platform Evolution.
We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform
Evolution goals that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a
shared understanding of the product vision around those goals while also
enhancing technical engagement within the Foundation and embracing and
empowering our large community of volunteer developers.
Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals.
Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and
outcomes around the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental
program.
Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on
building and sustaining our developer community.
We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The
previously established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to
the annual Foundation All Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of
events. However, feedback from both the DevSummit and All Hands
participants indicates that both events need more time to accomplish their
goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come
together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire
Foundation getting together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple
the DevSummit from All Hands, to give both gatherings the time and space
that all attendees need to be productive and successful.
This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year
2018-2019, in October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This
timing was chosen to give us the opportunity to formulate plans, proposals,
and programs in time for the Foundation annual planning cycle which starts
in January 2019.
Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the
Developer Summit events from years past — we will now call this gathering
of like-minded technologists the Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM
TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the formation of the program
committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are making quite a
few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.
Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page <https://www.mediawiki.org/
wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018> for more details.
Best wishes,
Victoria Coleman
Chief Technology Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
[phone]
_______________________________________________
MediaWiki-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
wiki/Wikimedia-l
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,

[Victoria Coleman]

Post by Pine W
Hi Victoria,
I hope that you are OK with discussing this announcement on Wikimedia-l, which seems to me to be the most applicable mailing list for my questions.
I have two questions and one comment.
I think that I understand the desires here. However, it is unfortunate that a likely side effect of this scheduling is an increase in total costs and time spent traveling for those who will attend this conference and WMF All Hands, and additional costs from the lengthening of the All Hands conference. Since there are so many options for remote collaboration for WMF staff for follow up to All Hands discussions, and the additional costs for these combined changes sound likely to be in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, I am less than enthusiastic about this aspect. Can you explain the cost-benefit analysis further,

Our aim is to keep the travel costs flat from year to year. For Wikimedia Foundation's engineering teams, other events to be taken into account in this equation are the Wikimedia Hackathon and separate team offsites. The extended AllHands in January 2019 will allow for more team offsites co-located, being both types of events Wikimedia Foundation internal. Participation in the Hackathon and the Tech Conference (both events open to Wikimedians and third parties) is expected to be more balanced. We believe that this combination will allow us to participate at the WMF & teams AllHands, the Tech Conference and the Hackathon in more focused and consistent ways, getting better results from each event.

Post by Pine W
and why remote collaboration options at much lower cost are inadequate for extending the conversations from All Hands?

Remote collaboration is our default way of working. Most if not all engineering teams are partially or totally remote, and their day to day communications are based on chats, hangouts and asynchronous conversations. We believe that adding a few more days around these events for face to face interaction will result in much better understanding and decisions around the many complex problems that our current plans and our future strategy is demanding us to solve.

Post by Pine W
Please ensure that the dates for this conference don't conflict with Wiki Conference North America.

I believe there is overlap of one day between the two events. On the other hand, the participation in each of these events has almost no overlap, according to the data from past editions.

Post by Pine W
The cap of 50 participants, as stated on the MediaWiki page, seems to me to be low given the stated goals of the conference. Have you considered a higher cap?

Yes, and we discarded it. We are serious about keeping travel costs flat, and this is achieved through decisions like this one. In previous versions, the Developer Summit has increased online participation before, during, and after the event. This cap of 50 participants is necessary from a budget point of view, but it also contributes to tighter collaboration and results assuming that these participants represent a critical mass of stakeholders in the subjects discussed. We are planning to improve the dynamics and impact of online participation open to anyone prior to the event (see Outcome 4 and its related outputs in our International Developer Events program <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration/Annual_Plan_2018-19#International_developer_events>).

Post by Pine W
Thanks,
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
Hi everyone.
This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.
Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future years will have have different focuses and themes.
We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme of the event.
The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to look at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of those discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.
We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers.
Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals.
Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program.
Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and sustaining our developer community.
We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and successful.
This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual planning cycle which starts in January 2019.
Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.
Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018> for more details.
Best wishes,
Victoria Coleman
Chief Technology Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
[phone]
_______________________________________________
MediaWiki-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l

[Pine W]

Hi Victoria,

Thank you very much for the explanations.

I am glad to hear that the net effect of these changes will be that travel
costs remain flat. Does that include lodging and per diem costs?

I would suggest collaborating with the WikiConference North America
organizers to try to arrange for there to be no overlap between the two
conferences. That may be impossible, but I think that it is desirable. To
the best of my knowledge, the exact WMCONNA dates have been finalized
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference/WCNA/WikiConference_North_America_2018>
while the WMTCON dates have not
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018>. Both
conferences could be in October but on different weekends so that there
would be no overlap.

The WMF Board has not yet adopted the 2018-2019 WMF Annual Plan, which I
believe means that the plans for the WMTCON and for the next WMF All Hands
Conference are contingent on WMF Board approval of that annual plan. Is
that correct?

I would like there to be a policy that every conference which receives WMF
funding, including the Wikimedia Conference and All Hands, should go
through a WMF Conference and Event Grants process
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference>, perhaps with levels of
detail and scrutiny that are scaled according to the sizes of budgets and
the number of anticipated participants. Even if funding is a foregone
conclusion, I think that compelling all conference organizers to do this
will help with transparency and to strengthen the planning and evaluation
of conferences.

Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

[Victoria Coleman]

Hi Pine,

Yes, you are correct. The Board has not yet approved the annual plan for next year so our plans for the conference and other programs are contingent on Board approval.

Best regards,

Victoria

Post by Pine W
Hi Victoria,
Thank you very much for the explanations.
I am glad to hear that the net effect of these changes will be that travel
costs remain flat. Does that include lodging and per diem costs?
I would suggest collaborating with the WikiConference North America
organizers to try to arrange for there to be no overlap between the two
conferences. That may be impossible, but I think that it is desirable. To
the best of my knowledge, the exact WMCONNA dates have been finalized
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference/WCNA/WikiConference_North_America_2018>
while the WMTCON dates have not
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018>. Both
conferences could be in October but on different weekends so that there
would be no overlap.
The WMF Board has not yet adopted the 2018-2019 WMF Annual Plan, which I
believe means that the plans for the WMTCON and for the next WMF All Hands
Conference are contingent on WMF Board approval of that annual plan. Is
that correct?
I would like there to be a policy that every conference which receives WMF
funding, including the Wikimedia Conference and All Hands, should go
through a WMF Conference and Event Grants process
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference>, perhaps with levels of
detail and scrutiny that are scaled according to the sizes of budgets and
the number of anticipated participants. Even if funding is a foregone
conclusion, I think that compelling all conference organizers to do this
will help with transparency and to strengthen the planning and evaluation
of conferences.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l