NYC Enterprise MediaWiki Hackathon

The NYC Enterprise MediaWiki Hackathon will be held on Thursday and Friday, February 13-14, 2014 in New York City.

This hackathon is intended strictly for the development and improvement of MediaWiki-related software for use by corporations, other organizations, etc. It may include creating and modifying MediaWiki extensions, working on skins, templates and other data structure components, and potentially working on documentation as well.

It is not intended for the development of any tools specific to Wikipedia or other Wikimedia sites, and is not intended for working on core MediaWiki - except for potentially adding a hook or two.

There will not be judges or prizes; though that's not different from other MediaWiki-based hackathons so far. There will, however, be a big push to try to get all the code into some sort of usable state by the end of the event.

This event is also not intended for outreach, i.e. bringing new developers into the MediaWiki/Wikimedia community. That of course is always a nice side effect, but the focus here is on the code. Ideally, people can bring code that they've been working on that needs some polishing; or ideas for specific features that they've wanted to add; or just a desire to get involved in the exciting world of enterprise MediaWiki development.

February 14 is Valentine's Day; for those who want to celebrate this important holiday, we'll try to have a natural break at around noon or so on Friday, so that people can leave early if they need to.

Location

The NYU Polytechnic Varick Street Incubator in New York City.

Schedule

Doors will open at 9 AM on both days. On Thursday, the hackathon will last until around 6 PM, at which we will break for an optional dinner. Afterward, if people want to keep working, they can go to wi-fi cafes and the like. On Friday, the official wrapup will probably happen in the afternoon, though people can keep working there if they want to.

Cost

Probably around $30 per person, to cover food and drink.

Questions

For any questions, please write to Yaron Koren at yaron -at- wikiworks.com.

Project ideas

If you have ideas ahead of time for projects you'd like to work on - whether it's creating new software or improving existing software - feel free to include them here.

1. Add composer support to extensions
2. Enhancements to SemanticTitle
3. Begin to add functionality from SemanticFormsDisplayTitle and SemanticFormsUniqueValue directly into SemanticForms (see slides accompanying SMWCon Fall 2013 presentation).
4. Simple workflow functionality.
   • Define a business process
     • One page per business process. Defined in wikitext. The amount of detail can be huge, but the structure of the process itself is constrained to simple fundamental keywords (start, step 1.0, step 1.1-5, step 2.0, split, merge, stop_error, stop_success).
   • Business process definition generates simple diagram on the same page automatically, with links back to detailed text. (There may be some existing extensions to do this - UML?)
   • User can instantiate a worklist (a new page), so a team of users may track progress of an instance of the business process.
     • Simple checkboxes to record progress, where checking a box automatically inserts signature/timestamp.
     • Perhaps consider exporting to a tool like Asana, which has very good tracking functionality for a team (then no need for a dashboard).
   • Dashboard
     • Show number of business processes defined.
     • For each definiton, number that have been instantiated into a worklist.
     • For each instantiated, number still in progress vs. number reached a stop status yet (i.e., are still in progress).
5. A new feature for Semantic forms, where a user selects a value from a dropdown list, which immediately causes a second dropdown list to be loaded with a set of choices. For example, imagine a user wants to select a Winter Olympic athlete: the first dropdown list is the five continents of the world that correspond to the five Olympic rings, the next dropdown then populates with the list of countries in the chosen continent, the next dropdown then populates with all the athletes from the chosen country.
   • For the record, that already exists, with the "values dependent on" parameter. Yaron Koren (talk) 04:56, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
6. Better geospatial support, i.e. using MySQL/Postgresql geospatial primitives when storing geospatial data --Jnatividad (talk) 15:39, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
7. Using an SMW store other than SQL (NoSQL, Triplestore, hybrid combos) that has better support for temporal/geospatial queries --Jnatividad (talk) 15:39, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Attendees

Please add your name below if you are interested in attending.

1. Yaron Koren
2. Bernadette Clemente
3. Cindy Cicalese
4. Tom Fellows
5. Gary Clairmont
6. Mark A. Hershberger
7. Mariya Miteva

Wrap-up

See this blog post by Yaron