Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Developer Summit/2018

Is it just how things turned out? Or did we only invite people from Google? I don't think it looks that great if all of our guests come from one corporation that some see as potentially harmful to our movement.

I am not sure @Legoktm, but interesting question. I will ping Victoria to make sure she sees this.

Yes, it's a good question and we went back and forth on it trying to figure out what to do. Google asked us to send engineers from their Knowledge Graph and Data teams along to the Summit as they had done in the past. Of course this Summit is different so the answer was not obvious. In the end, we decided to let them participate with a small contingent of engineers (3) as "special guests". This is part of our effort to build a technology partnership with them which I believe can be very beneficial for us in the future. The tech roundtables that we are starting with them next week are also part of that effort. The goal is for us to a/find out what technologies they have that we can learn from and borrow to support our mission - such as machine learning, content translation etc and b/ to help them make more efficient use of our APIs. We will evaluate the practice of inviting "special guests" to future summits based on what we learn from this coming one.

Thanks for the response. So the answer is basically "Google invited themselves" :/

@Legoktm maybe the more complete answer is: The specific teams in Google invited themselves and we didn't send active invitations to other Tech companies who use our data/API heavily and may have wanted to attend. For example, the knowledge base team in Apple, I bet, would be interested to have someone in the summit if the consumers of our data and API are going to be represented.

One thing we do need to keep in mind is how we aggregate the input from "special guests". Basically, this input will not be representative of our total data/api consumer population and we need to remember that due to the relatively closed nature of the summit and the way people got added, the discussions can be skewed heavily. I suggest at the note taking level, we keep the notes from special guests separate and handle those separately in the future.