Wikimedia Developer Summit/2018/Communications

Emails to all attendees

someone can add them here, or I will do it later

Emails to Topic Leaders

(Email 1, sent Dec 18 - Topic Leaders were chosen by the Program Committee who looked for position statements that strongly correlated with each topic)

Hello everyone,

With the Wikimedia Developer Summit 6 weeks away, the Program Committee has been busy working away on narrowing down session topics and assigning “topic leaders” to each session based on the submitted Position Statements.

The desired outcome of each DevSummit session is to provide input to Phase 2 of our strategy process. While Phase 1 was about collecting and synthesizing input to determine our direction, Phase 2 is about planning the implementation of the direction. The Dev Summit this year is dedicated to identifying technological priority areas to support the strategic direction.

Here is our proposed list of Sessions and Session Leaders:

Session	Leader(s)
Advancing the Contributor Experience	Derk-Jan Hartman Volker Anne Gomez Adam Baso Daren Welsh
Embracing Open Source Software	Timo Tijhof Matanya Moses Moriel Schottlender James Montalvo
Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture	Daniel Kinzler James Forrester
Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community	Birgit Müller Sam Reed Matthew Flaschen
Knowledge as a Service	Lydia Pintscher Thomas Pellissier Tanon Adam Baso Daniel Kinzler
Next Steps for Languages and Cross Project Collaboration	Lydia Pintscher Santhosh Thottingal
Research, Analytics, and Machine Learning	Aaron Halfaker Leila Zia
Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki	Cindy Cicalese Kunal Mehta Mark Hershberger Markus Glaser

Each topic will either have 90 minutes or 3 hours and an assigned facilitator. Each session should have between 20-50 participants. The session leaders will be responsible for:

Provide participants of their session with some advanced reading, phabricator discussion, organizing a hangout, or something else that participants can do BEFORE arriving at the summit to either help shape the session or come prepared for the session.
Provide the Program committee a written plan for your session a minimum of two weeks in advance of the Developer Summit.
Present your plan to other Dev Summit participants on Phabricator in advance of the summit and allow flexibility for changes from the feedback you receive.
Work within the session timing constraints to both introduce the topic and help the audience engage in the topic.
Address strategic questions about each topic
Ensure the notes are being taken and that we end up with a list of questions we need to answer in the future OR next steps OR action items with owners.
After the session review the notes, get them ready for publication to the rest of the technical community and write a short 1-2 paragraph summary of how the session went and its outcomes.

We hope that the topic leaders can begin discussing by email or in meetings the topic, how they want to structure the time and regularly update an associated phabricator task that Dev Summit participants can follow.

The WMDS program committee and organization group are happy to provide advice, support, or anything else you need - please just ask!

If you are willing to accept the role as topic leader please email back to rfarrand@wikimedia.org and ccicalese@wikimedia.org and confirm. If not, it would be helpful if you could suggest someone who might be a good choice to take your place.