Work and writing related to Wikimedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
# (1) 30 Mar 2012, 10:14AM: Awww:
Tomorrow's Picture of the Day on Wikimedia Commons is really nice.
An interesting thing I learned while pasting this: if you are linking to Wikimedia web pages, you can leave out the protocol.
# 26 Mar 2012, 05:53PM: Announcements and Reading:
"<body> <img> -- the anxiety of learning and how I am beating it" is my newest post at Geek Feminism.
Enjoyed in the last several weeks: Naomi Kritzer's "Scrap Dragon," a short story in the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. "Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas," a short story in Strange Horizons by Alberto Yáñez. "Things Greater than Love" by Kate Bachus, another story in Strange Horizons. Past Lies, a graphic novel by Christina Weir, Christopher Mitten, and Nunzio DeFilippis.
I'll be keynoting the Open Source Bridge conference this year (late June, Portland, Oregon, USA). It's an honor to be asked to give a keynote address to this exciting and inspiring conference.
# 12 Feb 2012, 07:51PM: What Does A Volunteer Development Coordinator Do?:
A giant wall of text follows, giving a snapshot of work I do. I nurture the software community that supports the Wikimedia movement. So here's a big swath of stuff I did between February 1st and today.
Wrote and posted a blog entry about the San Francisco hackathon. Still need to do more followup with participants.
Handed over the MediaWiki 1.19 deployment communications plan to Guillaume Paumier, WMF Technical Communications Manager. He blogged a summary of the deployment and of our efforts and that's just the tip of the iceberg; he also set up a global message delivery and improved the CentralNotice maintenance message and did even more to make sure that we thoroughly communicate about the upcoming deployment to all the Wikimedia communities. I also shared information with various folks regarding testing of site-specific gadgets on 1.19.
I sent at least 285 work-related emails. That's 41 per workday but I definitely sent some work-related email on weekends.
Some patch queue work, responding to contributors and getting experienced developers to review the patches. I'm just trying to keep our queue from growing while code reviewers are mostly focused on getting MediaWiki 1.19 reviewed, polished, and deployed. But I do want to take care of all parts of the volunteer pipeline -- initial outreach and recruiting, training, code improvement, commit access, continued interest and participation, and debriefing when they leave -- so the patch review queue is a continuing worry.
Some work preparing for the Pune hackathon and for GLAMCamp DC, neither of which I am attending. I wrote or edited some tutorials and made a tutorial category which pleases me. We have more good material for workshops and stuff now, yay! And I helped the GLAMCamp people a bit in talking through what technical goals they wanted to achieve during the weekend.
Got dates from Wikimedia Germany for the Berlin hackathon, 1-3 June, and started trumpeting it. Also worked on planning for it and did outreach. For example, I reached out to about 13 chapters that are pursuing or interested in some kind of technology work like, say, funding or working on the offline Wikipedia reader (Wikimedia Switzerland), or usability and accessibility for Wikisource (Wikimedia Italy), or the Toolserver, a shared hosting service for tools and stuff that hackers use to improve or make use of the Wikimedia sites (for example, Wikimedia Germany & Wikimedia Hungary). We hope they can convene, share insights and collaborate at the WMDE hackfest.
Told at least 30 contributors to apply for Wikimania scholarships because the deadline is 16 February.
Talked to some Wikimedia India folks about planning technical events, and contributed to a page of resources for upcoming events.
Worked on some event planning & decisions for a potential event.
Passed the word to some friends, acquaintances, and email lists about some job openings at the Foundation.
Google Summer of Code has been announced, and I am managing MediaWiki's participation. I have started -- flyers, emails, recruiting potential students, improving the wiki page, asking experts whether they might mentor, and so on. I'm trying to start a thing where every major women's college in North America gets a GSoC presentation by March 15th, to improve the number of GSoC applications that come from women; let's see how that goes. MediaWiki still needs to apply to participate as a mentoring organization and acceptances only go out after that, but I'm comfortable spending time preparing anyway. And the women's college outreach will lead to an increase in the number of applications for all the participating open source projects, instead of just aiming a firehose at MediaWiki; that's fine. Like Tim O'Reilly says, aim to create more value than you capture.
Related to that -- I set up a talk for one of our engineers to give at Mills, a women's college that has an interesting interdisciplinary computer science program (both grad and undergrad, the grad program being mixed-sex) and I think it may end up being a really amazing talk. Ian Baker is going to talk about how CS helps us work in Wikimedia engineering, how we collaborate with the community during the design, development, and testing phases, and what skills and experiences come in handy in his job. I'll publicize more once there's an official webpage to point to.
Had a videoconference with a developer and my boss about our conversion to Git. I prepped for it by collecting some questions and getting preliminary answers, and then after the call we ended up with all this raw material and I sent a fairly long summary to the developers' mailing list. There's a lot left to do, and the team needs to work on some open issues, but we have a lot more detail on those TODOs now, so that's good.
Saw a nice email from Erik Möller publicizing the San Francisco hackathon videos and tutorials/documentation, yay!
Talked with a few people about submitting talks to upcoming conferences. I ought to write some preliminary Grace Hopper, Open Source Bridge, and Wikimania proposals this week.
Various volunteer encouragement stuff (pointing to resources, helping with installation or development problems, troubleshooting, teaching, putting confused people in touch with relevant experts, etc.), especially talking in IRC to eager students who want to do GSoC. Many of them are from India. I wonder how many of them see my name and think I'm in India too.
Saw privacy policy stuff mentioned on an agenda for an IRC meeting on the 18th, so I talked to a WMF lawyer a little bit about privacy policy stuff for our new Labs infrastructure. We set up a meeting for this week to iron stuff out.
Helped with the monthly report. I have a colleague who wants to learn more about All This Engineering Stuff, so every month we have a call where I explain and teach the context of the report, and for this month's call I suggested we add another colleague who also wants to learn how the tech side works. Who knows, maybe this will turn into a tradition!
Followed up on the GSoC 2011 students who never quite got their projects set up and deployed on Wikimedia servers, and looks like two of them have some time and want to finish it now, yay! Updated the Past Projects page.
Checked in on the UCOSP students who are working on a mobile app for Wiktionary and told them about Wikimania, new mobile research, etc. Also got some feedback from their mentor, Amgine, on how they're doing.
Started an onwiki thread to discuss the MobileFrontend rewrite question(s).
Talked to Oren Bochman, the volunteer who's working on our Lucene search stuff, and followed up on a bunch of his questions/interests.
Ran & attended meetings.
Suggested to the new Wikimedia Kenya chapter that maybe we could collaborate, since they're interested in helping schools get Wikipedia access via offline reading.
Looked into the code review situation by getting a list of committers with their associated numbers of commits, reviews, and statuschanges. It's just a first pass, but it's a start for discovering who's been committing way more than they review, so we can start efforts to mentor them into more code reviewing confidence. I also saw who's been reviewing way more than they commit, and saw a name I wasn't familiar with -- looks like I've now successfully recruited him to come to the Berlin hackathon. :-)
Put two groups of people in touch with each other: did a group-intro mail to people at various institutions working on Wikimedia accessibility, and another to people who want to work on a redesign of mediawiki.org's front page.
And there was other miscellaneous stuff, but this is already sooooo TL;DR (too long; didn't read). (Which is funny because that's the name of my team.) Monday awaits!
# 18 Jan 2012, 04:14PM: Ducts:
I've had two astonishing experiences in the last few days.
The first was watching the film Brazil for the first time. If I had watched that at 16 it would have changed the course of my life.
This morning a stranger thanked me for working at the Foundation, as though thanking a soldier for her service in a war.
In Brazil we see everywhere ubiquitous ducts, maintained badly -- sometimes sabotaged -- by Central Services, as heroic volunteers make up the difference by secretly installing workarounds. I write this at my temporary desk, seeing the exposed HVAC ductwork on the third floor of a nondescript San Francisco office building. The more vital duct is the Ethernet cord connecting me to the Internet, to that communally maintained "series of tubes" that gives me work, community, free speech, and the collective wisdom of civilization.
Right now someone needs to save our ducts from sabotage, and the volunteers of the Wikimedia community have courageously decided to sacrifice a day of Wikipedia in the hopes of decisively ending a great threat. We Foundation workers have the privilege of helping.
The second is still ongoing. I am at Wikimedia Foundation headquarters today, and I was here when the word came back that the community had decided to globally black out English Wikipedia in protest of SOPA and PIPA, and I was here when we flipped the switch to do that and some music player started blasting "We're Not Gonna Take It."
# 12 Nov 2011, 10:09PM: Work And Being Realistic:
Selected recent Wikimedia (work) stuff: Guillaume Paumier did important foundational work in collecting and integrating information for a MediaWiki architectural overview and history. I've already pointed newbies to it at least five times to explain something. And the first MediaWiki 1.18 beta release is out so people can download and test that. We're hiring for like a dozen technical positions. There's so much going on that if I go on I'll end up repeating our monthly reports.
Perhaps more interestingly, my current crusade is patch review. When new technical volunteers show up, perhaps trying to scratch their own itch or get started with an annoying little easy bug, they contribute patches in our Bugzilla. We're not reviewing and responding to them consistently and quickly enough; there are more than 260 patches awaiting a response, some dating back years and thus suffering bitrot. So, the workflow isn't working. I'm working on figuring out what's broken and how to fix it.
All my Wikimedia work and travel has kept me from my previous big open source commitment, GNOME. I've been saying to friends and GNOME teammates for some time now that I can't keep up, and am now unsubscribing from the GNOME Marketing and GNOME Journal team email lists in recognition of that fact. It hurts, but it's better not to pretend to commitments one can't keep. Fortunately, Emily (Rose? not sure of her last name) & Sriram Ramkrishna have done a great service in moving GNOME Journal to a modern publishing system at https://thegnomejournal.wordpress.com/. It looks like they'll take over running and editing it, which is lovely. Paul Cutler and I simply have not had the time to give this information channel the attention it deserves, so he and I asked for others to step in and take over, and I am glad to see Sri's, Emily's, Allan Day's, and others' energy pushing forward to keep the GNOME and FLOSS communities informed about GNOME happenings.
We are in this together. It's like the geek feminist saying goes: The demands of scaling up imply, somewhat recursively, that in my role coordinating and recruiting volunteers, I need to also recruit people who will coordinate and recruit volunteers. I'm working on it.
This month I'll briefly be in Mumbai for a Wikimedia developers' meetup. Developers and translators will be working on mobile and offline access, localization, and general knowledge sharing about Wikimedia technologies. If you're interested in coming by, let me know.
Let's say that fighting sexism is like a chorus of people singing a continuous tone. If enough people sing, the tone will be continuous even though each of the singers will be stopping singing to take a breath every now and then. The way to change things is for more people to sing rather than for the same small group of people to try to sing louder and never breathe.
# (6) 01 Sep 2011, 06:22PM: Everybody's Doing It: Some Hackathon Tips:
People keep acting as though I'll have useful advice for them in hackathon planning, so here goes! I do not want to reinvent the wheel here, so I'm liberally linking to others' existing guides and HOWTOs.
Goals
First I'll talk about the social/content side of hackathons, and then some outreach/process stuff, and then the technical/logistics side.
People & Activities
Here's what I wrote while helping plan an upcoming hackathon, one of the first in its region:
One of these activities should be the "how to start modding MediaWiki"
lecture/workshop that we first led at Wikimania. A colleague and I will
be cleaning up those notes in
September to create a curriculum that a local developer could use to teach.
Other preplanned activities would include just enough structure to
help inform and guide the energy of new, uncertain participants. For
example, organizers should ask several local developers, ahead of time,
to prepare sets of tasks that small groups could work on, such as "fix
these ten bugs in Kiwix" or "add language support for (this language) to
(tool)." It would be best if these developers could also give extremely
short talks about their areas of interest (3-5 minutes each, no slides
necessary). In the afternoon of the first day, and at the beginning of
the second day, there would be a twenty-minute period of these
"lightning talks" and then participants could decide what group to join.
It's tempting for organizers to say "let's concentrate on this! and
this! and this!" at a hackathon. But you can't concentrate on
localisation, and mobile, and accessibility, and HTTPS, and mass
uploaders, and usability, and the article feedback tool, and and and.
:-) If you really want some topic focus at the hackathon, choose maybe
2 concentrations a day, and target your outreach and publicity, saying
that you especially welcome participation in those areas.
Some Things You'll Need
for a successful developer outreach event:
Technical stuff & logistics
Basically, once you have a venue, the next priority is provision for
robust wireless (and, if possible, wired) internet, and provision for
heavy electrical power usage.
You'll want to have some kind of documentation of your hackathon, to
make it easier for people to collaborate (face-to-face and remotely),
and to have a record for future reference. As we decided for the Berlin WMDE hackathon this year (thanks to Daniel Kinzler for distilling this hierarchy):
It's great to have two dedicated notetakers/facilitators typing into
Etherpad for collborative notetaking, finding and answering questions on IRC and blogging, and walking around talking to people and asking them what they're working on and helping them collaborate more effectively.
#1 - I couldn't find any USB compatible shotgun mics off hand. You can, in effect make one with the right parts [1], [2], but it's definitely not cheap.
#2 - The USB omni-directional that I found [3] isn't cheap, and I've no idea what the quality is.
So [you'd] need at least one mic setup (and probably computer) per area [you] are trying to record. It's not... "great", but it sure beats running a ton of cable, doing mixing and all sorts of much more pro level work. I have no idea what the budget is for that sort of thing, so it might not be a big deal...
You'll also want to consider bathrooms, garbage needs, whiteboards and
markers, and maybe childcare, and so on -- the sorts of things
conference organizers need to consider, in general. A few guides with
tips on what to consider:
Questions, links, comments welcome in the comments..JPG)
I'm helping arrange some developers' events at work. They're meant for open source software developers, testers, documenters, and other contributors to get together, talk, and collaborate. We often call them hackathons. I'm directly planning, with a colleague, the October 14-16 hackathon in New Orleans. But I'm also advising volunteers and people at partner organizations who want to put on technical events -- for example, a British contributor is planning a hackathon in Brighton, 19-20 November. The Wikimedia Foundation itself can only put on a few events a year, but there's plenty of room and demand for smaller regional meetups, so I'm enthusiastically encouraging volunteers who want to throw a hacking party.
My colleague Siebrand Mazeland wrote some goals for an upcoming hackathon and I like them as an example. Note that this is for an event where we're expecting that most participants will be new to MediaWiki and to open source development in general:
Since I predict that at least half of the participants will be new to
MediaWiki-related development, we'll want to seed the crowd with some
more experienced developers (if possible, from the region). And we'll
want to provide some direction and some pre-planned activities,
especially for the first day (if we're assuming a two-day hackathon).
.JPG)
I am generally in favor of allowing some room for spontaneity, by asking
participants on the first day what they're interested in working on,
encouraging them to give ad hoc lightning talks during the short talks
sessions, and by encouraging participants to lead sprints on topics of
their interest. Technologists feel more inspired and creative if
there's lots of support (people who are willing to teach and mentor) but
also freedom to discover and concentrate on new interests.
.JPG)
I find that the Stumptown Syndicate's Event Planning Handbook section on logistics ably summarizes the logistical side of what's needed at a technical event.
And below I'll reproduce a note that Jon Davis, formerly of Wikimedia
internal IT, wrote about audio recording and streaming (when planning
for the Berlin WMDE developers' days):
The biggest problem is getting reasonably quality audio to a computer. The single biggest complaint I've had... was that it was hard to hear people. [You'll] need some reasonably quality microphones to capture with. If it is presentations, I recommend some sort of shotgun style mic. If it is a group talk, something omnidirectional. The trouble is twofold.
There is probably far better advice out there regarding recording/streaming video and audio. I welcome links and experiences.
And of course there is a lot of "how to run a conference" reference material available for your perusal, including ConRunner, which focuses on science fiction convention organizers but which has more generally applicable advice. And hey, they're running MediaWiki!
# (1) 11 Jul 2011, 11:11AM: Kyriarchy & Mr. Rogers:
In late June, Kjerstin Johnson interviewed me for Bitch Media (makers of Bitch Magazine) about Wikimedia, feminism in open source, and related topics. You can listen to the half-hour interview via download from the Internet Archive, or read the transcript (4800 words, 67KB .doc file).
The actual quote is: "Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others." I'm pretty sure I first ran into it in Seth Schoen's email signature.So open source means that anybody can modify the code; closed source means that no one else other than the people who basically sold it to you can modify it, and therefore you are disempowered, and you are under someone else's control. And as Mr. Rogers once said, "I am against the idea of anybody being programmed by anybody else."
# (2) 29 Jun 2011, 07:01PM: Open Source Bridge 2011:
I had a wonderful time at this year's Open Source Bridge conference. Last year at OSBridge, I presented "The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits" and had a great time. So this year I spoke on technology management, with the fairly ambitious title "Learn Tech Management in 45 Minutes". Addie Beseda reported such a high turnout that people were standing in the hall outside the door listening to the talk, which blows my mind. Audio and polished notes coming soon; slides & nearly complete notes available now.
I also performed some geeky stand-up comedy, and people liked that. So that's nice.
Sessions I attended:
In between, I saw new friends and old, talked up MediaWiki, told people about the zillion open positions for which Wikimedia Foundation is hiring, played Dance Dance Revolution, ate great food, and enjoyed the inimitable atmosphere of a great conference.
A few ego-stroking notes: Open Source Bridge's Melissa Chavez also interviewed me for an eight-minute video. And, with Asheesh Laroia and Igal Koshevoy, I was named one of three Open Source Citizens by the conference organizers. Thank you for the honor; I will wear my scarf with pride!
(Thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation for the plane flight, to the conference for letting me in free as a speaker, and to my friends Brendan and Kara for hosting me. Thanks to Reid Beels and John Parker for their photos, which are CC BY-NC-SA. Thanks also to Josh Triplett for his photo.)
Because we released MediaWiki 1.17.0 (after 11 months of development and review!) while I was in Portland, I also led an unconference session on "What's new in MediaWiki 1.17 and How You Can Help". People volunteered to help us with PostgreSQL support, testing, design ideas, bug triage, the parser, and more. And I got to talk about the new release with Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki. That has got to be a Sumana career highlight.
Selena Deckelmann led "How to Ask for Money", which I think many people will find useful. Some of their lessons: "Find a fundraising mentor," "Hire a graphic designer", "Your network is bigger than you think," "Ask again anyway," and "Do what you say you'll do. And if you don't, communicate why - now."
"Snooze, the Totally RESTful Language": hilarious, because Markus Roberts led it. My dents from the session:
# 20 May 2011, 07:43AM: Three Wikimedia Facts:
If you have a WordPress blog, the PhotoCommons plugin is an easy way to grab photos from Wikimedia Commons as graphics for your posts.
We have a lot of job openings, including nonprofit-y, communication and legal stuff.
Basically, our number one priority right now is new editor retention -- people don't realize they can edit Wikipedia, or they try and then something turns them off. We're implementing a bunch of technical and social initiatives to turn this around.
# (5) 03 May 2011, 10:40AM: New Job, New Email Address:
In case you were wondering about my other clients from earlier this year: my paid work on GNOME Marketing, for the launch of GNOME 3.0, has ended, and I've also ended my work as fundraising coordinator for QuestionCopyright.org (passing it on to someone who has more time and relevant experience).
It might be disorienting to only have one job! I shall probably get used to it.
As of this month, I'm a full-time contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation, serving as Volunteer Development Coordinator. My boss at WMF, Rob Lanphier, has just posted a welcome note that makes me sound all fancy.
# 26 Apr 2011, 05:14PM: GSoC, GSoC, Who's There?:
As the organizational administrator for MediaWiki (thanks to my job for the Wikimedia Foundation), I am pleased to announce our Google Summer of Code students for 2011.
Also delight-inducing: the number of rejected applicants who hope to contribute to MediaWiki as volunteers. I'm trying to get them involved in their local Wikimedia chapters as well.
# 31 Mar 2011, 03:40PM: MediaWiki Accepting Google Summer of Code Applications: Just posted on the Wikimedia tech blog: MediaWiki got accepted as a Google Summer of Code project, so we're looking for project ideas, mentors, and students. More details at the techblog post.
# (5) 02 Mar 2011, 04:54AM: Wikimedia:
Now that my new bosses have told the world: yes, I'm also now consulting for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia and other free knowledge initiatives. To grossly simplify, I'm coordinating software development (mostly MediaWiki improvement) that isn't by WMF staffers, primarily concentrating on the upcoming Berlin hackathon and this year's Google Summer of Code participation.
Thank you, nostalgia: in December, I was looking up my old high school classmate Christine Moellenberndt, and discovered she was a new hire, then looked at the current job openings, and applied.
I told my mom about it and it went something like:
"Mom, I'm working for the nonprofit that does Wikipedia! ... No, not them, they're different. Wikipedia is a big free encyclopedia that's online for anyone to use. Wikileaks is a ... well, they're a bunch of people who like to get and publicize secrets -- anyway, that's not us."
And no, this holiday season my photogenic face will not be on banner ads entreating you to give. As far as I know.
# (1) 09 Feb 2011, 12:34PM: Recruiting:
As you might have seen from my microblogging, I seem to know a lot of firms that are hiring. In short: I know people who are looking for project managers, UX designers, backend developers, undergrads who code, playtesters, kernel & mobile hackers, so if you know me at all, feel free to contact me to ask for an introduction.
Wikimedia, the foundation that supports Wikipedia ("No, Mom, not Wikileaks, that's different"), is looking for lots of engineers (deadline in 2 days) and fundraisers/researchers/analysts/more. The Volunteer Development Coordinator role also has a 11 February application deadline: attention, open source community managers!
Get paid to hack Linux mobile and save vendors & developers from constantly reinventing the wheel at Linaro. They especially need kernel and Android hackers and technical project and product managers.
OpenPlans, the New York City nonprofit that uses technology to make cities better, has decadent offices and benefits. Oh, and they're looking for a web designer, two engineers, and a fundraising manager.
Socialbomb, the Brooklyn startup that creates stylish experiences connecting Blu-Ray and mobile devices to Facebook & Twitter, is looking to fill several roles, including development.
I'll be administering some Google Summer of Code work this year, so I'd like to recruit bright university students to consider applying. It's never too early to start thinking about summer internships! And don't worry too hard about qualifications: "Do you have some programming experience at the university level? Then, yes, you are good enough! No, you don't need to be a Computer Science or IT major."
And I know at least one more project that's looking for a part-time playtester and a part-time project manager, so let me know if you're interested.
Cogito, Ergo Sumana by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author at sumanah@panix.com.