[Events] Making a "Test-it" event happen

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi all Event-y people,

Sumana and I had a conversation a few months ago about organizing a "Test 
It" event, where OpenHatch encouraged free software fans to test (and 
report) issues in their favorite free software package.

Sumana, as I recall, you were interested because MediaWiki was having a 
major update, and so it was a good time for such an event in October 2011.

It's way past October 2011, but I definitely think that a 
community-centric, retention-oriented software testing event is something 
that could be great.

Right now, I don't have the bandwidth to organize such a thing, but I'll 
quickly lay out what I think it would take. Anyone on this list (or 
elsewhere in the world) could step up and run it, and if it fits the 
following structure (or otherwise is awesome), I'd be quite happy to hand 
that person the OpenHatch banner to do it so that it feels like a 
cross-community collaboration!

* Select software projects with some community around testing

For MediaWiki, it seems that testers hang out in the main #mediawiki IRC 
channel and pop in now and then, mentioning issues and being welcomed. 
That's a level of community-around-testing that's a baseline for what I'm 
after, and so of course that qualifies. Anything stronger also works -- 
for example, Mozilla has a big QA operation with a separate IRC channel 
and mailing list and active participants.

* Find "point people" within each project to promise to be available as 
mentors on IRC or otherwise in real-time

* Make sure that the people showing up to be testers have something 
specific to test

* Make sure that there is a specific time for each project (perhaps the 
times overlap, or perhaps they don't) so that attendees feel some 
urgency (-:

* Come up with some reasonable follow-up plan to find out what impact the 
event had, with particular regard to retention

* Write a blog post for the OpenHatch blog about how the event went

* Write a note for this list about how the event went (could be the same 
text as above)

Anything else we'd need? I want to specially invite jesstess to remark on 
what else might make the event excellent. Everyone else too! -- what do 
you think of such a structure?

One thing I will say about retention -- it'd be great if such an event 
were to cause lots of new people to arrive at a project and stick 
indefinitely, but something I've learned by running sprints is that events 
often uncover a class of contributors who want to contribute, but 
basically only will at dedicated event times. So maybe the best thing to 
do is to see how many of the attendees show up to a follow-up event 
online, rather than assuming that they have totally vanished from the 
project if they stop being visible within a few weeks.

-- Asheesh.