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

[Sumana Harihareswara]

On 04/13/2012 07:14 PM, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for the note, Asheesh.  Your TODO list lines up with my intuition
as well.

I'm cc'ing our QA Lead, Chris McMahon, who is arranging this sort of
participation -- on May 5th he'll be running an event with Weekend
Testers http://weekendtesting.com .  Chris, would you also like to
co-brand that event with OpenHatch?  The up side is: more potential
contributors.  The downside is: a large proportion of them will be very
new to formal software testing and would need more handholding.

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation