[Events] OpenHatch + Wikimedia Foundation test event June 9

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi all event peeps!

Excerpts from Chris McMahon's message of Wed May 16 17:19:34 -0400 2012:
> OpenHatch will be helping the Wikimedia Foundation with a testing event on
> June 9 10AM-noon Pacific time.

Yup! It's something that Sumana and Chris roped me into volunteering to
help with. (:

> WMF is working on a new system for Article Feedback on Wikipedia, and as of
> June 9, the project will be nearly complete, with all essential functions
> publicly available.  The goal of the testing is to flush out any last
> potential issues and problems before WMF winds down this phase of the
> project and releases the new Article Feedback system across all of
> Wikipedia.
> 
> This testing event follows on a similar event that saw WMF collaborate with
> an established testing organization, the Weekend Testers.   We will be
> extending the invitation to help test Article Feedback to the Weekend
> Testers in their regular session on June 2, so we expect to have
> professional software testers on hand as well as participants from
> OpenHatch.
> 
> No programming skill is required for this exercise, just curiosity and and
> eye for detail (although knowing something about web development and/or
> Wikipedia is a plus!)

It's really exciting that you folks are organizing these open testing
events.

> OpenHatch and WMF hope you join us on June 9.  There will be more details
> to follow, but the curious might want to investigate some background:
> 
> WMF initial announcement:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OpenHatch_Testing_June_2012
> Description and transcript of the WMF test event with Weekend Testing:
> http://weekendtesting.com/archives/2499

This is great. As per our conversation, I'm glad we'll be running this
event on an IRC channel that's actively used within the mediawiki dev
community.

I see that the IRC channel is logged in real-time, at e.g. 
http://bots.wmflabs.org/~wm-bot/logs/%23mediawiki/20120517.txt
so we can point late-comers at the right text file, which is good for
avoiding too much repetition.

I'm glad your test plan from before included instructions on filing bugs;
that'll be hugely helpful, and I bet a lot of our attendees won't have
filed bugs before.

One thing I think we should do before I work on getting the word out, is
to create a RSVP system for people to use. Evn if it's "just" a form that
submits to a database/spreadsheet that lets us ask people their names and
background level, I think that'll be great. Plus we can send reminder
emails and possibly an exit survey that way.

If y'all are okay with my choice of tech, I would make a Google Docs
spreadsheet form for it.

We'll need to make sure we have a concrete plan for what people do after
they attend the event -- join a particular mailing list, etc., to stay
in touch with the community. (In this case, wikitech-l seems like the
right list. Is there also a list with past discussions about the Article
Feedback Tool?)

Transcript of last event:
   http://weekendtesting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/WTA27_Experience_Report.pdf

Reading the transcript of the Weekend Testing event, it seems some people
got stuck. That's something that will basically always happen, but I'll
read the transcript with an eye toward how we can prep people well for
the upcoming event. One way we can do that seems to be to limit the
number of available test plans.

It does seem like if we have more than a few attendees, people will have
trouble getting their questions answered all in one IRC channel. Maybe
we can assign people to smaller "TA" channels. Then we'd moderate the
main channel, and have you and me and others be in the smaller channels.
But that goes against the goal of having people participate in the
main channel of the community.

Those are my thoughts for now! I think once we have an RSVP, we should
make a blurb for a variety of email lists, and get the word out (and
others on this list -- I welcome your input on the event structure,
and your possible future help getting the word out)!

-- Asheesh.