[WMF-outreach-staff] Current state of Wikimania hackathon organizing (and stepping up as lead)

[Asheesh Laroia]

I notice that on https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Organizing_team 
there's no specific people dedicated to organizing the hackathon. I want 
to step up to be the lead organizer, but I don't want to step on anyone's 
toes.

>From what I gather, looking at 
https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon , no one has invited 
people to give specific tutorials yet, or created a concrete schedule. 
That's fine for a free-form hackathon.

I'm interested in adding a lot more structure to things -- including 
finding and training volunteers to help make that work -- so that people 
who show up have a lot more clarity on what they can do that helps push 
the Wikimedia/MediaWiki tech world forward.

I'll be using this list as a discussion ground and idea growing point. 
Yes, that means if you have ideas, mention them here and we'll think + 
iterate together!

Katie and Gregory in particular, I know you had some ideas about the 
hackathon. My first goal is to survey the people who have signed up to 
figure out what they want to learn, and also behind-the-scenes I'll do 
some research to see what things we can teach them (e.g. if they maintain 
extensions in svn and we can help them move to git), and then customize 
the hackathon to make sure it provides that.

If we can organize things pretty soon, then there will be time to 
advertise the improved newcomer-friendly hackathon to other Wikimania 
attendees and try to convince them to show up on those first two days, 
too!

So I'll be trying to "Be bold" in terms of updating pages like 
https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule/Hackathon , and I'm 
willing to put in a lot of work and time into making things great.

I want to emphasize that I'm quite open to different ideas and 
adjustments!

If that seems reasonable to y'all, I think the next step is for me to 
somehow get access to the list of names+emails who have signed up when 
registering for Wikimania. (Katie said on IRC a spreadsheet could probably 
be exported; that sounds fine for a start.) From my end, I'll be working 
on a survey to send to them to find out what they want to learn and hack 
on.

-- Asheesh.