Participants at the San Francisco hackathon in January 2012

In January, 92 participants gathered in San Francisco to learn about Wikimedia technology and to build things in our first Bay Area hackathon.

After a kickoff speech by Foundation VP of Engineering Erik Möller (video), we led tutorials on the MediaWiki web API, customizing wikis with JavaScript user scripts and Gadgets, and building the Wikipedia Android app.  (We recorded each training; click those links for how-to guides and videos.)  We asked the participants to self-organize into teams and work on projects.  After their demonstration showcase, judges awarded a few prizes to the best demos.

(more…)

On May 24th and 25th, the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a CiviCRM coding sprint in our San Francisco office. CiviCRM is the premier open source constituent relationship manager; WMF uses it to store donor and contribution information. Our CiviCRM database contains more than a million contact records and a million contribution records.

CiviCRM, The Free and Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector

The sprint was a terrific success. The eight participants squashed many CiviCRM bugs — and the Foundation directly benefited, as they improved CiviCRM contact/contribution search performance by 15 to 25 times! Formerly, it could take more than two minutes for someone to search among the contribution records. The developers’ tweaks, hacks and patches whittled that down to about 4-6 seconds per search. This will save innumerable hours for WMF administrators and fundraisers.

The Foundation’s Arthur Richards, a fundraising engineer, enthused: “Any software tool, open source or not, comes with headaches; the beauty of tools like CiviCRM is that we can solve our own problems. Thanks to having some great hackers in one place, we managed to mitigate one of our biggest CiviCRM pain points in a matter of hours.”

You can read more details about the sprint on Donald Lobo’s CiviCRM blog.

Richards was especially excited to “highlight how awesome it is working with other open source projects and using other open source tools. We get to scratch each other’s backs, which helps support a sustainable, healthy ecosystem of software/communities. Also, using open source tools like CiviCRM – while not without their (often big) pain points – is great because we can fix the software ourselves. While the tools are free to use, with a little bit of elbow grease and some resources, they can be molded and fixed to meet our needs much easier (and likely much cheaper) than relying on proprietary tools. Plus, the CiviCRM community has been instrumental in helping us troubleshoot, solve problems and add new features to meet our usage requirements.”

The CiviCRM community is planning to run another code sprint in the fall in Northern California; please contact them if you’d like to participate or even host it. In the meantime, Wikimedia and thousands of other nonprofits will enjoy the CiviCRM improvements developed in May.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

While GLAMCamp NYC finished on Sunday (Signpost coverage), the work initiated there will continue throughout the GLAM community.  Representatives from cultural institutions and Wikimedia chapters, as well as individuals, are working on several projects.  The projects concerning web badges for free culture allies, a metadata standard for use in the mass uploader/data ingestion tool, and the web analytics proposal are in particular seeking contributors and project managers; please comment at the coordination page to signal your interest.

Also available: the collaborative notes from Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and specifically for discussion of the Ambassadors program, the Point Of Entry project, the data ingestion tool, and the metrics/analytics proposal.

Thanks to the organizers and participants for a productive and illuminating weekend.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Today, several Wikimedians and representatives from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions) met in New York City to kick off GLAMCampNYC.  New York City’s public Science, Industry, and Business Library is hosting the event.

Liam Wyatt, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Cultural Partnerships Fellow (aka GLAM fellow), introduced two keynoters: Meg Bellinger, discussing open access at Yale, and Maarten Zeinstra, presenting the Europeana public domain calculator.  The conference continues through Sunday.  Participants are discussing and building the GLAM outreach wiki, writing documentation, sharing best practices, and building tools.

Developers at GLAMCamp are developing a data-munging tool, based on pywikipediabot, to aid in mass uploads (more details).  According to Wyatt, the most common requests from GLAM institutions are (1) mass upload of audiovisual media and (2) metrics, “easily exportable statistics based on analytics on a GLAM’s relationship with Wikimedia.”  The data-munging or data ingestion tool will aid in the import of metadata from large sets of files, thus speeding the difficult part of mass uploads.  Attendees will be hacking on it in sprints this weekend, starting 3pm-4:30pm UTC time tomorrow, Saturday the 21st. Join them in person (11am local time), or in #glamwiki on Freenode.

See notes from today’s general talks and discussion and from the discussion of the GLAM Ambassadors program, or follow #glamwiki and #glamcamp on Twitter and Identi.ca.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Greetings MediaWiki hackers!

I am pleased to announce the upcoming MediaWiki Hack-A-Ton in Washington, DC.

As you are all aware, every year in April our good friends at Wikimedia Deutschland host the annual “MediaWiki Developers Meetup” in Berlin. At that event, the program is focused on demonstrations, workshops and small group discussions. To complement this, we’re planning the DC meetup to be focused solely on hacking, bugfixing and getting down and dirty with the
code.

We’re scheduling this for October 22nd-24th in Washington, DC. Some of the details haven’t been ironed out yet, but will be announced over the coming days as it is. So clear your calendars, and keep your eyes on MediaWiki.org and the mailing lists for more information.

Some travel assistance may be available for those coming a long way. I’ve also been told there will be swag of some sort for attendees :)

Chad Horohoe
Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation

And one more thing: I forgot to mention Bugzilla. To help track the event, we’ve added a new keyword, “bugsmash.” Prior to the Hack-A-Ton, we’d like people to start tagging bugs that should be tackled during the event. It will help the participants get started finding bugs, as well as bump the priority on a bug you’ve been wanting to see fixed.