Developer Advocacy

The Developer Advocacy team is a sub team of the Technical Engagement team. The Developer Advocacy team is tasked with supporting the technical communities who use Wikimedia web APIs and software projects to spread and improve free knowledge. They collaborate with teams in the Wikimedia Foundation, the larger Wikimedia movement, and external organizations to promote the use of the Wikimedia platforms via documentation, sample code, libraries, articles, and reference applications. The team also supports programs to actively recruit and mentor new technical contributors who will become the next generation of Foundation staff and FLOSS project maintainers. Our primary focus is to help the developer community build and scale successful projects using Wikimedia technology. We encourage them to contribute to our free and open source projects as a way to achieve their own goals.

To contact us, see #Team below.

Srishti Sethi showing stuff

Sarah R. Rodlund looks like she is talking to a group but the chairs are empty

Andre Klapper searching for new technical contributors in his internet bag

Areas

These are regular tasks that usually don't make it to our goals or backlogs explicitly, but take a significant portion of our time and attention.

Everywhere (within reason)

• Help newcomers with technical questions, reporting their first bugs, or looking for first tasks to contribute.

Task management

Scan new tasks in Phabricator , bringing them into good shape and looking for potential issues that need escalation.

• Triage old tasks in order to push forward bugs or feature requests that require higher attention, or resolving obsolete reports.
• Oversee the creation and renaming of new projects.

For a more detailed description of workflows, see Bugwrangler .

Events

• Organization of online and face-to-face events (except for the Wikimedia Technical Conference or international Hackathons ), and smaller events for hacking, training, and promote new technologies.
• Plan and run a continuous stream of online Tech Talks and Wikimedia Tech meetups in San Francisco.
• Find ways to make events accessible to all participants.

Documentation

Coordination of entry-level and mid-level documentation with a focus on documentation for volunteer contributors that encourages developers to use Wikimedia data and APIs.

Outreach programs

Coordinate Wikimedia's participation in Outreach programs (Google Summer of Code , Outreachy , Google Code-in , etc.) to bring in new contributors to our technical projects and introduce them to free and open source software.

Technical Community Metrics

Maintain https://wikimedia.biterg.io which offers some statistics about Wikimedia's technical community. See Community metrics .

Projects

Some recent or ongoing projects:

• Building technical capacity in smaller wikis (phab:T242542)
• Improving MediaWiki Action API documentation and Toolforge documentation
• Improving Gerrit/Tutorial (01/2020)
• Refresh of the mediawiki.org frontpage (10/2018-04/2019; Screenshot comparison)
• Creating a Developer Portal (since 07/2020)

Also see Wikimedia Technical Engagement/Workshops and talks .

Planning

You can follow our work and get involved. Contributors of all disciplines and skill levels are welcome!

We mainly use Phabricator for planning work. You can find our workboard at phab:tag/developer-advocacy/.

Every significant task that doesn't belong to a regular workflow needs to have its own Phabricator task associated to the team project.

Our Phabricator workboard columns have the following meaning:

• To Triage: New tasks are placed automatically in this column. Then we move them to the column that seems more appropriate. Such moving can be done by anyone in the team. If the task does not seem trivial, it is to be brought up in our team meeting as a routine. Ignore the "Priority" value of a task in this column, as it might be the Priority of another team.
• Backlog: We have looked at tasks in this column. Tasks here could be assigned to a team member but we rather want to avoid cookie licking. If it is likely that we soon want to work on a task, we might give that task a higher priority or even move it to a quarterly column.
• Team radar: Tasks that are interesting to us but we do not work on and do not drive these tasks. Hence we do not close these tasks but only remove our team project tag if at all.
• Quarterly: Tasks we plan to work on in this quarter. Tasks should have an assignee.

Quarterly goals

We follow the process for defining quarterly goals used at Wikimedia Technology/Goals.

See the "Technical Engagement" section in the corresponding quarter linked on Wikimedia Technology/Goals.

For historical goals, see #Historical data below.

Also see the corresponding quarterly columns on our Phabricator workboard.

Team

Photo	Name, Title	Main Focus Areas
	Sarah Rodlund, Technical Writer	Toolforge and Cloud VPS improvements, Outreach programs Google Season of Docs, Wikimedia Technical Talks, Wikimedia Technical Blog
	Srishti Sethi, Developer Advocate	Outreach programs (Google Summer of Code & Outreachy), Small Wiki Toolkits, Toolhub, MediaWiki Action API Documentation improvements
	Andre Klapper, Developer Advocate	Bugwrangler (Phabricator), Community metrics, Developer Portal (and sometimes documentation), Code Review, Google Code-in
	Joaquin Oltra Hernandez, Developer Advocate	Just joinedǃ TBD

Contact

You can contact the entire team

• by adding a comment on the Discussion page of this very page, or
• by creating a task in Phabricator under phab:tag/developer-advocacy/ if you are sure that we are the correct team for a specific task.

To contact individual team members, see the contact information on the individual user pages (linked above).

Historical data

Before July 2018, this team was called Developer Relations. Before September 2015, this team was called Engineering Community.