Developer Advocacy

The Developer Advocacy team is a sub team of the Technical Engagement team. The Developer Advocacy team supports 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 Wikimedia 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.

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 , Season of Docs , 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
• Updating and improving the PAWS documentation and creating PAWS tutorials (since 2020)
• Help with organizing the annual Coolest Tool Award
• Improving the Gerrit/Tutorial page (01/2020)
• Refresh of the mediawiki.org frontpage (10/2018-04/2019; Screenshot comparison)
• Creating a Developer Portal (since 07/2020)
• Creating a series of tutorial videos how to use phabricator.wikimedia.org (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

See the corresponding entries on Wikimedia Technology/Annual Plans for goals since July 2021.

For historical goals, see the "Technical Engagement" section in the corresponding quarter linked on Wikimedia Technology/Goals before July 2021, and #Historical data below.

Also see the corresponding quarterly columns on the Phabricator team workboard.

Team

Photo	Name, Title	Main Focus Areas
Super Srishti	Srishti Sethi, Senior Developer Advocate	Outreach programs (Google Summer of Code & Outreachy), Small Wiki Toolkits, Toolhub, MediaWiki Action API Documentation improvements
It's an Andre!	Andre Klapper, Staff Developer Advocate	Bugwrangler (Phabricator), Community metrics, Developer Portal (and sometimes documentation), Code Review, Google Code-in
The Invisible Melinda	Melinda Seckington, Developer Advocacy Manager	Management and strategy of the Developer Advocacy team
The Terrific Tricia	Tricia Burmeister, Technical Writer	Empower developers and technical contributors to find, benefit from, and improve technical documentation.
Haley with a dog in a backpack	Haley Lepp, Technical Community Program Manager	Talk to me about the Wikimedia Hackathon, NLP, and Tech ethics!
The Invisible Komla	Seyram Komla Sapaty, Developer Advocate	Working with the technical community around Wikimedia's Tools & Cloud Services

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.

Extended content

Our previous activity is in the links on the Engineering Community Team template on MediaWiki wiki. Before April 2016, the team used monthly Sprint projects in Phabricator to plan work. For older monthly sprint projects before the team name was changed in Sep2015, see Oct2014, Nov2014, Dec2014, Jan2015, Feb2015, Mar2015, Apr2015, May2015, Jun2015, Jul2015, Aug2015. Quarterly goals See the "Technical Engagement" section in the corresponding quarter linked on Wikimedia Technology/Goals. For older goals: April - June 2018: Wikimedia Technology/Goals/2017-18 Q4#Technology departmental programs January - March 2018 (as part of the Technical Collaboration team) October - December 2017 (as part of the Technical Collaboration team) July - September 2017 (as part of the Technical Collaboration team) April - June 2017 (as part of the Technical Collaboration team) January - March 2017 (as part of the Technical Collaboration team) January - March 2016 October - December 2015 July - September 2015 April - June 2015 July 2014 - March 2015 July 2013 - June 2014 July 2012 - June 2013 Quarterly check-ins The Wikimedia Foundation performed Quarterly Reviews for a while. They were later renamed to Quarterly Check Ins: Jan - Mar 2017: c:File:CE_APRIL_2017_Quarterly_Check_In_(Q4)_Slide_Deck_1.pdf&page=19 Oct - Dec 2016: Part 1, Part 2 Jul - Sep 2016 Apr - Jun 2016, page 17ff. Jan - Mar 2016, page 6ff. Oct - Dec 2015, page 18ff. Jul - Sep 2015, page 8ff. Apr - Jun 2015, page 27ff. Jan - Mar 2015, page 22ff.