Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Developer Summit/2017/Topic ideas

This is the text of the "Inclusiveness" section of WikiDev17/Topic ideas as of this writing

How can we help our software development community be more inclusive and productive (and attract many more people)? Improving developer outreach. Our developer community is quite stable, and getting old. We are struggling attracting new developers. How do we grow our developer community to the size and diversity that a popular project like Wikimedia would deserve? The "Inclusiveness" topic above is included here, but the main problem is outreach in general.

Fora: Code of Conduct draft, meta:Grants:IdeaLab, GSoC, Outreachy participants

I think an important part of "inclusiveness" is dealing with harassment. It's not enough to recruit new and diverse editors, we need to protect them (and our existing editors) in order to retain them. In my mind this dovetails with efforts like Teahouse (providing a welcome party that's not going to immediately revert your first edit), Flow and Echo (in terms of providing conversational UX which is responsive and hopefully not abusive), as well as the thinking around real-time collaboration (in so far as these new UXs should incorporate designs that raise the bar for acceptable behavior) and "draft"/merge workflows (to provide protected spaces for new or minority editors to work before proposing their contributions for general merge).

I didn't know exactly how to express the above without seeming to hijack the topic, however, so I've dropped it here in a comment. I'd appreciate if others could figure out a concise way to express the 'anti-harassment' and 'inclusive/welcoming UX' aspects of the above into the topic idea.

Thanks for the response, @Cscott. In order to avoid hijacking the topic, we may just need to take this part of the conversation over to Talk:Code of Conduct/Draft. @mooeypoo and @Mattflaschen-WMF: your thoughts?

@Cscott @RobLa-WMF I agree that promoting diversity and preventing harassment are an important part (but certainly there are multiple other important parts) of growing our technical community.

I always welcome more participants at Talk:Code of Conduct/Draft .

I propose to combine this Inclusiveness aspect and the technical collaboration aspect discussed in another thread under a common main topic labelled How to engage new technical contributors.

Hm. Why are we limiting ourselves to "new contributors" and not also on retention? That was part of my point above which seems to have been missed entirely. "Inclusiveness" means not just getting new people to try wiki out, but to *retain them*, and retaining them means (a) ensuring that our community is friendly and not hostile, and also (b) giving users tools to control their social interactions on-site and filter out harassment.

So I'm going to formally object to sidelining this to the code of conduct, since I think this is a technical discussion about UX affordances, not just a social contract, and I object to Qgil's combination proposal because I think this is about *retaining* diverse voices when they join us, not just in convincing them to engage with us the first time.

OK, fair.

What about "How to grow our technical community".

This includes all the obstacles impeding our technical community to reach the size, awareness, freshness, and diversity that one would expect from a top 10 Internet site build entirely with free software technologies.