Topic on Talk:New Developers/Quarterly/2017-10

• Review the tutorials explaining the code contribution process and investigate what we can improve further. Such as: include a list of easy tasks requiring one-line fixes, etc. that might bring some value to the first contribution made by newcomers
• Getting Wikipedia Android Apps project listed as a featured project on the New Developers page
• Better tracking information of new developers
  • Quim's idea to start with developers from workshops in Africa via CRM
• Shorten the survey, change the timeframe, and send it not just at the end of the quarter but a few times?
• Can we do anything about this issue "Fix the IP ban that blocks access to Phabricator"?

@AKlapper (WMF) @Rfarrand (WMF) @Qgil-WMF What do you think?

@SSethi (WMF):

• Having real one-liner tasks (e.g. typo fixes) offered instead of just "check out Examples and make a change that does not fix any real bug" is exactly what https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T146960 is about. We'd need folks to do this (categorize #easy tasks, I can try to remember but it's hard to judge if you're not the dev), and then using that in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161901.
• Survey timeframe: Up to you, but if you want to go for monthly sending out, please update our docs in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T177522

• Re Phab IP ban: It is meant to be only about specific Wikipedia Zero providers. Which might have bugs which someone needs to fix. Such as https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T173537 or https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T174342. To read more about the IP block, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T170200#3424774...

@SSethi (WMF) Thanks so much for putting this together. It't really valuable. :)

• For point #9: perhaps if this is the case, we can hold yearly (??) "tell your friends about contributing to Wikimedia" volunteer recruting drive. Maybe using similar tactics to how other non-profit organizations ask for money.
  • We could write both an email and a facebook post with links that people could copy and paste and then just send that around
  • We could ask people to think about people that they know that might like to get interested & if they don't want to do anything - we could approach them ourselves. "Hi NAME, we heard from Quim Gil that you might be interested in learning about volunteer opportunities to contribute to............... if you have any questions about getting started, please don't hesitate to ask"
  • We could even be crazy and ask Fundraising to add some details in some of their banners "Donate money OR volunteer your developer skills"
• For point #8: maybe we can send personal messages to some newcomers asking them to fill it out next time. Shortening it, like you plan, is probably going to help also.
• For point #7: certainly we should, as a team, look at what questions we want to ask people during hackathon registration. Registration for Barcelona will sneak up on us pretty quickly here.
• For point #3 can we work with the Community Tech team to set up a "newcomers-code-review-day" once every quarter? Or even make it wikitech-l wide and send an email out with code written by newcomers that has not been reviewed and / or needs help?
• I think we should have an action item to check in with other small hackathon organizers (Ghana, Greece, Netherlands, etc) both just a week or so in advance of their events and again afterwards.
  • The pre event check in would be to offer any last minute support in any capacity
  • The post event check in should be to see if they want to write a blog or if they found our tasks useful, or if they discovered other tasks that still need work, or if there is anything else they want to tell us. We should also ask them where they are collecting their lessons learned and add a link to that to our hackathons documentation. Maybe also, specifically, what they wished they had known in advance of organizing the event.

@AKlapper (WMF) @Qgil-WMF & @SSethi (WMF), any thoughts? ^^ :)

I'm wondering.. if we should make the following tasks as subtasks of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178630

• Gerrit/Tutorial https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161901
• Phabricator IP/Ban https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T173537
• CRM for TC: Start with new developers from workshops in Africa https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T177583
• Follow up with organizers of WikiFemHack?
• I created already one about making Wikipedia Android app as a featured project for new developers https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178633
• Shortening the survey is already now a TODO in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178627

@Rfarrand (WMF) All your points 1-3 are some promising ideas for improving outreach, that we could utilize in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T176488

@AKlapper (WMF) Better triaging for easy tasks sounds interesting, but I am not sure if we currently have the bandwidth to work on this, and if we should carve out a tiny bit of it for the purpose of improving the Gerrit tutorial.

@SSethi (WMF): Re Follow up with organizers of WikiFemHack: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T176861 might be usable for this (as that task needs an update anyway)

Slight change > Make new tasks as subtasks of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T167085 as Quim suggested in T178630#3699139

Looking at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T167085 which is called "Release a "New Developers Quarterly Report" including metrics, trends, lessons learned, and recommendations by Oct 2017", those tasks listed above do not block releasing a Quarterly Report by Oct 2017 and that task is already resolved. Hence they are not subtasks (tasks that need to be done to resolve a parent task) in my understanding - also see Phabricator/Help#Parent tasks and subtasks. So I guess I disagree with Quim here. :)