WikiToLearn India Conference 2016

Background

Like in most remote Universities, the Open Source culture is quite unpopular in LNMIIT, primarly due to lack of understanding at the student level; how one can become a part of the community and start contributing along with ever-solving unknown entry level barriers to the communities itself. Considering Mediawiki as one software which keep alive the knowledge source Wikipedia and WikiToLearn, LNMIIT is bringing WikiToLearn Conference to Jaipur, India to bring in more technical contributers to the community. It will help students get a head start to code contrnibutions to Mediawiki codebase, and Open Source development in general. We plan to have introductory and live sessions which touch every aspect - starting from the concepts of Open Source, technical contributing guidelines to Mediawiki software and WikiToLearn, setting up environments, finding and fixing in code fixes and submitting for review. We also have our aim to focus on bringing in more translators into WikiToLearn and Wikimedia Foundation through this event by people from the translation team, who would be joining us.

On the Mediawiki and WikiToLearn front, we have six speakers (four from India and two from abroad) who will be flying over to make the conference successful. They have experience in the relevant Technical fronts and have conducted other hackathons and conferences before.

Added Benefit

Are you willing to apply for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) but don't know how to start?

Well, that's problem everyone faces at the onset of joining the open source communities.

Attending this workshop would help anyone who is willing to apply to the open source scholarship programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC)and/or Outreachy but lacks direction or information. This workshop will leave you with a better understanding on how you may proceed with contributing to an organization of your choice, thus significantly boosting the probability of you getting selected!

Details

Date	18-19 January, 2016
Time	9:30am-4:30pm
Venue	LNMIIT campus
Contact	srijan@wikitolearn.com, 01tonythomas@gmail.com
Hashtag	#wtlindiaconf
Register	Register here.
IRC	#wtlindiaconf

Facilitators

• Tony Thomas
• Srijan Agarwal

Registration

Fill this form to register yourself for the conference. Since we have limited slots available, we'll keep the event limited to the registered students.

Pre-requisite

To make sure all attendees are at the same phase, please ensure that you have the following setup in your machine:

1. Any working Linux environment, with LAMP server installed. You can find the installation steps for LAMP in Ubuntu here
2. Any powerful PHP IDE, PHPstorm recommended. You can find the instructions here.
3. An account in Wikitech, Gerrit, Wikimedia Phabricator, and Github
4. Try cloning and setting up Gerrit in your machine following the instructions given here
5. Try connecting with the IRC channel #wikimedia-dev ^connect

Important: We are expecting the participants to have a clone of MediaWiki-core downloaded and installed in their machine before hand, so that we can start early with the contribution phase. You can find the detailed instructions on how to setup development environment for Mediawiki in the Gerrit/Tutorial

In case you do not have any prior know-how of PHP, Version control or web applications : You are welcome to try setting up a simple registration and login web application in PHP beforehand, in your machine. You can find sample code for the same here. You will have to setup LAMP or similar stack in your machine to test the code locally.

Schedule

 

Date	Time	Event	Location
18 Jan	09:30 am - 11:30 am	Inauguration, other ceremonies	Lecture hall 9-10, LNMIIT Campus
18 Jan	11:30 am - 12:30 am	Continuous hackathon with lightning talks in between	Lecture hall 9-10, LNMIIT Campus
18 Jan	12:30 am - 1:30 pm	Lunch	Lecture hall 9-10, LNMIIT Campus
18 Jan	1:30 pm - 4:30 pm	Continuous hackathon with lightning talks in between	Lecture hall 9-10, LNMIIT Campus
19 Jan	09:30 am - 12:30 am	Continuous hackathon with lightning talks in between	Lecture hall 9-10, LNMIIT Campus
19 Jan	12:30 am - 1:30 pm	Lunch	Lecture hall 9-10, LNMIIT Campus
19 Jan	1:30 pm - 3:30 pm	Continuous hackathon with lightning talks in between	Lecture hall 9-10, LNMIIT Campus
19 Jan	3:30 pm - 04:30 pm	Showcase, talk by participants, Closing in Ceremony	Lecture hall 9-10, LNMIIT Campus

Why Should You Attend?

1. Reading through large open-source code base and contributing as code: Increasing their technical and code scripting skills, solving simple to complex real time problems existing in Mediawiki software. 
2. Motivated students reaching out and getting into internship opportunities like Google Summer of Code and Outreachy: Along with building a strong hold in technical stuff, internship programs like GSoC and Outreachy allow its interns to work on major problems, proposing and implementing their solution under expert mentorships. The selected students gets a considerable stipend, and its a major addition to the institutional record too. IIIT Hyderabad had 62 selects and IIT Bombay 13. (Source)
3. Active community engagement and other opportunities The workshop would add to the technical know-how of the participants, while working closely with a worldwide Wikimedia community, which is the fun part.
4. GSoC and Outreachy will also serve as incentives for the participants to continue contributing. We will make sure that we are continuously in contact with new contributors via mailing list telling them about the new events and changes in Wikimedia and WikiToLearn.

FAQ

• What you need to know
  • Participants are expected to take as learning the knowledge of what open source is, how to contribute to it, and maintaining quality and documentation.
  • You need to have some sort of prior experience developing stuff (web apps, mobile apps, data mungers, anything at all!). There are a variety of things you can do (CSS/JS hacks, webapps that use the API, Mobile apps, data mining) that pretty much anyone with some developer experience is bound to find something fun to do. This is a hackathon, and not a workshop.
  • Knowledge of Free Software License, comfortable using any Online Project hosting websites (like Github) since we would want you make the code you write for the hack freely available, online.
• What language can I use
  • Any programming language you are comfortable with and can make sense of the MediaWiki code base
  • Life would get easier if you have some prior programming experience in PHP since most of the MediaWiki code is written in PHP
• How can I prepare for the hackathon
  • Read through links in Resources, check out the Examples.
  • Feel free to ask questions! Contact us.
• What qualifies me to come
  • Show us some code you have written, tell us what you know, tell us why you love hacking (and Wikipedia) in general, and you'll get the pass :)
  • Please sign up here.
• How to spread the word
  • Pass on the word to your fellow geek friends.
  • Use #WTLIndiaConf on Twitter.