Wikimedia Technical Conference/2019/PCUpdates

The Program Committee will begin posting updates from our weekly meeting around where we are in the planning process. The updates will include links to Phab tasks when we get to a stage where we could use input around session structure / content / etc.

If you have any questions please use the Phab task or this talk page.

Update from 1 October

Session themes and session proposals will be published Phabricator here by Friday of this week at the latest for comment and feedback from attendees: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234085

People will have 1 week to point out major gaps, missing sessions, or things that don’t make sense and then we will move forward finalizing sessions. Starting next week, Program Committee members will also begin to reach out to attendees to ask them to help lead or co-lead sessions.

Update from 20 September

The program committee has been hard at work. Leszek from WMDE joins the Program Committee to replace Raz who is only able to work on this project for another month or so. During the last week, Greg grouped and summarizes all of the ideas from our surveys into Themes: testing, deploying/hosting, people and tool processes and integrations, standardization decisions, local development and onboarding. (may still change slightly)

Each theme has been assigned to a Program Committee member and by Tuesday next week we should have clear summaries / intentions for each theme and by Friday next week we should have proposals for sessions to go with each theme. At that point we will publicly share the proposal on Phabricator and email attendees asking for feedback - before we move forward with getting individual session leaders and designing the sessions or prioritizing the topic areas and translating that to time at the event.

Update from 10 September

The Program Committee has moved from meeting every 2 weeks to once a week. Greg has been named Chair of the Program Committee.

Between the last two meetings, we heavily focused on analyzing data from the Wikimedia Technical Conference 2018 Feedback Survey as well as the data that participants provided in this year’s registration form. Specific questions were around session formation and content, event structure, specific topics, how to make the event productive, etc. We should be publishing outcomes and summaries of the content and session outcomes soon, and collecting feedback from participants around the topics before moving forward with assigning sessions to individual owners.

Between now and next week’s meeting, the areas of interest identified from the surveys will be grouped into thematic / track areas. The intention will be that each area will be owned by an individual program committee member. Once those areas are identified we will publish them on the event’s Phab task for comment and feedback.

The program committee will ask session owners to lead sessions a minimum of 1 month in advance of the conference. We are working with notetakers and facilitators already around templates and plans.