Wikimedia Hackathon 2021 Remote May 22-23

The Wikimedia Hackathon 2021 is coming up in a few weeks, on May 22-23! The coordination team is very excited to gather online with you all and hack together.

This event is open to all people who are interested in discovering the technical aspects of the Wikimedia projects, working on specific tools, features or projects, and socializing with other participants. Building on last year’s edition, this event is organized in a very light mode, offering a lot of space for spontaneity and experimentation. 

We hope that this event can be a moment of fun, reconnecting with long-time-no-see Wikimedians as well as onboarding new people into the technical community. We also expect this community-powered event to be used as an experiment field for other online events.

All ideas and suggestions are welcome. This year, we would like to explore the following topics:

• Free and open source tools for online gatherings
• Find co-maintainers for your tools
• Create and improve documentation

On top of the informal hacking, we would like to build a light, community powered program, with sessions and discussions about the technical environment in the Wikimedia movement. We will have two different “tracks”, each of them having its own setup:

1. The main track, a livestream of sessions that will be recorded and available for replay, hopefully using a fully open source set up. This will be great for presentations, talks and demos.
2. The open rooms: two Jitsi rooms will be available to schedule your sessions. This is perfect for informal discussions, Q&As and workshops.

If you’re interested in running a session in the hackathon’s program, it’s easy: please create a task on the Phabricator board, using this template. That will give you all the required information. The coordination team will come back to you to help you prepare and schedule your session.

Because we will need some time to schedule the proposed sessions and to make technical tests with the speakers, please note that the deadline to submit a session for the main track is May 9th. For the open rooms, you will have a bit more time, until May 19th.

You will also find the different formats that we are offering: presentation, discussion, workshop or lightning talk. All topics are welcome, as long as they are connected to the technical environment of the Wikimedia projects. We are particularly interested in sessions that are useful for newcomers, and connected to the main topics of this year’s hackathon: open source tools for events, documentation and finding co-maintainers.

You will find more information and details about the call for proposals on the how-to page. If you have any questions, feel free to ask on the discussion page. If you want to brainstorm ideas or find a co-speaker for your session, feel free to ask the crowd on the hackathon social channels.

You can also add yourself to the participants list, and mention if you would like to help with tasks such as facilitation, or welcoming newcomers.

Feel free to share the word anywhere you find it useful, and talk about it with your contacts!