Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group (aka Indic TechCom) is a group of volunteers from both within and outside India providing technical support to Wikimedia projects of Indic languages, along with organizing outreach to boost the technical community in the region.
Taking all our learnings and experience from organizing various activities, the user group proposed an annual plan for 2024 with a series of activities, which has been funded during the last round of General Support Funds. In this blog we would like to give an outline of the planned activities, to share with the wider community to enable collaboration and feedback.
Background
Indic TechCom started in 2020 as an informal group, and became an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2022. Over the past few years, along with development of various tools, the user group has engaged and organized in various technical outreach activities in India, such as hackathons, newcomer trainings, online workshops for editors, and mentoring as a part of GSoC/Outreachy programs.
Our Plans for 2024
In the past, most of the activities organized were done on a need to need basis, which made it hard to focus on consistent and structured engagements and made the retention of newcomers difficult. Hence, for 2024 the group collaborated on a structured and well defined annual plan which aims to focus on the gaps identified by active members of the group.
We will start off the year with technical consultations with the Indic communities to get a better sense of the current technical challenges and needs by Indic contributors. While various bugs/issues are reported regularly, there is a clear need to have a more comprehensive understanding of technical challenges.
For this year, we will be working with 3-5 communities as a pilot, during the first half of the year, where we will be organizing multiple brainstorming sessions with volunteers to understand their technical needs and challenges. Upon completing these consultations, we will analyze the broad themes, and also use the emergent issues during hackathons and to plan further projects.
In addition to engaging the existing community, it is important for us to bring new technical contributors into the community and from our experience, we learnt that it is tricky to design a hackathon program for newcomers and existing contributors. While more training time is needed for newcomers, existing contributors are more interested in hacking. Hence, we will be splitting these to serve different audiences, but also ensure they remain connected. We will be organizing newcomer workshops at colleges, with an existing FOSS club like amFOSS, where we have collaborated in the past. This program will be more focused on introducing participants to Wikimedia and the technical ecosystem, setting up developer accounts, avenues to contribute and getting started on some good first tasks.
Each of these workshops will be followed up with a hackathon. We planned two sets of these, for example, a newcomer training workshop is planned in April, which will be followed up with a hackathon in June. This will give a chance for the participants from the newcomer workshops to connect with the larger community. The hackathons will involve less training and more time spent on hacking. We also plan to test a buddy system, where newcomers will be paired with experienced contributors during the hackathons.
Towards the end of the year, as a culmination of the annual plan, we have planned a national level hackathon with ~50 participants. Along with these, we will continue to support the community through Indic-TechCom requests page, online workshops from time to time, and also participate as mentors in GSoC/Outreachy programs.
Overall among all of our activities, although we won’t be restricting to specific projects, we will focus on Wikisource and media related tooling/issues (both on Wikimedia Commons and other projects). For example, this can be encouraging participants to work tasks related to during hackathons.
2024 is an exciting year for the technical community in India, since along with our user group, CIS-A2K and IIIT-Hyderabad, are also planning various initiatives to foster volunteers in technical areas of Wikimedia.
If you would like to know more or get in touch please feel free to email contact@indicmediawikidev.org or write to our talk page.
Acknowledgement: We would like to thank Rachit Sharma, for helping us develop this blog post, and supporting us in communicating our work with the larger movement.
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