Francophone Developers Work in the Open Source at DRC Wikimedia Hackathon

A 3-day Hackathon was held from June 5th – 7th in Goma, DRCongo and brought together a highly technical group of enthusiastic participants from around the city to learn, collaborate and build an open source product using Wikimedia APIs from scratch. 

The hackathon was guided by three core objectives:

• Create Awareness: it’s not a secret for all of us. Onboarding for francophone developers in Wikimedia Technical space is not so easy. The hackathon was an opportunity for francophone developers to learn how to smoothly start with open source, thanks to Wikimedia.
• Innovate and Build: we wanted to build something from scratch; but not only that we wanted to innovate. Emi is not only another “top visited articles” app, but one that gives info about how a given country access or visit Wikipedia articles. And there’re cool features yet to come.
• Connect and Collaborate: it’s all about community. Connect and collaborate, these are things we always want to have in all physical event. The program was designed in a way that allows participants to network. 

Participant shared their impressions with us. Take their words for it.

Participer à l’hackathon Wikimedia à Goma a été une expérience transformatrice. J’ai non seulement acquis de nouvelles compétences techniques et collaboratives, mais j’ai aussi été témoin de la puissance de la communauté et de l’importance de l’open source pour le développement local. Je repars avec une motivation renouvelée pour contribuer aux projets Wikimedia et pour continuer à promouvoir l’accès libre à la connaissance. –User:Esaïe Bahati

I’m positively impressed with the event. It was a great experience of learning and working together. The commitment of the organizers to help the community has inspired me a lot and I’ve understood that we need to keep the cycle going by raising the awareness of others to participate in open source projects. I cannot finish my impression without mentioning that I really liked the simplicity of the organizers, they were ready to answer any question in a friendly way. It was almost impossible to recognize them because they were just other contributors like us. Thank you very much for this opportunity – User:Emmanuelbinen

Par ce Hackathon, j’ai appris comment travailler sous pression et encore en équipe avec une collaboration entre membres de l’équipe. Quelques points qu’on pourrait améliorer c’est la répartition de tâches à chaque participant. Sinon l’idée générale était nickel et j’aimerais de nouveau participer à ce genre d’activité, merci à toute la team – User:KOLIAMA Nathanaël

Program Highlights

• We welcomed 40 participants, including six women. Participants came mostly from Wikimedians of DRCongo User Group, Kali Academy, and other coding bootcamps or universities. Attendees were split into two groups:
  • Documnetors (10)
  • Coders (30)
• Most of our participant reported that the knew already something about open source and have done open source contributions
• About MediaWiki, participants reported that they have known it and some have done contributions to it
• Around 190 commits and more 2000 lines of code were pushed to GitHub

Conclusion, Recognitions and Next Step

Pulling off a successful event truly takes a village, and we had a talented village! 😀 A heartfelt thank you to our incredible Core Team Wikimedia DRC (Valentin, Gloire, Cedrik, Josué Joe Makuta, Credo), Kali Academy (BamLifa, Delord), Sponsor (Wiki Mentor Africa, Igbo Wikimedians User Group) who all worked tirelessly to keep everything on track.

A special shoutout also goes to all our participants who contributed to the success of the event. We can’t finish this thank-you section without saying a special thanks to Benedict Udeh for making the collaboration come to life.

The hackathon was a great opportunity given to francophone developers to put the feet wet into open source thanks to Wikimedia with a smooth onboarding process. We’re proud of the product, Emi, that was developed and the connections made. We look forward to seeing many other developers contribute to the project.

Next step: the app is still in alpha version. We want to spread the world about it and call for other contributors. We also plan to migrate the app to Wikimedia tools like Phabricator, Toolforge…