Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Hackathon satellite event in Palermo, Italy (ID: 22886413)
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Applicant Details
[edit]- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
Auregann
- Organization
N/A
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
N/A
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
Main Proposal
[edit]- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Hackathon satellite event in Palermo, Italy
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2025-02-07 - 2025-04-15
- 4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
Italy
- 5. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event? If so, please select the relevant project or campaign. (required)
Wikimedia Hackathon
- 6. What is the change you are trying to bring? What are the main challenges or problems you are trying to solve? Describe this change or challenges, as well as main approaches to achieve it. (required)
Although there’s an active Wikimedia community in Italy, we are lacking of a lively, structured technical community, that could address the technical challenges faced by the Italian editors on their projects. By organising a satellite event ahead of the Wikimedia Hackathon for the second year, we are aiming to:
- Strengthen the connections between the technical users of the community, support exchange of knowledge and skills ;
- Collect and address the needs from the Italian-speaking projects and projects in dialects of Italy (software, tools, templates, Wikidata-powered tools, etc.) ;
- Create a space to actively work on fixing issues and developing new features ;
- Onboard Wikimedia editors to technical tasks at various levels (from writing Phabricator tickets to contributing to the code).
We also want to create connections between the existing technical contributors and like-minded people who are interested in open source development, to offer them to contribute to the Wikimedia ecosystem, but also learn from their own skills and useful tools. We are targeting three groups in particular:
- The active Open Data group operating in Sicily, to create connections between their use of open datasets and data analysis tools, and our use of Wikidata and queries ;
- The local Linux User Group, to exchange tips and skills about open source tools ;
- The local Google Developers Group, to strengthen our technical community, and who’s also a potential sponsor for the event.
We are building this event on top of the one we organized in 2024, that was the first Wikimedia technical event in Italy, and allowed us to gather the Italian-speaking technical community from the first time. Thanks to this first event, we were able to build the foundations of the technical community: getting together, sharing knowledge about specific technologies and tools, and working on fixing issues together. Following this event, we created a Telegram group that remained active in the past year, and a Phabricator board to collect issues to fix on Italian Wikipedia and other projects. You can find the report and outcomes of the first hackathon here: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/04/25/the-italian-speaking-technical-community-gathers-for-the-first-time-in-catania-in-april-2024/
- 7. What are the planned activities? (required) Please provide a list of main activities. You can also add a link to the public page for your project where details about your project can be found. Alternatively, you can upload a timeline document. When the activities include partnerships, include details about your partners and planned partnerships.
The main planned activity is to organise a three-days pre-hackathon event in Palermo in March 2025. This event will be hosted at Neu Noi, a social coworking space that hosts events on digital literacy, already hosted previous Wikimedia gatherings, and provide all the requirements for a technical event (wifi, infrastructure and equipment).
The event will take place from Friday, March 14th to Sunday, March 16th. Ahead of the event, we will also organize a general presentation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, to connect with the local open source community and bridge the knowledge gaps there may be, as a lot of them are lacking knowledge on how the Wikimedia projects work.
We are aiming to host 25 participants:
- 15 technical contributors coming from all Italy and Switzerland
- 5 members of the Open Data Sicilia group
- 5 members of the open source community in the Sicily region
Ahead of the event, we will run the following actions:
- Inform the Italian technical community about the event and collect their project ideas and wishes;
- Get in touch with the local open data and open source communities to build the program together;
- Communicate about the event and personally invite people to join;
- Prepare a simple process to invite technical contributors from Italy to join, and reimburse their travel and accommodation;
- Get the logistics ready (book the space, accommodation and travel);
- Inform people about the possibility to participate in the international hackathon in May in Istambul.
During the event, we plan to run the following activities:
- General presentation of the Wikimedia projects on the day before the event;
- General presentation of the Wikimedia technical ecosystem to get everyone on the same page;
- Round of presentations of projects, ideas and needs, in order to highlight people’s projects and form working groups (matching session);
- A light program of workshops and discussions, with input coming from the Wikimedia, the open data and the open source local groups;
- Lunch and dinner in common and social activities to bring people together (e.g. walk in the city to contribute to OSM and Commons);
- Showcase at the end of the last day to present projects, progress made during the event, and talk about the next steps and how to stay in touch.
After the event, we will make sure that we:
- Keep the discussion channel for the old and new technical contributors to stay in touch;
- Send a light form to the participants to collect feedback and ideas;
- Keep in touch with the open data and open source groupes as well as other contacts that may have emerged during the event, for future projects and partnerships;
- Follow up during the Wikimedia Hackathon in May, for those who travel to Istambul, and make sure that the projects and discussions started in Palermo can be continued and presented at the main Hackathon;
- Follow up a few months later to suggest a new meetup of the Italian technical community.
- 8. Describe your team. Please provide their roles, Wikimedia Usernames and other details. (required) Include more details of the team, including their roles, usernames, Wikimedia group, and whether they are salaried, volunteers, consultants/contractors, etc. Team members involved in the grant application need to be aware of their involvement in the project.
Léa Lacroix (user:Auregann) is based in Sicily, and is active in the Movement since 2010. First as a volunteer, then as WMDE staff, and since 2022 as a contractor working with different organizations, she has been organizing various events in the Wikimedia technical ecosystem, including the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 in Athens for WMF, the WikidataCon since 2017 for WMDE, and various other regional community meetups, most recently in Sicily. For this project, she will serve as the main coordinator of the event, in charge of project management, grant and funds management, logistics, partnerships and communication.
Ferdinando Traversa (user:Ferdi2005) is a long time Wikimedian based in Bari, another city of Southern Italy with an active Wikimedia community. He recently coordinated the Italian WikiCon in Bari (November 2023). Student in informatics, he joined the Wikimedia Hackathon in 2023 and 2024 and is involved in most technical projects in the Italian community: for example, he ran the Wiki Loves Monuments website and database until 2022. For this project, he will focus on internal communication, engaging the Italian technical communities and program design.
Aside of the main two coordinators, we will get support from other community members for specific tasks:
- user:GiovPen, student in engineering in Catania, will support with communication towards local open source communities and building the program;
- user:Sannita, long term Wikimedia contributor, will contribute to the program on topics related to Wikidata and WikiFunctions;
- user:Horcrux, another skilled technical contributor, will contribute to the program on topics related to RDF and SPARQL.
- 9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities? (required)
Target participants and communities:
- Technical Wikimedia contributors from all Italy;
- Open source developers from Sicily;
- Open data activists in Sicily.
Engagement with participants:
- Before the event: communication in the existing Telegram group for the Italian technical community, messages onwiki, personal invitations;
- During the event: throughout the program with discussions, social events and showcase;
- After the event: feedback survey, gathering at the international hackathon in Istambul, follow-up through the Telegram group.
Follow up with participants:
- Keep the Telegram group active to give updates about ongoing projects and Q&As;
- Share with the broader Italian community about the progress made on technical topics through communication channels (onwiki, Phabricator)
- Carry on the energy during future events at a local or national events (Italian WikiCon 2025 in Sicily, future hackathon satellite event in 2026).
Documentation and connection with the main hackathon:
- At the pre-hackathon, we will focus on the IRL experience, therefore the workshops and discussions will not be broadcasted or recorded. However, the documentation and slides will be published under a free license;
- Most content and discussions will take place in Italian, and offer the opportunity to grow the available resources about our technical ecosystem in Italian. Since most content will be made available in a text form, one could easily translate it in other languages;
- We will organize a meetup/gathering during the main Hackathon in Istambul to continue working on the projects started in Palermo, and present them during the main showcase.
- 10. Does your project involve work with children or youth? (required)
No
- 10.1. Please provide a link to your Youth Safety Policy. (required) If the proposal indicates direct contact with children or youth, you are required to outline compliance with international and local laws for working with children and youth, and provide a youth safety policy aligned with these laws. Read more here.
N/A
- 11. How did you discuss the idea of your project with your community members and/or any relevant groups? Please describe steps taken and provide links to any on-wiki community discussion(s) about the proposal. (required) You need to inform the community and/or group, discuss the project with them, and involve them in planning this proposal. You also need to align the activities with other projects happening in the planned area of implementation to ensure collaboration within the community.
The discussion about the upcoming hackathon event took place in the Telegram group of the Italian technical community.
In the upcoming weeks, we will create a page dedicated to the event on Mediawiki.org and link it from the list of satellite events the main Hackathon page.
- 12. Does your proposal aim to work to bridge any of the content knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Not applicable
- 13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)
Open Technology
- 14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Geographic
- 15. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select one that most applies. (required)
Invest in Skills and Leadership Development
Learning and metrics
[edit]- 17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)
What are the main topics of interest of the Italian technical community?
What are the main pain points of the Italian-speaking (and dialects of Italy) Wikimedia projects and how can we address them?
What can we learn from like-minded communities (e.g. open source developers and open data)?
- 18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)
Other Metrics | Target | Optional description |
---|---|---|
Number of participants | 25 | |
Number of editors | 25 | people who make at least one edit on Mediawiki, Phabricator or contribute to a project on a code repository |
Number of organizers | 4 |
Wikimedia project | Number of content created or improved |
---|---|
Wikipedia | |
Wikimedia Commons | |
Wikidata | |
Wiktionary | |
Wikisource | |
Wikimedia Incubator | |
Translatewiki | |
MediaWiki | |
Wikiquote | |
Wikivoyage | |
Wikibooks | |
Wikiversity | |
Wikinews | |
Wikispecies | |
Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
- Optional description for content contributions.
N/A
- 19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)
No
Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
---|---|---|
N/A | N/A | N/A |
N/A | N/A | N/A |
N/A | N/A | N/A |
N/A | N/A | N/A |
N/A | N/A | N/A |
- 20. What tools would you use to measure each metrics? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support. (required)
not applicable, as the event is technical, it doesn’t make sense to track content.
Financial proposal
[edit]- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pjNwYLIiWaH2CPwA_nTLmCklqBWn_Oe_mqWNenCjyEA/edit?usp=sharing
- 22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
4500 EUR
- 22.2. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
4752.54 USD
- We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback
[edit]Please add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.
Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:
- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).