Grants:TPS/Paulproteus/OSCON and Community Leadership Summit

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User name
Paulproteus
User location (country)
United States of America
Event name
Community Leadership Summit, and OSCON
Event Web site
http://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/ and http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013
Event date(s)
Sat July 20 - 26
Event location (city)
Portland, OR
Amount requested (remember to specify currency!)
USD 237.80
Endorsements
  • I can confirm that Asheesh is a regular contributor and supporter of the Wikimedia tech community. He has offered good support and discussions relative to outreach to new contributors, which is a critical area for us. We are in ongoing conversation to improve our current tools and processes at mediawiki.org. Considering the modest amount requested, I think this would be a good investment. Since I can't attend OSCON myself, I would love to hear/read from Asheesh the insights that matter.--Qgil (talk) 08:16, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Budget breakdown[edit]

  • Travel: USD 237.80 for coach-class round-trip airfare between SFO and PDX.
  • Accommodation: I will arrange free-of-cost accommodation through friends.

Proposed Participation[edit]

I am an active Wikimedia contributor and free software participant, with a strong interest in continuing to help Wikimedia tech better attract and retain contributors. For example, I worked with WMF to make the Wikimania 2012 hackathon more accessible to newcomers.

At the Community Leadership Summit, I hope to gain traction for "Greenhouse", a tool OpenHatch is developing with GSoC student David Lu, to help project maintainers track their new contributors. I have been chatting with Sumana Harihareswara and Quim Gil about applying it to Wikimedia projects; I hope that by attending the Community Leadership Summit, I can have in-person conversations with other free software community leaders to get a better understanding of their needs as well, so that the tool can be maximally useful across projects.

At OSCON, I intend to talk again about Quantitative Community Management. I have gained more understanding of Wikimedia's work with Bitergia, and the dashboard at http://bitergia.com/projects/mediawiki-dashboard/browser/ , and intend to discuss it in depth at the conference talk, as well as at the Community Leadership Summit.

(More info about Greenhouse: https://github.com/openhatch/oh-greenhouse )

I realize this is my second grant request in the past six weeks or so; I have been trying to keep the costs of travel as low as possible so that even though there are two requests, the total outlay is minimal. I do believe that both events provide significant value for Wikimedia.

Goal and Expected Impact[edit]

If my participation is successful, more open source contributors and community managers will be aware of Wikimedia's quantitative work on community management, and be able to discuss and participate in that. Additionally, if Wikimedia stays interested in the Greenhouse tools, a result will be a broader degree of interest that will help the tool be more flexible and useful.

The lessons I learned giving the Quantitative Community Management talk at Open Source Bridge will help me deliver an even more lucid talk for OSCON, and I expect an even greater number of attendees due to OSCON's larger size.