Grants:TPS/Rjain/Open Source Bridge 2014/Report

Event Name:
Open Source Bridge 2014

Description of your participation:
I was a speaker at OSB 2014 where I delivered a talk on the subject Mediawiki Extension Development. I met many people from Wikimedia and other Organisations. To name a few I met Sumana, Roan, Steven, Netha, Niharika and a few people from Google, Dreamwidth, Mozilla, Gnome. I also visited the MozSpace office located in Portland along with Netha where I got some guidelines of how to start working on Firefox OS and had an awesome hangout with some Mozillians.

Regarding my talk session, I was greatly assisted by Sumana during the entire session. In the first 45 minutes, I delivered my presentation about Extension Development and then showing them the example of the Extension:Annotator which I created during my GSoC with Wikimedia Foundation. In the next one hour I actually helped out people to solve their issues of mediawiki installation and helped them create their own "Hello User" Extension. I found the response to be good from the audience. My slides can be seen here.

What lessons where learnt that could help others in similar events?
I actually forgot to put the code of the "Hello User" Extension on github prior to my session but then Sumana asked me to do so in between the session. So I learnt that we must take care to put all our example codes on the internet so that people may refer to it after the event. I also did not carry my card to give it to people who I meet so that they may contact me after the conference. So, I will take care to carry my card along next time when I attend any conference.

Apart from this, I found OSB to be well managed with appropriate time gaps between sessions. There was a separate Hacker Lounge for the participants and a silent room to those who want to work separately which I found to be a really good facility. There were people standing just outside the venue wearing OSB T-shirts so that its easy for the new ones to find the center.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?
I found a nice response from the people. They tried creating their own Mediawiki Extension during the hands-on-session. I also interacted with people from Dreamwidth which uses wiki for maintaining their documentation. So, we discussed some ideas about how to make their wikis become better. Overall, I found the session to be good enough to deliver a basic knowledge about mediawiki extensions to the audience.

Details of expenditure:

• Air Tickets: 2457 USD (Booked by WMF)
• Accomodation (shared with Netha Hussain) : 921 USD (Booked by WMF)
• Visa Cost: 160 USD
• Local Travel Expenses: 66 USD