Community Relations/Onboarding New Developers
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Onboarding New Developers was a program of the Technical Collaboration team (since July 2018 Developer Advocacy team), part of the proposed Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan FY2017-18. See the content of the program in their canonical location.
We are using this page to develop and document the program.
Program structure[edit]
Sort of. Work in progress.
Outputs[edit]
- Understanding newcomers motivations and needs
- A learning environment
- Growth paths
- Partnerships
- Local groups
- Newcomer hub
- Reports
- Project showcases and evaluation
- Level-up mentors
Activities[edit]
- New Developers Quarterly Report (T167085)
- Featured Projects (T165920)
- Documentation for new developers (T169599)
- Developer outreach programs
- Developer events
Thoughts to be processed[edit]
How to offer the best growth paths to volunteer developers with the best use of resources and partnerships that we can have.
Growth path vs travel budget[edit]
- Find your project: Introduction to Wikimedia Tech - Featured Projects. Result: project found.
- Get started: Workshop Get Started to (Featured Project). Online (text / video, real-time / self-paced). Result: certificate upon completion.
- First task: Clonable / Easy task. Self-paced, project support channel. Result: certificate upon completion.
- Get involved: More tasks via project discussions, meetings, sprints, peer programming. Result: contacts, mentors, your contributor metrics start growing.
- Get more involved: Meet developers and editors in local meetups, regional events, developer conferences, Wikimedia Hackathon, Wikimania. Result: travel support, high bandwidth collaboration, social contacts.
Steps 1-4 can provide satisfaction and don't require any travel budget. Scholarships and travel grants should focus on volunteers who make it through 1-4.
Requirements[edit]
- Introduction to Wikimedia Tech (Phab:T158791)
- Featured Projects with documentation to get started, first tasks, support channel and mentors.
- Certificates valuable for CV, level up, travel support.
- My contributor metrics.
- CRM to track all newcomers in a scalable way and support them according to merit and location (i.e. invitations to regional Wikimedia events).
- Activities to assure that first-timers thrive in their first face to face events.
We can squeeze a lot more the possibilities of online collaboration, focusing our travel budget flying the right junior volunteers and mentors to the right events, to continue building their growth paths.