Hi all
Right, I'm not going to bore you with the long back story of this, but I
was reading about the recently announced New Orleans hackathon, and as I
normally do when I can't get to an event because its abroad or whatever,
I go onto IRC and do my normal whiney thing (which I really hate myself
for). But anyway, I got talking with 'sumanah, who is the Volunteer
Development Coordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation (I guess that makes
hackathons and stuff part of her job), but she suggested that if I can't
get to these, why don't I organise my own...
So anyway, then we got talking about some stuff, and we decided that it
would be best, especially for my first event not necessarily worry about
international developers and participants as much, and that I should
focus the event locally.
A few of the main hurdles with me not being able to get to the other
hackathons are that my age, I'm 14 (15 in early September), so it makes
finding a simple flight or whatever harder to find (because my parents
don't have passports, and would not be able to afford coming with me, or
finding something else to do), and cash to pay for hotel room and travel
is also a problem. These problems also kind of apply to me running a
hackathon, and a few solutions that came up were that 1, I hold it
somewhere in Brighton, or somewhere rather close, and 2, that I contact
my local chapter (if memberships a problem for no chapter support, I'll
get the application in for the next meeting).
And basicly I need to know,
* How many of you would be interested in coming to a MediaWiki
Hackathon, will be before Christmas this year, which would last a
day or two, depending on the level of support and interest we get.
There may be an opportunity for a chapter/GLAM/board meetup
depending on time/venue/interest, but I still need to find out the
relevant information before that can be arranged fully. I plan to
cross post an announcement to
* What support I can get from the chapter, I don't have a lot of
money, and I don't get a lot either, if anything, how much would
the chapter be willing to put into this event.
* Would anyone interested be willing to pay a small fee to attend,
like £5/10 a day? This has yet to be decided but it would help
especially if the chapter doesn't have much money it can spare...
* How many MediaWiki developers, toolserver users (not toolserver
tools users, but people that have their own tools/bots on
toolserver) do we have here, because I personally don't know of
that many, but it'd be nice if we could have some kind of workshop
thing or mentoring program, because if we don't have a few, we're
going to have a lot of bored people sitting in a room for a couple
of days. I've spoken to a few of the other developers in
#mediawiki, and I know one or two people that have said they would
be happy to travel into the UK if I can get one organised and run
by Christmas...
* Deputy Event manager like person. As I've said, I'll be 15 when
this happens, and I'm not comfortable running this by myself, or
booking stuff in my name... or being the emergency contact on the
time of the event, mainly because I'm a stupidly heavy sleeper. I
am happy, however to go to the event, do some speaking, go
shopping or order shopping for snacks, work out transport routes
and stuff, and I'll go along with someone to visit the venue if
need be...
Oh yeah, and if anyone doesn't know what a hackathon is, I've probably
left it a bit late to explain, but its a meetup with a few talks and a
lot of coding and bug fixing (and for this one, specifically MediaWiki
related tools (so toolserver, pybot etc as well)).
Hope I haven't forgotten anything,
-- Lewis Cawte
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