Grants:Project/Rapid/ROSEdu/Wikimedia Challenge

What content will the contest focus on, and why is it important to your community?
Software development (all details here). Hopefully, having one or more contributors that can act as technical ambassador will release more time for other activities from current technical people

We will accept any contribution to any project reviewed on gerrit, but we have proposed 5 large projects to kick-start the project and guide the users: MediaWiki core, Visual Editor, Pywikibot, iOS app and Android App. These are very active projects, each with their own entry in the "Annoying little bugs" page, and which cover many different languages and interests. If you have suggestions of other, well defined (as in, having their own repository) projects, please let me know.
How will you let people know about the contest?
We will mainly promote it on Facebook, on our page and the partner's, as well as in various specialized groups and mailing lists. We will also announce it on Wikipedia, but we don't expect much participation on that channel
How will you judge the contest and award prizes?
Judging will be entirely automated. The platform we're using retrieves the reviews automatically and can give points following a set of criteria. For instance, the latest challenge has a formula of 4*R+2*IL+3*RL+FC, where R is a rating given by mentors, IL - inserted lines, RL - removed lines, FC - files changed. We will probably remove the rating (since we lack an appropriate number of mentors) and use some other metric instead - the formula for our contest is not yet finalized. The user with the highest score will be the winner.
For photo contests, what is the strategy to get images used on projects?
Not applicable
Is there anything else you want to tell us about this project?
The contest will last for 4 months, between Nov 1st, 2016 and March 1st, 2017. In that period we will have 3 hackathons:
1. On Nov 12th
2. Near the middle of the period
3. Near the end of the contest
The plan for the first hackathon will follow closely the Greek model from TessHack: a few presentations about the Wikimedia dev environment followed by work on little bugs. We will also encourage them to connect to the IRC and ask any questions there. For the rest of the hackathons, we will adapt to the participation: if the same people return, we will probably help them iron out issues and/or find new bugs to work on; if new people arrive, we will continue with the little bugs.

Between the events we will continue to work with the participants by posting occasional announcements through the communication channels (such as bugs they might want to work on, or a cool new project that just got enabled and might need help etc.) and by answering any question they might ask. If we will be unable to respond, we will try to redirect them to the proper contact person, so that they'll get help as quickly as possible. The same procedure will apply to opened reviews: we'll follow them and contact the contributor if they get abandoned, to see if we can help.

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more:

Number of people submitting at least a patch for review: 25
Number of total patches merged: 25
Average number of participants per hackathon: 20

We had two references when deciding on these targets:

the average number of people participating in previous ROSEdu challenges (around 12, with 4 or 5 submitting more than one patch)
the recent ThessHack event in Greece (100 participants)

We felt that the broader call for participation will bring more people to our events and to the contest than in previous challenges, but on the other hand, we will still be limited by the lack of mentors and by the long duration of the contest - some people might come to the events, be interested, but never actually submit any patch. This is why we stopped short of a more aggressive goal. Participants will probably be around 50% students from the Politehnica University (where ROSEdu is based) and 50% other people (students from other universities and IT professionals)

"How to grow our technical community" is a main topic at the Wikimedia Developer Summit, so having contact with people who never worked on Wikimedia code - a totally new pool of potential contributors - is a good opportunity for the community at large. Of course, the true benefit will be if one or more of these users will stick around and continue to solve bugs and, who knows, develop features. While the organizers of the event will do their best to encourage contacts between the participants and the worldwide Wikimedia community, whether their participation will continue beyond this contest is not entirely in our hands.

Having a special prize for women will hopefully ensure a significant presence from this group.

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

The event will be organized by User:Strainu with support from ROSEdu (2 volunteers+1 treasurer for finances). He will ensure mentorship to the participants and will make sure that the relation between the community and the participants goes smoothly.

ROSEdu (short for Romanian Open Source Education) is an organization based on a community formed by programming and open-source software enthusiasts, in the educational environment. ROSEdu's mission is to initiate, support and develop education based on the values of Open Source. They will act as fiscal sponsors of the contest and will also help with promoting the contest and with setting up the judging platform.

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense and include a total amount.

We need catering for the hackathons and some funds for the prizes. The first prize will be a trip to the Vienna Hackathon (plane ticket only). I searched for the cheapest ticket from Bucharest to Vienna, from Thu to Sun, with 3 to 8 weeks in advance. The value requested is the highest such ticket, so hopefully the final amount will be lower. The plane ticket can be purchased directly by the WMF if preferable.

We also want to have a second overall prize and a prize for the best placed woman: $40 in Wikimedia store credit (enough for 2 T-Shirts or 1 hoodie) each, plus shipping. This amount can be offered as a gift card to reduce bank fees.

Item	Price	Total
Food (1/2 pizza/participant, some snacks)	3 hackathons × $150	$450
Drinks (water, soft drinks and juice, cca. 2 l/participant)	3 hackathons × $35	$105
Napkins, glasses etc.	3 hackathons × $3	$9
Plane ticket	$220	$220
Prizes	2 × $40 + $15	$95
Total ammount		$879

Endorsements

Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!

Romania has a great IT potential, with so many young specialists offering their services to outsourcing companies. They also participate in a number of competitions abroad ([1] [2]), majority of times returning with great results. I find it very suitable to organize such an event in a country that has this kind of potential. This will also help spreading the word about Romanian Wikipedia, which sees so little involvement in Romania. Gikü (talk) 11:07, 27 October 2016 (UTC)