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Grants:TPS/Rahul21/Open Source Bridge 2014

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User name
Rahul21
User location (country)
India
Event name
Open Source Bridge 2014
Event Web site
http://opensourcebridge.org/
Event date(s)
24 - 27th June 2014
Event location (city)
Portland, Oregon
Amount requested (remember to specify currency!)
USD 2500
Endorsements
Together, Richa Jain and Rahul Maliakkal have the required experience to do a solid presentation on how to start out as an extension developer. Both have some experience with the client-side. Rahul's experience is mostly on the client-side. Richa has strong server-side experience (particularly the API, but also the database, supporting code, and basic hooks), so she can speak to that aspect; however Extension:Annotator involved client-side code as well. Superm401 | Talk 05:22, 6 May 2014 (UTC)
I'm one of the co-chairs of this year's Open Source Bridge conference. Richa and Rahul's talk proposal was well-received by our selection committee and we would very much like to see them be able to attend and speak. Our conference draws a decent contingent of people (myself included) who administer Mediawiki instances and could benefit from a look at the sometimes-mysterious world of extension development. --Reidab (talk) 02:08, 7 May 2014 (UTC)
Young minds who could become potential long time contributors from India to the project and the community. Participation in this could be good motivation for them and could also help them learn. --H P Nadig (talk) 11:12, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Budget breakdown

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  • Travel (round trip Economy class base fare from India to Portland): USD 2000
  • Visa: USD 160
  • Accommodation: USD 70 * 4 nights = USD 280
  • Local Travel and Incidental Expenditure = USD 60
  • Total cost: USD 2500 (Approx)

I only expect WMF to grant funds for the bills that will be provided for the above expenses.

Proposed Participation

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A few lines about me

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  • I am an active Wikimedian from India and contributor to MediaWiki. I got the opportunity to intern at Wikimedia Foundation as a part of Google Summer of Code 2013 where I developed the prototype of a Pronunciation Recording Tool for Wiktionary under the able guidance of Superm401 and Michael Dale. I have been an active Wikimedian ever since,I was invited to present a talk on the extension i.e Pronunciation Recording Tool which I developed during the course of my internship at FOSSASIA 2014. I have also given a few talks on "Contributing to WMF" at my college.
  • At this event we have been selected to conduct a Hack on "Extension Development with MediaWiki". I will be giving this long session with my fellow Wikimedian Richa Jain. The proposal can be found here : http://opensourcebridge.org/proposals/1259.

Goal and Expected Impact

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Goal

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  • Going through the history of OSB hacks, we found out that this will be the first of its kind of a Long Session/Hack that is devoted to "Extension Development with MediaWiki". According to some of the statistics that we managed to collect around 500 participants attend this conference.
  • Target Audience :
    • In the audience people having minimal programming experience and who wish to contribute to the world of Open Source and Wikimedia Foundation by writing code. There are many questions that come to the inquisitive mind of a new budding developer like "Where and How to start?. Whom to contact for help ? ". Our primary goal is to answer such questions with a bit of hand-holding and also to highlight some of those problems so that the journey can begin seamlessly.
    • We also expect developers at organizations that run MediaWiki installations , but do they use MediaWiki Extensions ? Our secondary goal is to encourage such developers to use existing MediaWiki Extensions and also develop a few according to their needs.
  • We will be showcasing some of the most used extensions like "Visual Editor", "Upload Wizard", etc. We will also be developing an Extension with the audience and guiding them right through session. A rough TO-DO list in session:
    • Provide the audience with answers to basic questions about MediaWiki, Extensions building, Hooks, Parser, etc.
    • A Hacking session where the entire room will be building a MediaWiki Extension together.
    • Resources will be provided which will help kick start their journey of code wrangling with the Wikimedia Foundation.

Session Details

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The length of our session is 1.45 hours, since we are time bound we would like to keep the scope of this session very realistic. We plan on building 2 extensions keeping in my mind the basic skill set of the audience. Our Session will be divided into 2 parts

  • In the first 45 mins we will be defining :
    • Extensions
    • How does it extend MediaWiki ?
    • Show the difference between life with and without extensions. We will showcasing 2 of my favorite extensions i.e Upload Wizard and Visual Editor here.
    • Getting Shell Access
    • From where to Download Extensions and how to install them via LocalSettings.php.
  • In the remaining hour we will be building 2 extensions with the audience
    • HelloUser Extension - The main goal of this extension is for the audience is to get a basic idea about the necessary files and the purpose of each of them respectively. We will be using a Special Page which will displaying the time and welcome the User.
    • A theme changing extension - Through this extension we will be seeing the usage of Hooks and also it is for the design frenzy people.

Impact

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  • We may not be the most skilled people to handle this session, but we certainly were once on the other side of the bridge and know where new developers find it hard and get stuck often. At the end of this session the audience will equipped with the knowledge to build an MediaWiki Extension successfully.
  • Developers at organizations which run MediaWiki installations to enhance their wiki's with several already developed MediaWiki Extensions and also develop their own extensions.
  • We will be taking email-id's of all the participants, providing them with a list of useful links and also checking in to them after a week just to know if they found our session useful and have implemented it either in their wiki's or have started to develop their own extensions. Doing so we will be able to measure a rough estimate of the impact that we were able to create during Open Source Bridge 2014
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