Wikimedia CH/Grant apply/Italian speaking hackathon in Palermo, March 2025

Infodata

Name of the project:
Amount requested:Italian speaking hackathon in Palermo, March 2025
Type of grantee:Individual
Name of the contact: Léa Lacroix (Auregann)
Contact: lea.lacroixgmail.com

The problem and the context

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

Although there’s an active Wikimedia community in Italy and Swizerland, we are lacking of a lively, structured technical community, that could address the technical challenges faced by the editors on their projects:

fix known bugs on community tools;
create new tools or features based on community requests;
create well-written tickets to submit bug fix requests to the WMF engineering teams;
support the minoritized languages (dialects) Wikipedias that lack proper technical set up;
build Wikidata-powered infoboxes...

What is your solution to this problem (please explain the context and the solution)?

By organising a satellite event ahead of the Wikimedia Hackathon for the second year, we are aiming to:

Strengthen the connections between the technical users of the community, support exchange of knowledge and skills ;
Collect and address the needs from the Italian-speaking projects and projects in dialects of Italy (software, tools, templates, Wikidata-powered tools, etc.) ;
Hold a space to actively work on fixing issues and developing new features ;
Onboard Wikimedia editors to technical tasks at various levels (from writing Phabricator tickets to contributing to the code).

We also want to create connections between the existing technical contributors and like-minded people who are interested in open source development, to offer them to contribute to the Wikimedia ecosystem, but also learn from their own skills and useful tools. We are targeting three groups in particular:

The active Open Data group operating in Sicily, to create connections between their use of open datasets and data analysis tools, and our use of Wikidata and queries ;
The local Linux User Group, to exchange tips and skills about open source tools ;
The local Google Developers Group, to strengthen our technical community, and who’s also a potential sponsor for the event.

We are building this event on top of the one we organized in 2024, that was the first Wikimedia technical event in Italy, and allowed us to gather the Italian-speaking technical community from the first time. Thanks to this first event, we were able to build the foundations of the technical community: getting together, sharing knowledge about specific technologies and tools, and working on fixing issues together. Following this event, we created a Telegram group that remained active in the past year, and a Phabricator board to collect issues to fix on Italian Wikipedia and other projects. You can find the report and outcomes of the first hackathon here.

Project goals

Strengthen the connections between the technical users of the community;
Support exchange of knowledge and skills;
Collect and address the needs from the Italian-speaking projects and projects in dialects of Italy;
Hold a space to actively work on fixing issues and developing new features;
Onboard Wikimedia editors to technical tasks at various levels.

Project impact

How will you know if you have met your goals?

The process to build the program, the interactions between the participants during the event and the showcase at the end of the event will allow us to evaluate the success of our goals.

Do you have any goals or metrics around participation or content?

25 participants from Italy and Switzerland
10 projects (individual or groups) presented during the showcase
No content-related metrics as the project is focused on technical contributions

Project plan

Activities

The main planned activity is to organise a three-days pre-hackathon event in Palermo in March 2025. This event will be hosted at Neu Noi, a social coworking space that hosts events on digital literacy, already hosted previous Wikimedia gatherings, and provide all the requirements for a technical event (wifi, infrastructure and equipment).

The event will take place from Friday, March 14th to Sunday, March 16th. Ahead of the event, we will also organize a general presentation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, to connect with the local open source community and bridge the knowledge gaps there may be, as a lot of them are lacking knowledge on how the Wikimedia projects work.

We are aiming to host 25 participants:

15 technical contributors coming from all Italy and Switzerland
5 members of the Open Data Sicilia group
5 members of the open source community in the Sicily region

Ahead of the event, we will run the following actions:

Inform the Italian technical community about the event and collect their project ideas and wishes;
Get in touch with the local open data and open source communities to build the program together;
Communicate about the event and personally invite people to join;
Prepare a simple process to invite technical contributors from Italy to join, and reimburse their travel and accommodation;
Get the logistics ready (book the space, accommodation and travel);
Inform people about the possibility to participate in the international hackathon in May in Istambul.

During the event, we plan to run the following activities:

General presentation of the Wikimedia projects on the day before the event;
General presentation of the Wikimedia technical ecosystem to get everyone on the same page;
Round of presentations of projects, ideas and needs, in order to highlight people’s projects and form working groups (matching session);
A light program of workshops and discussions, with input coming from the Wikimedia, the open data and the open source local groups;
Lunch and dinner in common and social activities to bring people together (e.g. walk in the city to contribute to OSM and Commons);
Showcase at the end of the last day to present projects, progress made during the event, and talk about the next steps and how to stay in touch.

After the event, we will make sure that we:

Keep the discussion channel for the old and new technical contributors to stay in touch;
Send a light form to the participants to collect feedback and ideas;
Keep in touch with the open data and open source groupes as well as other contacts that may have emerged during the event, for future projects and partnerships;
Follow up during the Wikimedia Hackathon in May, for those who travel to Istambul, and make sure that the projects and discussions started in Palermo can be continued and presented at the main Hackathon;
Follow up a few months later to suggest a new meetup of the Italian technical community.

Budget

We are asking WMCH a contribution of 3,000€ (~2795CHF) that will be used to cover the catering costs for participants during the event.

Although having a contained number of participants, our event has a quite ambitious budget, because we are aware that most participants come from a disadvantaged region in Europe, and may not be able to contribute if they have to pay the expenses from their own pocket. Therefore, we built the budget in a way that we can cover most of the participants’ expenses (grants for travel and accommodation, covering all activities and food). The grants could of course cover technical participants coming from Switzerland.

Therefore, the budget of the event is based on cumulating grants from different organizations. Part of the budget would be covered by WMCH, and we would require additional contributions from WMF, WMIT, our local institution (Regione Siciliana) and possibly additional sponsors. You can find the distributed list of planned expenses here.

Note: the budget amount as been preliminary discussed with Ilario Valdelli. If convenient for fiscal year reasons, the amount could be advanced until the end of 2024. Alternatively, it could be used for payment of the service provider's invoice in 2025.

Community engagement

Target participants and communities:

Technical Wikimedia contributors from Italy and Switzerland;
Open source developers from Sicily;
Open data activists in Sicily.

Engagement with participants:

Before the event: communication in the existing Telegram group for the Italian technical community, messages onwiki, personal invitations;
During the event: throughout the program with discussions, social events and showcase;
After the event: feedback survey, gathering at the international hackathon in Istambul, follow-up through the Telegram group.

Follow up with participants:

Keep the Telegram group active to give updates about ongoing projects and Q&As;
Share with the broader Italian community about the progress made on technical topics through communication channels (onwiki, Phabricator)
Carry on the energy during future events at a local or national events (Italian WikiCon 2025 in Sicily, future hackathon satellite event in 2026).

Documentation and connection with the main hackathon:

At the pre-hackathon, we will focus on the IRL experience, therefore the workshops and discussions will not be broadcasted or recorded. However, the documentation and slides will be published under a free license;
Most content and discussions will take place in Italian, and offer the opportunity to grow the available resources about our technical ecosystem in Italian. Since most content will be made available in a text form, one could easily translate it in other languages;
We will organize a meetup/gathering during the main Hackathon in Istambul to continue working on the projects started in Palermo, and present them during the main showcase.