Edit 2019/Wikimedia Outreach programs for technical contributors: 2024/Main Page

This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2019.

Join us to learn all about Wikimedia outreach programs and how you can participate in them as a mentor or a mentee!

Wikimedia participates all year long in four Outreach Programs: Outreachy, Google Summer of Code, Google Code-in, and Season of Docs. Three of these programs are sponsored and organized by Google and Outreachy program is run by the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Through these programs, high-school and university students, and folks transitioning careers get an opportunity to work on both coding and non-coding, small and big Wikimedia projects. Some of the participants from these programs have become a valuable asset to our movement and have found success in technical careers. These programs help bring technical contributors from marginalized communities into the Wikimedia movement. Though we have many contributors from the global south, we have noticeably fewer mentors or interns participation from the North American region.

This session would be part informative and part discussion and workshop.

Part 1) We will focus on Wikimedia’s participation in mentorship programs, the roles and responsibilities as a participant and mentor, the nature of projects that get completed, and success stories.

Part 2) We will facilitate a workshop around setting goals and creating effective mentorship tasks. Workshop participants will share ideas for projects they need resource help with. They will work in small groups to create potential tasks on Wikimedia Phabricator for future rounds of outreach programs.