Hackathon/Email3

Email to Hackathon Newcomers. This email went on out June 17 to participants who indication on their registration that they considered themselves to be a newcomer.

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Hi Wikimania Hackathon 2016 Newcomers!

If you are receiving this email you have indicated in your registration for the upcoming hackathon that you consider yourself to be a Hackathon or Wikimedia newcomer. Welcome!

We just wanted to email you in advance of the Hackathon, and reinforce a few of the suggestions from our last email to all participants, as well as add a bit of additional information and context.

To give you an idea of what to expect:

This is a Hackathon! Throughout the event expect the majority of participants to be “hacking”. In other words, this is not a standard conference and most of the time, most of the participants at the Hackathon will be working together in small groups on their various projects.

We do provide space for people to meet, run sessions, and have discussions, so there is a session program where many of these will be listed, however this is not the main focus of the event and there may be many times throughout the event where no sessions are running at all.

Anyone who is registered for the event can schedule a session, so all sessions are scheduled by the participants themselves and can be scheduled at any time, including 30 min in advance of the session start. So keep refreshing the program page as the event continues.

Because this is an event for people who are already developers or working with developers, we won’t be teaching anyone how to become a developer and all of our sessions will be geared towards people with technical backgrounds and understanding. If this does not sound like a good fit for you, you may want to consider another pre-Wikimania activity instead.

Multi-lingual people might be interested in the Translathon session, to learn about how we translate the MediaWiki interface, and help with that task.

If you are looking for a project to work on at the hackathon, please make sure to come to the opening event. All participants will be given the opportunity to come up on stage and either present their project or indicate their interest area. This will help you find a project, or help a project group find you.

Please refer back to the previous email and confirm that you have followed all the steps in the “action Items for all hackathon participants” and the “action items for newcomers” sections, and don’t be shy to email anybody else from the event, or start commenting on any interesting projects you see on our event phabricator project board if you want to start getting involved now.

Again, we are very excited to welcome you in Esino Lario and hope that you have found this information useful. See you soon!