This is under "LPL Essential 2024 Jul-Sep" but was in October. Could someone fix tags please?

I attend the 3 day event. The first day was a mini hackathon, and the subsequent 2 days were the summit.

Hackathon

We expected around 40 participants but a total of around 13 participants attended the event. A lot of them were new comers. The Indic MediaWiki Developer user group helped conduct the event.

We surveyed the participants to understand what technologies they familiar with. Majority of them mentioned Python. We created a spreadsheet with a few good tasks and shared this with the participants a few days before the event.

Participants mostly worked on tools and scripts in Python. I've documented the tasks that were worked on here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/3rd_Wikimedia_Technology_Summit_(WTS_2024)/Hackathon

Takeways

• The number of participants attending the event was disappointing.
• The event was organized in an auditorium. It made it difficult to move around. It would have been better to organize the hackathon in a room with tables and chairs set around them. Makes it easier to collaborate and move around efficiently.
• None of the participants had worked with PHP before. This meant that we couldn't work on extensions or skins. PHP is not a popular language in schools and universities here in India.
• During the mini-hackathon we had about 7 hours of hacking time. In this duration having new comers hack on projects that they may not be familiar with is not productive. It maybe better to conduct workshops when we have a short duration.
• Regardless of the number of participants, we received several valuable contributions. All PRs submitted to various tools have been merged, thanks to the mentors for their support in seeing this through.

Summit

• Met Dr. Anoop Kunchukuttan, co-lead of AI4Bharat. We use the IndicTrans2 model in MinT. We exchanged emails, and spoke on how we could collaborate better with them.
• Spoke to participants from WikiClub Tech Prayagraj. Discussed some issues that they were having. Gave them some tips on how to get code reviews, and identifying tasks to work on.
• Session conducted by Niharika and Sudhanshu went well. There was a lot of interest in all the new features that were shared: IP Masking, Community defined translation list.
• Many CX and SX users from Telugu and Tamil Wikipedia have valuable feedback. We should reach out to them to gather their input.
• Indic MediaWiki developer user group shared a summary of the activities that they conducted. There was some feedback from the community about difficulties in reaching out to the user group. The developer user group shared the official email address, and a Telegram channel was created to get quick support.
• On the second day of the summit, a technical helpdesk was set up where developers from the Indic MediaWiki Developer User Group were available for community consultations. It was very popular, with community members constantly engaging in discussions in the room.
• Had a short discussion with members of the Indic MediaWiki developer user group about the upcoming hackathon in December 2024.

It was nice to connect with community members again, and meet some colleagues from the Foundation.

@SGautam_WMF Anything to add or share from your side?

@abi_ thanks for tagging. I think you have captured the overall experience, I am sharing a couple of points from my side.

Takeways

• Overall, I had a great experience attending the summit. It was great to meet people who are doing amazing work to preserve and document knowledge in their languages.
• I received useful feedback after presenting custom topic selection work. This would certainly help to improve the experience.