Zürich Wikimedia Hackathon
This year the Wikimedia Hackathon was held in Zürich, Switzerland from the 9th to 11th May 2014. The organization of the event was great, from lanyards and badges that included a USB memory stick to a city map and a ticket for public transport, Wikimedia Switzerland had prepared fantastic hackathon.
More than 150 developers, engineers, sysadmins, and technology enthusiasts gathered coming from more than 30 countries aiming to share knowledge about new and existing technologies, fix bugs, come up with new ideas and work together on tools and systems relating to the Wikimedia movement.
As the name suggests a lot of time at a hackathon is spent ‘hacking’ (coding and such) there are also workshops available on all days. This year these workshops and talks included multiple sessions on ‘Vagrant’ working toward a production like development system, ‘Open data’ looking at Wikidata and government open data as well as sessions of ‘Phabricator’ and ‘Jenkins’.
Hackathons are not just a place to hack, but they provide people with a crucial time to allow people with different specialisms and interests to meet each other in person, put faces to names and names to pseudonyms, to build relationships and in turn build the movement.
Until next time!
Image Credits:
- Logo: By Original: Trevor Parscal Modification: Lokal_Profil [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
- Photo: By Christian Meixner (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons