The New Orleans Hackathon 2011 is an opportunity for MediaWiki developers and Wikimedia operations engineers to come together to work on advancing Wikimedia's tools and infrastructure, focusing on Wikimedia Labs
Wikimedia is hosting a hackathon this weekend at Launch Pad to tap into the New Orleans tech community’s ability to “supercharge Wikimedia with awesomeness”. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Wikimedia will give instruction and accounts to local developers and visitors to help advance Wikimedia Labs and act as beta testers.
Wikimedia and MediaWiki brought the world the wonder that is Wikipedia.
MediaWiki developers and Wikimedia operations engineers will host teaching sessions to introduce attendees to Wikimedia Labs projects infrastructure. Talks include “How to be a MediaWiki hacker” and “Introduction to git and gerrit” among others.
There are ambitious production goals for the hackathon. “We’d like to configure Wikimedia sites to act as an OpenID provider at the hackathon, and we’d like to get some formalized specs out for oAuth support in MediaWiki,” said organizer Ryan Lane. “We are going to attempt to put OpenStack Swift into production on our sites to replace our current image storage architecture.”
The hackathon provides an opportunity for an international community of open source developers to have rare face time together and expedite production. The gathering is expected to bring around 40 members of this community from around the world to our fair city.
Lane chose New Orleans for this year’s hackathon because of his personal ties to the city. “Until the past eight months I had lived in New Orleans,” said Lane, “I love the culture of the city, and wanted to show that to my coworkers and our community.”
Events start at 5:oo PM on Friday and 10:00 AM on Saturday and Sunday at Launch Pad. Full details are available on the Wikimedia website here.