User:Dominic/HackSI

HackSI is an all-day GLAM-Wiki hackathon that will be hosted by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The event will bring a small number of Smithsonian developers from the Office of the CIO—as well as other interested technically minded people from across the Smithsonian and local cultural institutions—together with about the same number of developers proficient in the technical aspects of the Wikimedia projects. We hope to produce both tools-based and skills-based outcomes for the participants.

The main theme of the event will be developing analytics tools to meet the specific needs of GLAMs, and the Smithsonian in particular. For the Smithsonian, the main goal will be to get set up on Wikimedia Labs and to foster the ability to develop tools or run Wikimedia database queries using in-house expertise rather than relying on the the community to fulfill all technical requests.

Analytics
There are many analytics tools, some GLAM-specific and some general to Wikimedia, and they can be found in Wikimedia Toolserver (e.g. wikistats), Wikimedia Labs (e.g. BaGLAMa and GLAMorous), special pages, and external sites (e.g. stats.grok.se and linkypedia). Some of these are poorly maintained or lack highly requested features. Rather than creating yet another disconnected tool, the main goal of the hackathon will be to create a single analytics report which will aggregate statistics from various existing tools, possibly with new features as needed. Ideally, a user should be able to select from a menu of options for statistics to include in the report (supplying necessary information, like names of categories or URLs, along the way) and subscribe to periodical updates by email. This is designed to meet SI's needs while being flexible enough to be used by all GLAMs.

A sample report will be developed here.

In-house expertise
The hackathon will also serve to educate cultural technologists about how to help themselves when it comes to the Wikimedia projects, rather than relying on the community to fulfill do things they could do themselves with a little instruction. Non-Wikimedian attendees should become familiar with MediaWiki, tools and database queries on Wikimedia Labs, the API, and Wikimedia's technical communication channels (Bugzilla, mediawiki.org, IRC, etc.). By the end of the day, relevant SI staff should have Wikimedia Labs accounts and feel comfortable enough to use them to solve problems in the future and continue to work on the analytics tools developed during the event. These skills will be taught through either presentations by the invited Wikimedian developers or simply through the collaborative hacking throughout the day.