RFP/Executive Dashboard - Analytics

Background Information and Statement of Purpose

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) wants improve its dashboard reporting. The Executive Dashboard presents a summary of the most important data for both WMF staff and projects such as Wikipedia to understand overall community health. The information for the Dashboard comes from a variety of different sources and is updated by a largely manual process. The goal of this project is to code this centralized dashboard so that it will be automatically updated and will allow for new new data sources to be easily included.

Scope of Work

Work alongside WMF staff to expand on the existing dashboard architecture and capabilities, rewriting when necessary. Specific objectives include:

• Build an automated system by which data are retrieved from back-end data stores and visualized in user-friendly web reports.
• Build an extensible architecture that allows for the addition of new reports and new levels of granularity over time to the Dashboard over time
• Enabling dynamic generation of reports based on user specifications (e.g., set a time frame and report adjusts graph for that timeframe).

Term of Contract

The contract will commence on January 1st, 2012 at the earliest, for an initial duration of 3 months. Code developed through this project is expected to be licensed under the GNU GPLv2, and data/reports generated through this project is expected to be made available under the Creative Commons Zero License.

Payment

Rate will be determined by level of experience and expertise. Please submit bid proposal.

Qualifications

Respondent parties are expected to:

• Have strong knowledge of Javascript and PHP.
• Have solid experience with production and processing of large datasets
• Have solid experience deploying web applications in a Linux environment
• Work in partnership with the Wikimedia open source community following existing development conventions and practices
• Be able to work independently where needed, and can work remotely as part of a globally distributed team
• Be able to learn quickly
• Have relevant hands-on experience and eagerness to learn and try new concepts
• Be comfortable in a highly collaborative, consensus-oriented environment
• Be a proficient speaker in the English language

Additionally:

• Prior work experience in QA and/or design and development of test suites is a plus
• Experience with MediaWiki is a plus
• Understanding of the free culture movement is a plus
• Being a Wikimedia editor is a plus

The ideal candidate will be creative, highly motivated, and able to operate effectively in multiple cultural contexts.

Requirements for Proposal Preparation

Contractor should provide a letter with resume that indicates their qualifications to fulfill the requirements of the RFP. In addition, please provide a number of links to software projects that you worked on including code samples or any other web presence that gives a good indication of your strengths (for example your StackOverflow profile).

Point of Contact

Howie Fung hfung at wikimedia dot org