Grants:IEG/Wikimaps Warper 2.0/Renewal

This project is requesting a 6-month renewal of the grant, to continue work in the areas described below.

Scope

Familiarize with relevant usability studies of other GeoHumanities or mapping projects
Chart existing and new communities, institutions and individuals for communication
Research technological dependencies that affect the tool's behavior: Structured data for Commons, Wikidata, Maps for Wikimedia etc.
Carry out user research and collaboration in several settings
- Questionnaires and/or interviews of current users of the MapWarper software
  - Chart existing workflows
  - Collect observations about the functionality: problems and proposals
- Questionnaires and polls for a broader group of interested participants though the social media channels
  - Gather use case scenarios
  - Gather case studies, if available
  - Get feedback about the current tool
  - Get feedback about the proposed interfaces
  - Create polls to prioritize features
  - Vote for options in the design
- Co-design with dedicated participants, online
- A public online workshop explaining the design issues and gathering feedback
Create mockups
- Wikimaps workflow
- Examples of other maps workflow interfaces
Create a preliminary css style guide
Gather a preliminary team for the production
Document the study

Budget

Project worker / designer grant, 4000 € per 3 months

Rationale

Having an easy-to-use warping tool is an essential part in the workflow of using old maps in Wikimedia projects as well as gathering information from old maps. This project will prepare the user interface of the user facing tools for production.

The historical maps and geographical data workflow has many possible directions where it can evolve, and a functional tool will boost working with them. We are ourselves looking into historical place names in another project in Wikidata: The WikiProject Historical Place, and into connecting historical photographs into the same workflow as the maps. A new upload tool, GLAMpipe, by Wikimedia Finland also supports working with maps metadata.

The Wikimaps project has an established community with several vibrant channels: Commons project page, blog, Facebook group, a newsletter and a mailing list.

Experts and Wikimedia volunteers are invited to act as co-designers, features will be negotiated with them, and logged publicly. The expert/dedicated design group will be sought among current users, GLAM partners working with historical maps, Wikimedia volunteers, Digital Humanities practitioners, OSM volunteers or other mappers and others. There will be an open call, and the possible participants will also be contacted directly.

Measures of success

Raised awareness of the tool

Targeting a list of 10 institutions worldwide for awareness
Targeting at least 3 new Wikimedia communities
Keeping the GLAM community updated by engaging all known GLAM coordinators in meetings and communication

Participation or commentary

Number of individuals / organizations in the design process

In the co-design team: 1 per community, at least 6 people
- The existing Wikimaps developer community
- Wikimedia volunteers
- Wikimedia Foundation engineering, GLAM, Maps, design.
- OpenStreetMap community
- Major GLAM organizations
- At least one new partner from a new domain (eg humanitarian)
- Digital Humanities / academic
Feedback from broader communities: At least 30 people commenting

Production plan

Positive feedback for key indicators (such as ease of use, applicability, design)

Documents

Documented input/feedback
- Statistics from polls and questionnaires
- Documented comments
Video from the online sessions
Design documents
Code repository
Social media statistics
Catalogue of use cases collected from the participants throughout this and earlier project phases
Possible emerging learning patterns

Community discussion

Notification

Endorsements:

Do you think this project should be continued for another 6 months? Please add your name and comments here. Other feedback, questions or concerns from community members are also highly valued, but please post them on the talk page of this proposal.