Grants talk:IEG/Replay Edits/Final

Thanks and feedback

Thanks for this report, and congratulations having run this truly engaging experiment, Jeph!
A few comments/questions:

• I appreciated seeing your learnings about releasing versions for feedback early and often, and constantly engaging with the community along the way, and bringing in UX designers early. I've been impressed with your community engagement work all along the way - this isn't always a natural or obvious part of the technical process, and I appreciate that you've made it a priority! I imagine other toolbuilders would find these approaches very helpful as well, so thanks for documenting them! They all seem like they'd make good Learning Patterns as well.
• Regarding your suggested "next step" of having this incorporated as a Beta feature. I'm not sure what the pipeline is for Beta features - are you in any conversations about this? I know you've also been thinking about other means of promoting the tool online, in ways that don't require engineering, though you haven't mentioned them here (another viral video, etc). I hope you'll keep us posted as anything moves forward :)
• I understand that user uptake takes time, and you've planned a bit in advance for this. Since you continue to run metrics, etc into March, would you like us to leave your IEG project listed as "active" rather than "completed" until you've got the final measures to post, so that you'll be able to demonstrate the final outcomes? Either way, I'd love to see an update on this final report with the metrics you gather, once you have them.
• It is interesting to see that in the end, this project cost no money! Would you say it was still useful to have had the grant, as a motivating factor to get your project started and completed, even if in the end the funds were not used?
• I hope the process for returning the unspent funds is clear. Please let me know what your plan and timeline is for completing this, or if you've got any questions about it - we won't be able to mark your project "completed" until those funds are received back by WMF.

Congratulations again, on the new tool - I'm glad you've made this idea a reality! Cheers, Siko (WMF) (talk) 19:52, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

• I'll add my learnings to Learning Patterns
• I had spoken to Jared about making it a beta feature. It was his suggestion. We have added it to Humanizing features
• Shall we leave it as active ?
• Being part of the IEG definitely helped. It helped a lot when reaching out to people for feedback. It lent credibility to the project and also made me accountable. Did the "grant" - the money component help? I hadn't budgeted any money for myself.Both the designers I engaged with also wanted to volunteer and refused any compensation. Hence the grant amount remained unspent. Ideally I should have spent the amount. Funds going unused points to faulty budgeting :-)It was a combination of factors that led to the funds not being used, but I think the IEG was really helpful.--Jeph paul (talk) 12:39, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi Jeph - agreed, let's leave your project as active until 1) the funds have been returned and 2) the metrics are added in March :) And just so you know, I don't think it is a bad thing at all that you didn't spend the grant amount. It is awesome that you found having the credibility and accountability was useful, and that you also got everyone to volunteer their time :) Congratulations! Siko (WMF) (talk) 18:37, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Accepting report and marking project complete

Now that we've finally come up with a solution for handling the return of these grant funds, we can close out this project. Jeph, I assume you'll update metrics as time goes on, but it doesn't seem worth keeping the grant status open for the sake of data collection alone (because, after all, many projects will require ongoing metrics collection). Cheers! Siko (WMF) (talk) 07:58, 1 April 2014 (UTC)