Movement Strategy/Forum/Proposal
 | The community review of this proposal has ended and a report is available. |
The Movement Strategy and Governance team invites everyone to review this proposal for a new Movement Strategy Forum. The goal is to improve community collaboration on a multilingual platform that is welcoming and easy to use.
This review is open between May 24 and July 24. A functional forum is available for testing and discussion. If the community feedback is positive, the Forum will launch in August 2022 before Wikimania. If not, we will follow the feedback received, changing the proposal or closing it.
If you prefer to test first and read later, join the MS Forum (non-wiki link) with your Wikimedia login now!
Why a Movement Strategy Forum
[edit]The implementation of the Movement Strategy (MS) requires collaboration across communities, projects, and languages. Hundreds of people must be able to learn from each other, work together, and have fun together. Newcomers should enjoy their MS involvement as much as oldtimers. Casual contributors should find opportunities to take part. Dedicated contributors should find the tools they need to get things done.
Currently, we lack the infrastructure to solve these needs. Meta-Wiki and Telegram are good for documentation and chat, but this is not enough. Discussions are scattered. Collaboration happens within isolated groups. People not fluent in English are at a clear disadvantage. Newcomers feel lost. This needs to change.
Main features
[edit]The Movement Strategy Forum is based on Discourse, a powerful open-source platform for community discussions. You can expect all the features of web forums and the ease of use of social media. These features are especially relevant for the problems we want to solve:
- Access is based on Wikimedia account, however verified e-mail is mandatory. See this Phabricator task. No additional registration is required.
- Multilingual conversations are possible thanks to automatic translation (currently powered by Google Translate, the engine can be changed) in more than 100 languages.
- Newcomers are welcomed with an interactive tutorial and badges for achievements.
- Notifications can be adjusted to follow or mute topics, categories, and tags.
- Conversations can use easy text formatting, expanded links, images, and emojis.
- Complex conversations can be summarized by their participants, also split or merged.
- Posts can be flagged anonymously for moderation. Community moderators ensure that the Universal Code of Conduct is observed.
- All features are available on mobile and desktop browsers.
- Congratulate newcomers each time they publish a post.
This is not an exhaustive list. If you are missing any feature, you can propose and upvote requests. If changes are easy to implement (e.g. texts, processes, settings...) we will make them as we go.
Community review questions
[edit]Here are questions to start the conversation. Anyone can share their opinions in the forum (on the threads linked below), or on the talk page here. Everyone can participate in their preferred language. Anyone can ask further questions.
- All the following links go to a place on the new forum, they are not wiki-links!
- Do you think this forum can improve Movement Strategy discussions and collaboration?
- Do you think this forum can be useful to welcome and retain new contributors to Movement Strategy?
- What goals should be set to consider this forum successful?
- What do you think about the proposed name and domain?
- What do you think about the proposed process for new moderators and administrators?
- Are there other channels that you would prefer to use in addition to or instead of this forum for Movement Strategy updates and feedback? Why?
- Do you have any feature requests?
- Do you have any other questions or concerns?
Next steps
[edit]The goal of the community review is to build consensus for a decision by 24 July 2022.
Summaries of the discussions are shared and updated as the review proceeds. Anyone can contribute to these summaries with feedback and edits. A report of the review including the decision will be drafted openly.
In the meantime, we are sharing weekly reports with summaries of new discussions and forum statistics.