Talk:Community Tech/Tools for program and event organizers/Archive 1

Archive of old discussions from Talk:Community Tech/Tools for program and event organizers.

Deprecation of the Education Extension

Some language Wikipedias have a module called the mw:Extension:Education Program installed dating from about 2011. In March 2018 some WMF staffers announced its deprecation and a recommendation that users migrate to the Programs & Events Dashboard, which most users had already done by 2014.

This deprecation of the old tool and the review of who used it, why, and what it does is part of the foundation for setting norms for what a programs and events dashboard should do. Conversations about deprecation are at these places:

• en:Wikipedia:Education noticeboard
• en:Wikipedia:Account creator
• outreach:Education/News/February 2018/The Education Extension is being deprecated
• outreach:Talk:Education/Extension

As always in Wikimedia discussion, there is no way for me to permanently directly link to these conversations while they are active, so search for them now and in the future when those conversations are archived then these links should update to refer to the archived discussion. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:38, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Hello, Bluerasberry, and thank you for collating and sharing these links. Our team is watching these discussions and we will be sure to take the participation into account when we set project goals for this 2017 Wishlist project. We're trying to set these project goals by the end of this month. Best, — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 01:27, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

Survey response from bluerasberry

I see that a survey was scheduled to go out in mid March. I want to take the survey and I am comfortable with my responses being public, so I will post here.

Basic/Demographic questions:

1. What is your username? bluerasberry
2. What is your background outside the free knowledge movement? clinical research, health education, consumer rights, data science
3. How long have you been involved with Wikimedia programs or events? since 2010
4. Which of the following are you most actively involved in organizing or facilitating?
   • Edit-a-thons ~20/year
   • Editing Workshops
   • Conference ~3/year
   • Wikipedia Education Program ~10/year
   • GLAM Content Donation ~10/year
   • Photo Drive or Event ~3/year
   • On-wiki Writing Contest
   • Wikipedian in Residence since 2012
   • Hack-a-thon ~3/year
   • Other Partnerships ~10/year
   • Research Project ~3/year
   • Tool Building Project
   • None
   • Other (Specify)
5. Please briefly describe this work:

Dashboard use:

1. How do you use the Dashboard to organize and communicate before a program or event? do not
2. How do you use the Dashboard to organize and facilitate during a program or event? ask participants to click to join, then exit dashboard permanently
3. How do you use the Dashboard to organize and perform evaluation after a program or event? provide report to program host or sponsor

Why the dashboard:

1. What do you think are the greatest benefits of the Dashboard? People are already familiar with the concept of digital communication or impact metrics. For example, everyone understands the concept of website traffic, social media engagement etc, and they pay for the activities which generate these metrics. The dashboard provides evidence to universities, research institutes, and other partners to commit to developing Wikimedia projects in a way that is comparable to their other communication investments.
2. What are your greatest frustrations with the Dashboard? It is not compatible with WMF global metrics reporting requirements, WMF indecision about the extent to which to validate Dashboard reports, some mismatch between the way that dashboard tracks audience impact versus how other communication dashboards (i.e. for web analytics, social media) report audience, lack of synchronization between dashboard and participants' on-wiki pages, and lack of ongoing maintenance for dashboard.
3. What can you not do because of poor functioning of the Dashboard? Reliably communicate with sponsors and the WMF about Wikimedia programs and events.
4. What other tools/techniques do you use in addition to the dashboard? For what purposes? massviews as on Traffic reporting, SPARQL queries to get traffic analytics for entire classes of articles, communication metrics from partners' websites and social media accounts
5. Any other comments Please survey Wiki NYC, Art+Feminism, and AfroCROWD, or just assume that each of these has a community base which will likely tell you a similar story to what I am telling.

• Target audience
  • What are the target audiences for the dashboard? mostly professionals who collect communication metrics as part of their work
  • Who is currently using the dashboard? from a user perspective, either people whom the Wiki Education Foundation has requested to use it, or professionals who collect communication metrics as part of their work
  • Who is currently using the dashboard but should not be? Are there any use cases that it does not need to support in the future? ideally the dashboard would be invisible to most users. In most instances, participants and even the primary user of the dashboard should never see it. The important part of it is generating communication metrics for people with professional need for those metrics.
  • Who should be using the dashboard but isn’t? Why? Any organization which invests resources to educate the public with encyclopedic information needs to use the dashboard. Organizations make massive investments toward ineffective publishing on their websites, social media, and on paper. Facebook has been particularly effective in convincing all organizations to collect communication metrics. The dashboard is the Wikimedia community's competing product. Organizations which come to realize that Wikipedia articles get measureable traffic can make an investment case for developing Wikimedia content. The reality is that most organizations have the perception that Wikimedia projects are not an effective channel for distributing free encyclopedic content, when actually, the dashboard provides supporting evidence that Wikimedia projects are less expensive, reach a larger audience, and reach a more relevant audience than alternatives. Most organizations with general encyclopedic information honestly think that distributing it through a Facebook community in their branded social media account is more useful than developing Wikipedia articles, and for many sectors of public education, this is a wild misconception.

• Changes to implement
  • What does the current dashboard do well? communication metrics comparable to the industry standard
  • What does the current dashboard do poorly? identify its target audience
  • What are the biggest pain points in the current dashboard? imagining that the dashboard outcomes are of greatest interest to Wikimedia internal research rather than the outside world
  • What needed functionality flat-out does not exist? perpetual count of audience metrics from the point in time where content is added, and also, a confirmation system to check whether added content remains in an article
• Technology
  • Keep building on top of the existing tool? Or build a new one? the existing tool is AWESOME - but I cannot comment on technical development
  • How extensible should the dashboard be?

Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:13, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, User:Bluerasberry, for providing your survey responses. I'm working on collating and synthesizing all the responses to identify which are the most common frustrations to solve or opportunities to address. I hope to have an update by the end of this week! — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 16:14, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

@TBolliger (WMF): Thanks. I never saw a survey advertised or going out, so I was wondering about the schedule. I look forward to sharing any updates with others. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:53, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Event coordinator proposal on English Wikipedia

In April 2018 this English Wikipedia proposal came to be.

• en:Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Event coordinator proposal

The idea is to create a userright so that program and event coordinators can grant permission for event participants to publish articles in English Wikipedia. This follows the Wikimedia Foundation + community's collaboration to do en:WP:ACTRIAL research which led to a policy change that new users cannot publish live articles on English Wikipedia. A common goal of programs and events is for an event coordinator to assist new users in publishing a new article. All of this matters to this project because if there is a "programs and events dashboard", then somehow it should integrate with the related userright that a person would need to do outreach.

This userright is not established yet but if it passes then it matters more for this project. The conversation is interesting and related in any case. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:07, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Yes, thank you! We're watching it and I hope it gains consensus to be implemented. The Community Tech team may also help build this software, if needed. — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 21:01, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

API for getting official Grant Metrics stats for Dashboard events / campaigns

Hey User:TBolliger (WMF)! Following up from WMCON, and in the spirit of this wishlist request and the 'suite of tools' vision you have for event organizer support, I wanted to put adding an API for getting Grant Metrics stats back on your radar. That would allow me to build a feature into the Dashboard so that users can easily get the official Grant Metrics stats according to whatever the latest definitions of global metrics and such are, without having to do extra data management. Beyond improvements to the Dashboard itself, that would be the most helpful thing I can think of to better support the people who voted for this.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:51, 14 May 2018 (UTC)