User:Philippe (WMF)/VisualEditor change management

This page is currently a draft.

More information pertaining to this may be available on the talk page. Community members are welcome to comment and give suggestions on the talk page, please - I'll follow it as closely as I can given time constraints, but this is very much a document that I'm authoring and will accordingly take responsibility for. I would ~love~ community suggestions as I do that, but can't promise that this will be a consensus product. Philippe (WMF) (talk) 11:09, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Overview

The change management strategy itself has three major goals:

1. It will help prevent community rejection of the tool through three mechanisms:
   1. Escalation paths in critical languages;
   2. Engagement in native languages, as much as possible; and
   3. Communications - Regular and frequent, appropriate for the level of engagement.
2. It will create a repeatable infrastructure for future deployments with a focus on reusability:
   1. Reusability - Community Liaisons (CLs) and Community Advocates (CAs) will be capturing usernames of consistently helpful people and encouraging them to sign up for the Wikitech-ambassadors list and the translators list
3. It will augment existing community resources with staff resources as needed, but always respect the role of the community while recognizing that, sometimes, the community needs to be prodded to change.

This strategy will overlay on top of existing plans and deployment dates (pre-set) within Engineering. It goes without saying that a critical success factor here is the ability of James F. and Philippe to work closely together on this project. As a result, Philippe will be reporting to James F. In addition, given tight timetables and the need for flexible and efficient execution, Philippe must oversee and manage our other community-facing team members assigned to this project through a dotted reporting relationship.

It’s important to say that - while I strongly believe that this strategy will achieve those three goals, it’s not a “slam-dunk”. No program of this size and nature is without risk. Significant risk factors include a delay in starting; insufficient resourcing, time spent on internal politics because of hazy reporting structure, and outside influences. However, I believe that this strategy, if faithfully executed, will have the best chance of delivering the success factors.

Engagement levels:

Level 1: Light engagement

Characteristics of a light engagement include wiki-tech ambassadors who may occasionally drop by, regular bot-delivered notes, and a local feedback page which is routinely scraped by a bot to gather feedback which may or may not be quickly answered on that page. We will track and gather the names of those who step up to help out with these wikis, for future project use.

Level 2: Medium engagement

Characteristics of a medium engagement include a volunteer who commits to an "above and beyond" effort in supporting the deployment, occasional check-ins from senior staff to users (with frequent check-ins between the volunteer language advocate and senior staff), and a local feedback page where the volunteer language advocate will attempt to answer questions in native language, escalating where she is uncertain of the answer. Wikis in this category are designated as “high priority” wikis for us, and the category will be locked down prior to engagement, so as to prevent us adding more languages to this group, and to also assure that they are all roughly in the same “place” in the socialization plan (without having one start three weeks later than others because we just had a volunteer present themselves, etc). We will track and gather the names of those who step up to help out with these wikis, for future project use.

Level 3: Full engagement

Characteristics of a full engagement include a staff member assigned to watch the wiki and serve as an information conduit, frequent check-ins from staff to users, and a local feedback page where feedback left is synthesized and responded to fairly rapidly. We will track and gather the names of those who step up to help out with these wikis, for future project use. Tentative list of full engagement wikis (with responsible staff member):

• English (Oliver, Maggie)
• German (Jan)
• Spanish (Jan)
• French (Guillaume)
• Italian (Erica)

Staff roles and responsibilities

Function	Assigned	Reporting to	Description
Program manager	James F	Howie / Erik	ultimate go/no-go authority, overall responsibility for the project
Director, Community Advocacy	Philippe	James / Geoff	owns internal community communications strategy, coordinates with Communications team, advises James F, manages team
Sr Community Advocate	Maggie	Philippe	owns tactical day-to-day operations execution
Language Community Advocates	Jan, Guillaume, Oliver	Philippe (or, if non-LCA, to their own manager with a dotted line to Philippe)	own the transactional work of preparing their assigned wikis for deployment with a deep engagement, including establishing and monitoring feedback loops
Community Liaisons	Erica, Keegan, Sherry, Patrick	James / Howie, with a dotted line to Philippe	own the transactional work of operating broad focused communications methods, such as EdwardsBot, assuring for watchlist notices and centralnotice, etc. They will not be deployed to particular wikis, but will monitor large numbers of them.
Volunteer Language Community Advocates	TBD	Philippe	the principal point of contact for their wikis, and will have agreed to an "above and beyond" type of role.
Engineering Community Management	Sumana	RobLa / Messages to be signed off on by Philippe	Work with the CLs to see that they have access to the people and tools needed; management of wikitech-ambassadors communications (after getting “go” from Philippe)

Communications and Change Strategy

The communication and change strategy will focus on two things:

• Broadcasting (owned primarily by CLs, with CA support)- using tools such as EdwardsBot, watchlist notice, centralnotice, sitenotice, talk page messages to influential community members, concise and well written and translated FAQs and announcements, IRC chats. Documentation will be published in at least English and German, but preferably as many languages as possible (a practical compromise may be our tier 3 languages - English, German, Spanish, and French). The structure of the documents will lend itself toward ease of translation and prioritisation (e.g., first paragraph always a summary paragraph) and will use existing tools as much as possible, supplemented and augmented by professional translation resources where necessary for reasons of speed or quality.
• Receiving (owned jointly by CAs and CLs) - create feedback loops through defined locations to leave feedback, appropriate service level/escalation time periods, Google Translate use, summaries of findings from statistical data, etc, Q&A sessions, communications with chapters.

Timeline and communication products

Key: B = Blog post / WL = Watchlist notice / CN = Centralnotice / VP = Village Pump / EM = email / MW = mediawiki.org

Date	Task	Method	Target	Assigned to	Status
13 May	Send update to WMF staff as to the change management and structure of VE deploy	EM	WMF staff	Philippe	Done
3 June	Post announcement about general socialization, discuss A/B test scheduled for weeks of 10 - 24 June.	B, WL	Enwiki, global	Guillaume (draft & publication), Philippe & James (review)	Done [1] [2]
10 June	Draft an FAQ for VisualEditor	MW	reference	CLs & CAs (add questions), Guillaume (draft, organize, maintain), Philippe & James (review)	Done
17 June	Reach out to translators to start translating the FAQ	MW	reference	Guillaume	Done
18 June 23 June	Begin A/B Testing on En Wikipedia (50% of new editors receive VE as default).
25 June	Send update to WMF staff as to the deploy of VE and schedule	EM	WMF staff	Philippe, James
26 June	Publish banners & blog post for 1 July deployment to enwiki	B, CN	Enwiki, global	Guillaume (draft & publication), Philippe & James (review)
28 June	Prepare banners, WL snippet & VP message for phase 2 wikis	VP, CN, WL	de / es / fr / ru / jp / pt / nl / it / he	Guillaume (draft & publication), Philippe & James (review)
30 June	Go / No-go decision.
1 July	Deployment of the VisualEditor to enwiki, as the default, for all logged-in users.
1 July	Begin translations of comms materials for deployment to phase 2 wikis	VP, CN, WL	de / es / fr / ru / jp / pt / nl / it / he	CLs and CAs
1 July	Prepare banners, WL snippet & VP message for phase 3 wikis	VP, CN, WL	all others	Guillaume (draft & publication), Philippe & James (review)
7 July 15 July	Deployment of the VisualEditor to enwiki, as the default, for anonymous and logged-in users
7 July 15 July	Deploy message to de / es / fr / ru / jp / pt / nl / it / he language editions	VP, CN, WL	de / es / fr / ru / jp / pt / nl / it / he	CLs & CAs (VP & WL); ? (CN)
7 July 15 July	Begin translations of comms materials for deployment to phase 3 wikis	VP, CN, WL	all others	Wikimedia translators
15 July 22 July	Deployment of the VisualEditor to first-tier, non-enwiki wikis - list still to be determined, but definitely de, fr and itwiki, for all users
15 July 22 July	Deploy message to final deployment group	VP, CN, WL	all others	missing
15 July 22 July	Prepare blog post celebrating the deployment to all WPs.	VP, CN, WL	all others	Guillaume (draft & publication), Philippe & James (review)
22 July 29 July	Begin translation for blog post celebrating the deployment to all WPs.	B	global	Guillaume (translate setup), CLs, CAs & Wikimedia translators
29 July	Deployment of the VisualEditor to all other wikipedias, as the default, for all users, minus those wikis (such as zhwiki) where the VisualEditor definitively does not work
29 July	Publish blog post celebrating the deployment to all WPs.	B	global	Guillaume (publication)

CentralNotice banners

This table is for coordination purposes among the team. If you edit something other than the text, please update the actual CentralNotice calendar as well.

Dates	Wikis	Users	Preview	CN campaign	CN template	ve-coming-soon ve-coming-soon-all	ve-is-there ve-is-there-all	call-to-action	call-to-action-url	Notes
June 26–July 1	en.wikipedia	logged-in	VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all logged-in users. Learn more, help out and give feedback.	VisualEditor deployment phase1	VisualEditor deployment	VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all logged-in users.	VisualEditor is now enabled for all logged-in users.	Learn more, help out and give feedback.	//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor
July 1–6	en.wikipedia	logged-in	VisualEditor is now enabled for all logged-in users. Learn more, help out and give feedback.
July 15–29	de, es, fr, he, it, nl, ja, pl, ru, sv Wikipedia	logged-in	VisualEditor will soon be available for all users. Learn more, help out and give feedback.	VisualEditor deployment phase2		VisualEditor will soon be available for all users.	VisualEditor is now available for all users.	Learn more, help out and give feedback.	//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEditor/Portal	Link to be localized in translations if the page exists on local wikis. Default link goes to mw.o.
July 29–31	de, es, fr, he, it, nl, ja, pl, ru, sv Wikipedia	logged-in	VisualEditor is now available for all users. Learn more, help out and give feedback.
August (date TBD)	phase3 wikipedia wikis	logged-in	VisualEditor will soon be available for all users. Learn more, help out and give feedback.	VisualEditor deployment phase2		VisualEditor will soon be available for all users.	VisualEditor is now available for all users.	Learn more, help out and give feedback.	//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEditor/Portal	Link to be localized in translations if the page exists on local wikis. Default link goes to mw.o.
August (date TBD)	phase3 wikipedia wikis	logged-in	VisualEditor is now available for all users. Learn more, help out and give feedback.