Hi Chris, Thanks for the comments. Would you and Edward be willing to meet with me (and anyone else who might be interested, such as Lodewijk as well as someone from WMF Communications) to discuss the current situation and brainstorm ideas about how to improve it? We could set up a meeting off-list. Anyone else who wants to participate would be welcome to email me/us privately to be included in the meeting. After we meet we can come back to this list with our notes from the meeting and suggestions for future actions, possibly including a survey and/or consultation about mass communications and information management.
In terms of scheduling, the earliest that I can realistically schedule a meeting is in April, so we might be looking at May or June for the timeframe in which we might come back to this list with notes about future directions. Thanks, Pine On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 1:58 PM, Chris "Jethro" Schilling < [email protected]> wrote: > Hey Pine, > > Had to laugh a little bit about a consultation about consultations, but I > understand the rationale for it. Your point is well taken that information > management is important to think about when there is much going on. > > I think the community notification calendar > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement/Calendar> > that Gergő has mentioned above is a good place to start thinking about > improvements of managing information. Anecdotally, some of the issues I > have seen and heard about are: > > * having to follow mailing lists that are too active (like this one), > * having to follow too many disparate mailing lists, > * getting pinged too many times from user talk page messages sent through > Special:MassMessage. > * Too many consultations focused on overlapping audiences > > A centralized calendar can help mitigate some of these issues. In > general, the calendar has been used for planning and scheduling purposes, > but I like the idea of making it more usable to for folks wanting to know > what consultations are happening. Lodewijk recently suggested to me that > some filters and other descriptors (e.g. country, projects targeted) will > be needed to help users see what is relevant to them. Building those > components is one technical challenge, and would be making sure the > calendar gets used by the relevant consultation audience is another. We > would need to think about how to inform people about the calendar without > also falling back to doing more announcements on the usual channels a la > "Hey, this new consultation is on the calendar." > > One issue I don't have a good answer for right now is how we can solve the > problem of having too many announcement channels while also being confident > that when a consultation is announced (by anyone) in some set of approved > channels, can they expect to get sufficient and representative > participation? That might be something we can figure out in a survey about > consultations generally as you've suggested. > > - Chris > > Chris "Jethro" Schilling > I JethroBT (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:I_JethroBT_(WMF)> > Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation > <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home> > > On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 1:40 AM, Pine W <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Attempting to summon Chris Schilling over here from the other thread. (: >> >> I think that some kind of analysis about optimal use of consultations and >> surveys would be beneficial, and I'd welcome seeing something like that in >> the next Annual Plan. Perhaps there might even be a consultation or survey >> about consultations or surveys, which I know sounds ironic but may be >> helpful in figuring out how much is too much or too little, timing, >> locations, etc. >> >> Information management is a big deal. We have watchlists, email, social >> media channels, Echo, and lots of other tools, but even so -- or perhaps >> because -- there are so many channels, it's easy to drown. I imagine that >> holds true for both staff and community members, and I'd welcome some >> initiatives to improve the situation. Perhaps someone will have some ideas >> that they can submit to IdeaLab. >> >> Pine >> >> >> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
