Comments inline.
On Apr 12, 2012, at 11:38 AM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote:
On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 04:22, Barry Newstead
<bnewstead@wikimedia.org> wrote:
It would also be cool if we celebrate what people actual "do" and debate the efficacy based on the results (since all of our work is experimental in nature and unproven at this time)
Since we are talking something related to outreach, let me remind the talk[1] is still open and am unaware about the analysis on outreach / metrics, since they haven't been figured out in the discussion.
We are working on trying to analyse the editing trends of newbies who have attended sessions. It's in this context, we've been in touch with nearly 20 community members across the country to gather the usernames of newbies who have recently attended outreach sessions. We wanted a couple of months of data to be available so that we could run an analysis of editing trends using some tools that are being developed. I can also imagine the need to finetune elements of the analysis once we see the first round of output.
A quick comment on the style of getting community input. While I appreciate IP for trying hard to get sound feedback from community which is good and very important, but sometimes I feel tired by just looking at things they ask for. Just look at the questions here[1][2], community is NOT a group of survey takers who have loads of free time(This has been mentioned somewhere in meta for research as well IIRC). It is quite obvious that they were unanswered(may remain so) because it will turn off most people.
IP is - and will continue to be for the foreseable future - in experimentation mode. We would love to have the answers to everything - be we won't. The questions I mention were meant to elicit suggestions, generate debate and indicate IP's thinking and the challenges we are working on.
Similarly, "
How do we build a toolkit for media/PR/social media such that community members are able to rapidly deploy to support specific initiatives such as Wikiprojects or to celebrate community or project milestones?" is being discussed with interested Odia community based on the following initial draft
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Social_Media
Something like. "
How do we support a community initiative like Wikipatrika in a manner that it remains entirely owned by the individual community members - but we are still able to help them? How do we do this without taking away credit and also without building dependence?" is governing the way that we are doing the support work for Wikipatrika. It's being done with nearly 15 community members across communities. A pilot design for this has been put up here
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Wikipatrika
Lastly, when we ask for something to be worked upon[3], there is a difference between seeking input and getting the work done. If only I had the time and skill to do what I suggested, I would have proposed an RfC myself, why would I even ask IP to work on it.
With regard post [3], I mentioned at the bottom of that post the kind of sensitives that we work within - and we will continue to be exceedingly aware of them. Over the past few days, Shiju has been working on a particularly sensitive community matter but he is doing it in the manner that is most appropriate for it - quietly and 1-on-1.