Hi Asaf --

Thanks for sharing this. It's a good article and there's a lot to agree with. Certainly there's a clear need for both qualitative and quantitive research and figuring out how to combine them is a worthwhile challenge. A lot of modern productive development practices stress empathy, meeting users where they are along with big data and we're certainly aspiring to this level of work in the Reading team.

Where I think the Foundation and the Movement struggle is on the evaluation side and I don't think the article addresses this issue particularly well. Measuring the impact of non-profit work has always been challenging and will continue to be so. It's certainly true that the emphasis on big data has been less helpful here.

Finally, since I can't resist, Nokia failed because they didn't do ethnographic research on their existing users in Europe and North America, not potential users across the planet and missed the fact that people would be thrilled to trade in their candy-bar phones for fancy iphones and androids!

-Toby

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 5:34 AM, Marcel Ruiz Forns <mforns@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Awesome reading, I liked it a lot.

Thanks!

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 9:34 AM, Asaf Bartov <abartov@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Estonian Wikipedian Raul Veede, User:Oop, asked to relay this link to "the metrics people", so I am sending it here and to the Community Engagement team at the Wikimedia Foundation.

https://medium.com/ethnography-matters/why-big-data-needs-thick-data-b4b3e75e3d7#.xxhn4bpvc

Cheers,

   A.
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    Asaf Bartov
    Wikimedia Foundation

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