I like the idea of working together internally with a trello board because it gives us some nice structure and many of us are familiar with how it work.  

Howevere, when it comes to Wikipedians requesting and discussing research work, I can't think of a better solution than the wiki.  It's the format and notification structure that editors are most likely to be familiar with.

Such a work request/discussion queue could work like L2 Ideas[1].  There, I've set up a series of templates and input boxes that make it straightforward to capture an idea/request, discussion and progress.  See also the Idea creation page[2] and an example idea [3].  

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Labs2/Ideas
2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Labs2/New_idea
3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Ideas/How_has_the_retention_of_female_editors_been_affected_by_the_decline%3F

-Aaron



On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 6:51 PM, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
The Research & Data team is currently experimenting with a tool called Trello for tracking progress and simplifying monthly reporting [1]. 

We don’t have a good solution for tracking progress on research/data support requests originating from the community or from non-WMF researchers. Using the same board for these requests is not going to work:
  • the board is currently set up as read-only for non-WMF users
  • it mostly reflects work prioritized by the team as part of our quarterly planning [2] and it’s not designed as a generic inbox for data requests
  • repurposing the board as a generic backlog would set the wrong expectations that the team has bandwidth or a mandate to support these requests as they come in 
What if we set up a public (read/write accessible) board where anyone (including volunteers) can create, pick up, execute and complete requests? The purpose of this would be purely to categorize, track and (self-)assign or reassign tasks: the actual requirements and the output of a request would be hosted on Meta (for example in the Research Index or the Labs2 portal) and/or in a public data repository.

How do people feel about this? We also have a bugzilla component for generic analytics requests that people have been using for a while [3] but I don’t think it has been particularly successful because BZ is mostly focused on development and bug reports or feature requests for analytics infrastructure.

The bottom line is that I don’t want to create more work for WMF researchers – we are a small team of 2.5 FTE staffers supporting the whole organization, if we exclude WMF analysts that are not part of Analytics – but test if a lightweight tool like Trello can be used to distribute tasks and track progress on a body of research and data requests.

Dario

[1] https://trello.com/b/k5N0ivoM/research-and-data
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Analytics_Quarterly_Review_Q2_2013_(Research_and_Data).pdf
[3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=251983&resolution=---&resolution=LATER&resolution=DUPLICATE&query_format=advanced&component=General%2FUnknown&product=Analytics

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