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_(Res…
[3]
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=251983&resolution=--…