Hi folks,

A few weeks ago, our product group started a new editor engagement program we call Roundtables, to improve our software tools with community participation.

The goal of this experimental program is to create better user experiences through focused, small group discussions between members of the Wikipedia and MediaWiki communities and Wikimedia product teams.

We aim to build closer closer collaborations with our community, through face-to-face meetings and video conferences that can augment text-only communication channels to solve complex issues through real-time, high-bandwidth conversations.

So far, we have found this roundtable process to be incredibly helpful for our teams. This convivial approach seems to be a promising new way to collaborate with community members and inform our product development.

In coming weeks, we will write a more in-depth report on our findings and will keep you posted on our next steps with this program.

For now, here are our preliminary reports on the first two roundtables:

• Roundtable on Editor Engagement - Wikimedia Foundation - June 22, 2013 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundtables/Roundtable_1

• Roundtable on Multimedia - Google Hangouts - July 10, 2013 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundtables/Roundtable_2

The first roundtable on engagement was a daylong face-to-face discussion in San Francisco, while the second roundtable on multimedia was hosted virtually, over Google Hangouts. Both approaches seemed effective in their own ways, and we are now evaluating the pros and cons of each collaboration method.

Next, we plan to host two more roundtables at Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong this summer:

* Roundtable on Multimedia - Wikimania 2013 - August 8, 2013 http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Multimedia_Roundtable

* Roundtable on Flow (Discussions and Messaging) - Wikimania 2013 - August 9, 2013 http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Roundtable_on_Messaging_...

You are welcome to sign up for the second roundtable about Flow on the Wikimania page. (The Multimedia roundtable is nearly full, and we would like to keep it up to a dozen participants, but the Flow roundtable still has room for more participants.)

And be sure to add this Roundtable page to your watchlist, to learn more about future events: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundtables

We want to make it clear that this Roundtable program is intended to complement existing talk page discussions and IRC chats, not to replace them. It helps our product teams to have focused discussions with small groups of contributors, but we will continue to interact with our community through existing channels.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the community participants who joined our first roundtables, as well as the many team members who made them possible, including Howie, Maryana, Brandon, Brian, Mark, Robla, Jared, Erik, Steven, Asaf, Chip, James, Siko, Oliver and Philippe, to name but a few.

To be continued!

All the best,

Fabrice

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Fabrice Florin Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation +1 (415) 860-6484 fflorin@wikimedia.org

Wikipedia Profile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)