[Wiki-research-l] WM Research team - time investment heads up

Hi all, If you interact with the Wikimedia Foundation's Research team [1] or rely on some of the services that we offer to the Wikimedia research community, I'd like to share an update with you regarding a change on our team's end for the period of July 2022 until June 30, 2023 in terms of how we invest our time on the Wikimedia Research Community front. ==Context for the change== We want to build a course that can help researchers (or potential future researchers) learn how to contribute their research expertise to the Wikimedia research community and Wikimedia Movement most effectively and joyfully. :) Developing the course material will require significant time investment from our small team. As a result, we are pausing a couple of the existing team initiatives/activities or are reducing time investment on some fronts. We may pause or lower time investments on some other fronts as we progress towards developing the course. ==What are we changing?== 1. We are pausing Monthly Research Office Hours [2] for 6 months with a possibility of extending the pause to 12 months. Emily Lescak, our senior Research Community Officer, had iterated over the format of the office hours and we were looking forward to launching with the new format in August. We will pick up experimenting with the changes that she had planned once we start investing in this space again. :) 2. We are going to reduce our public speaking work (talks, tutorials, keynotes, ...) and we may reduce some of the research community service work we normally offer unless we have already committed to them (PC member, track chair or PC chair roles and responsibilities, etc.). We may continue doing the research service work in our volunteer time. 3. We will be generally more conservative for picking up new initiatives or actions/activities for our team. ==What will not change in the coming 6 months?== * We are continuing to invest on three programs that our team has led over the years: Address Knowledge Gaps, Improve Knowledge Integrity, and Building the Foundations. [3] * On the Research Community front, our team is currently planning to continue to maintain these initiatives/activities: ** Research Fund ** WMF Research Award of the Year ** Wiki Workshop ** Monthly Research Showcases ** bi-annual Research Report ** Formal Collaborations program and mentoring interns ==Should you expect more changes in our services for you?== We may need to reduce investments on more fronts. We will be able to say this more accurately after we make some progress towards developing the course. If we make some relatively major choices in terms of time investment, we intend to continue notifying you through this mailing list. As a general approach: If there is a need for further prioritization of activities, we will continue pausing or reducing time investment considering the impact on the Wikimedia Research community as well as estimated time needed for doing the activity. ==How can I be involved in developing the course?== Thank you for considering joining forces on this front! :) Please write to Emily Lescak (cc-ed) with your proposal about contributing to the development of the course. We will reach out to you based on the specifics of your proposal and the needs of the course. And of course, there will be a page on MetaWiki about the course once we know slightly more than "we want to develop a course". ==What we can look forward to?== For years we have discussed developing a clear entry point for researchers to learn how to contribute research to the Wikimedia projects. We have done some initiatives within our team and in collaborations with other teams: developing tutorials for the resources that researchers can use, offering office hours to help folks get started, investing in documentation, Research Funds, and more. The course can act as a unifying effort or a force-multiplier that can help us reach to more researchers from across the globe with more diverse backgrounds and experiences and show them the possibility and joy of contributing research to the Wikimedia projects. If you have questions about this prioritization, you can reach out to me directly or write on this thread. Best, Leila [1] https://research.wikimedia.org/team.html [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours [3] https://research.wikimedia.org/projects.html -- Leila Zia Head of Research Wikimedia Foundation