Dear Asaf,
You are right, Meta users are talking about whatever. It should be interesting to know what are the strategic discussions about, and how are them of a better quality through the MS Forum.

The forum topic with more interactions is interesting: 日本とのつながり / Japanese Connection. Then the next with most comments is "Say hello!". We have then one related to the Strategy, Sub-saharan Africa Strategic Talk,  and the next most used 6 forum topics are about the platform itself, not about strategy. From the next 20 more commented topics, only 2 are about the MS. There's another one about the elections.

It seems that, as in Meta, the interactions are not especially about the Movement Strategy. And even those that are about the MS are not really impactful ([DRAFT] Minimum Criteria for Hub Pilots), with less than 7 users actually discussing, and at least 3 of them members of the WMF.

I don't know how to measure impact. I know that this is not a good metric in any way.

Cheers,
Galder

From: Asaf Bartov <abartov@wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, August 22, 2022 4:49 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Invitation to join the Movement Strategy Forum
 
On Sun, Aug 21, 2022 at 4:43 AM Gnangarra <gnangarra@gmail.com> wrote:
Percentages look good, and show some comparison but the reality is the actual raw number say just as much when meta has 4600 and formun has less than 200  and without staff less than 150 its not exactly a like for like engagement.

"Meta has 4600 and forum has less than 200", you say.  4600 what, though? That number is the number of "Active users", meaning people who make edits.  

However, comparing the 4600 active users of Meta to the 200 active[1] users is not comparing like with like: on Meta, edits are made on hundreds of different topics, from requests for permissions through learning patterns, global abuse investigations, to grant proposals and discussions. And very little discussion of Movement Strategy. In other words, a very small proportion (what proportion exactly, I don't have the means to ascertain) of the 4600 active users of Meta are engaged in Movement Strategy, so the number 4600 represents nothing relevant to this discussion. The Forum, on the other hand, is dedicated to Movement Strategy discussion, so a large number of the 200 active users are in fact discussing Movement Strategy.  (Personally I would like the Forum to be even more focused on Movement Strategy and to discourage content-free "social" posts, but I am not involved with the Forum's governance.)
 
In other words, I suggest that those of you determined to only discuss Movement Strategy on Meta do more of that, to lead by example. It is within your power to move the critical mass of active discussion of Movement Strategy and the liveliest proposals and plans to Meta. Remember that it is as a response to the difficulty[2] of gaining traction for Movement Strategy conversations that the Forum was created.

    Asaf
    (personal opinion)

[1] I think discounting staff engaging on the Forum is a mistake.  Staff is also engaging on Meta, yet is included in the 4600 figure.  I am guessing more staff engage on the Forum, by design, but surely that engagement is a good thing, as it is on Meta.

[2] that difficulty is certainly not solely due to the technology of Meta; there were other factors dampening engagement about Movement Strategy, some of them, I daresay, the fault of the Foundation.  But Meta's shortcomings as a venue are indicated in surveys as a major reason people aren't engaging in conversation about Movement Strategy, so the Foundation acted on that input.  Again, you can demonstrate that that reason is not a significant factor by creating and participating in lively Movement Strategy discussions on Meta. 

Asaf Bartov (he/him/his)

Senior Program Officer, Emerging Wikimedia Communities

Wikimedia Foundation


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