Dear all, One year ago, the Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) team at the Wikimedia Foundation launchedhttps://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/movement-strategy-forum-community-review/46 a proposal for a new Movement Strategy Forumhttps://forum.movement-strategy.org/. The proposal was open for a 2-month community review period, ending on 24 July 2022. Many users expressed their doubts on this Forum, not because we don't need a place to discuss, but because this should happen inside our ecosystem (ideally, on Meta). Nevertheless, the MSG continued with their proposal and launched the Forum itself using an external platform. Their main argument was that we didn't have the tools for a forum-like discussion on Meta, but embracing Discourse was easier, cheaper and more feasible.
Some months later, starting on September 2022, a monthly report was posted in the forum: https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/monthly-report-of-forum-activity/1665/.... This monthly report come, as the name suggests, every month till April: https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/monthly-report-of-forum-activity/1665/.... The last one showed evidence that after the first months, interest, posting and usefulness had declined: 15 new users per month, 8 users engaged per day and only 6 new contributors per month. More than a third of the 49 topics created in March were done by the staff members. There's only one topic that could be counted as active and thriving, and I think it is a very interesting one: "Japanese connection" (https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/japanese-connection/203).
As in this year there hasn't been any improvement in our platforms to have a better discussion forum (having a place where online discussion could happen should be the main goal of the MSG team), and we don't have any clue about how the MS Forum is going, I wonder if the lack of monthly statistics is because the forum is itself shrinking, or because the WMF doesn't have resources to continue with the reporting.
I whid that we could have a better platform to discuss and that the WMF invested money, resources and staff in this goal. Let's hope we see that in the near future.
Galder
Dear Galder,
Thank you for flagging this. We will look to provide a report covering the period from April to June by the end of July. Some of the hold up has happened because of getting comparator data that was previously used in the report. The forum does have some public statistics (scroll down on the About page https://forum.movement-strategy.org/about that may help in the meanwhile). The terms used on the page are expanded here https://meta.discourse.org/t/about-page-site-statistics-reference-guide/245984 by Discourse.
We are also seeing the declining trends both in terms of people who have visited the site described as "Active Users" on that page and in members of the community posting. We will continue to monitor this closely and reappraising whether the platform is meeting its stated aims.
Gracias,
Oscar Facilitation Specialist Movement Communications
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org