On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/6/1 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
While I'm thinking about it:
I would like to see the WMF solicit feedback on these kinds of issues -
how
it might further its goals (distribution for example) - from the wider readership. The small, well informed and focused group on foundation-l
can
do a lot, but what about inviting everyone to the conversation in a
medium
that makes it easy for them to contribute their ideas?
Erik, you had pitched us the Ideazilla application not too long ago. That
in
coordination with a site notice would be an awesome experiment. Let's do
it
sooner rather than later? :)
Did you see this email (and the resulting thread)? http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-April/051580.html
The kind of discussion you suggest could well be part of that, or at least done in connection with it.
I'm glad they are doing that but it's not quite what I was thinking. My idea is more of a combination of the ideas that liquid threads and ideazilla bring to mind (not necessarily related to how those applications actually work, however - just the ideas they elicit). I got the impression from Michael's e-mail that Wikimedia's Strategic Planning would mostly be done by really smart Wikimedians who are already meta-contributors. It was broad enough to include all volunteers, but wasn't really oriented around helping those volunteers become strategic planners. Ultimately, strategic planning will be best done in coordination with a vast amount of evidence and opinions. It doesn't make sense to create a strategic plan before considering all possible options in detail. Nowadays we can do that better than its ever been done before.
Idea: You perform a Google search for some topic and end up at Wikipedia. You find your information and are now looking for your next distraction when you see a prominent site notice that says, "How can we make Wikipedia better?" or somesuch. You click it and end up at a fully ajaxified application that doesn't require (but supports) login, has no captchas and does all anti-spam and anti-ballot stuffing on the backend (and a "report/flag this thread" link for human spam detection). What you see is a list of idea threads that are ranked according to simple ajax thumbs up / thumbs down votes in addition to a fully ajax form for adding a new idea. Clicking on it loads the threaded idea conversation on the same page. You can vote on individual comments and reply to them on the same page.
As you can tell I am of the opinion that loading pages incurs a heavy cognitive load, lowering the probability that you will convert the reader into a collaborator. There is of course the spam/ham tradeoff, but Gmail and Craigslist have nailed the solution and we could too. An important takeaway from the brain sciences regarding executive function is that you need to "trick" yourself (or your users) into switching tasks. Task switching is tough and every single additional degree of freedom that you add between your user reading and then following up on that with some creative writing lowers the probability that it will happen very significantly.
2009/6/1 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
Idea: You perform a Google search for some topic and end up at Wikipedia. You find your information and are now looking for your next distraction when you see a prominent site notice that says, "How can we make Wikipedia better?" or somesuch. You click it and end up at a fully ajaxified application that doesn't require (but supports) login, has no captchas and does all anti-spam and anti-ballot stuffing on the backend (and a "report/flag this thread" link for human spam detection). What you see is a list of idea threads that are ranked according to simple ajax thumbs up / thumbs down votes in addition to a fully ajax form for adding a new idea. Clicking on it loads the threaded idea conversation on the same page. You can vote on individual comments and reply to them on the same page.
I'm not convinced such a way of gathering ideas would actually result in anything useful happening. Brainstorming (which is basically what you are describing a tool for) is a very useful way of getting ideas, but you then need a way to implement them. Democracy isn't a good way of working out which ideas to give further consideration to - one person saying "this will never work because of XYZ" (where XYZ is a serious problem) outweighs dozens of people saying "this is a great idea" (but not giving any way to overcome XYZ). The strategic planning process will hopefully involve things like the process you describe for getting ideas, but it also involves small working groups that are able to go through the ideas and work out what ought to be done.
I totally agree with that and its one of the major reasons the WMF exists in the first place. We've basically described the division of labor - the community comes up with a plethora of ideas and donates money and then WMF synthesizes, refines and implements them, fully in coordination with said community. The problem is that if we limit community participation to hard-to-use tools then the same people that come up with just a few ideas will select only among the ideas that they thought up. It wouldn't be a broad enough search. It hasn't been a broad enough search.
On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/6/1 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu: I'm not convinced such a way of gathering ideas would actually result in anything useful happening. Brainstorming (which is basically what you are describing a tool for) is a very useful way of getting ideas, but you then need a way to implement them. Democracy isn't a good way of working out which ideas to give further consideration to - one person saying "this will never work because of XYZ" (where XYZ is a serious problem) outweighs dozens of people saying "this is a great idea" (but not giving any way to overcome XYZ). The strategic planning process will hopefully involve things like the process you describe for getting ideas, but it also involves small working groups that are able to go through the ideas and work out what ought to be done.
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