Hi,
Thanks for the update.
Over the years there has been a flourishing of subject-specific public
meetings, which have been good for covering topics in greater depth than is
possible when a much larger number of topics are packed into the same one
hour time window. However, my guess is that this has contributed to the
decline of interest in presenting at the Monthly Activities Meetings.
Bluerasberry and I are planning to resume the Wikimedia Café online
meetings. These are more casual and smaller in scale than the Activities
Meetings. For those who liked the Activities Meetings for wide-ranging
discussions, I encourage you to visit the Café sometime.
From what I have seen, I think that Wikimedia Space may
be good for some
use cases, but it's not a substitute for Meta and for many
existing public
communications channels. One use case for Space that does make sense to me
is that people might want to use it for private group communications.
However, the platform is under WMF's control, community governance appears
to be nearly nonexistent, public interest appears to be low at this time,
and I think that Space fragments discussions onto yet another platform. I
encourage WMF to be thoughtful about how much money, staff time, and
marketing efforts are spent on Space that might be better spent elsewhere,
and I discourage WMF from further fragmenting public discussions.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 11:03 Gregory Varnum <gvarnum(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello,
You are invited to our the Wikimedia monthly activities meeting, taking
place tomorrow (August 29) starting at 18:00 UTC (11:00 Pacific Daylight
Time). Please note this will be the last Wikimedia monthly activities
meeting planned by the Wikimedia Foundation Communications department.
After speaking with our colleagues and reviewing engagement metrics from
the past few years, we concluded that there are other efforts in place that
are better suited to achieve the goals of this meeting.
You can join tomorrow’s final meeting via YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhoJb6rwkfc
And also in IRC: #wikimedia-office
The agenda will include:
- Wikimedia movement strategy update
- Wikipedia’s role in Teenagers lives
- Wikimedia Space
More information on Meta-Wiki:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_monthly_activities_meetings
When this meeting first began, it provided insights into data that was
otherwise unavailable or hard to access. Thanks to the amazing efforts of
staff and volunteers, those metrics are now available and updated regularly
online. The purpose of the meeting thus shifted to focus on sharing
progress updates and information from across the movement. We have realized
however that this approach limits our ability to connect across languages
and provide the level of detail necessary to create impact. In addition,
interest in the meeting has remained steady, but is has not grown, and
there has been a decrease of interest in presenting.
Fortunately, we have new methods of outreach that allow us to connect with
wider audiences.. The new Wikimedia Foundation website, discussed at last
month's meeting, has a greater ability to communicate across languages and
is already helping us reach more people.[1] We are discussing ways to
further expand this support. The new Wikimedia Space project that will be
discussed at this month's meeting provides a central, real-time space to
have discussions and share information on activities across the
movement.[2]
We appreciate all of the feedback people have provided over the years, and
will continue to reflect on any additional input you may have. I also want
to personally thank the dozens of people that presented over the years and
the evolving core team that worked every month to put the meeting on. They
often made it look easy, and I know that is not always the case.
Thank you, and I will have more on this topic during tomorrow's meeting.
-greg
[1]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
[2]
https://space.wmflabs.org/
--
Gregory Varnum (pronouns - he/his/him)
Communications Strategist
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
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