Tilman,
Thanks, it's great to see the momentum here in Mobile Contributions.
Was there any discussion about how to convert the "selfies" uploaders and people who sign up for the watchlist feature into more active contributors? This seems like an opportunity to make progress on what I think should be the #1 WMF-wide priority right now, which making progress on the active contributor statistics.
Pine
--
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:32:54 -0700 From: Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Quarterly reviews of high priority WMF initiatives Message-ID: CAPDdKA6M+PLM7OHfJNKQcNVp_cS0EUEeBMATjvS=jjYDv01DeQ@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
Minutes and links to slides from this week's Quarterly Review meeting of the mobile contributions team have been posted at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_re...
On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi folks,
to increase accountability and create more opportunities for course corrections and resourcing adjustments as necessary, Sue's asked me and Howie Fung to set up a quarterly project evaluation process, starting with our highest priority initiatives. These are, according to Sue's narrowing focus recommendations which were approved by the Board [1]:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (mobile contributions + Wikipedia Zero)
- Editor Engagement (also known as the E2 and E3 teams)
- Funds Dissemination Committe and expanded grant-making capacity
I'm proposing the following initial schedule:
January:
- Editor Engagement Experiments
February:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (Contribs + Zero)
March:
- Editor Engagement Features (Echo, Flow projects)
- Funds Dissemination Committee
We’ll try doing this on the same day or adjacent to the monthly metrics meetings [2], since the team(s) will give a presentation on their recent progress, which will help set some context that would otherwise need to be covered in the quarterly review itself. This will also create open opportunities for feedback and questions.
My goal is to do this in a manner where even though the quarterly review meetings themselves are internal, the outcomes are captured as meeting minutes and shared publicly, which is why I'm starting this discussion on a public list as well. I've created a wiki page here which we can use to discuss the concept further:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_re...
The internal review will, at minimum, include:
Sue Gardner myself Howie Fung Team members and relevant director(s) Designated minute-taker
So for example, for Visual Editor, the review team would be the Visual Editor / Parsoid teams, Sue, me, Howie, Terry, and a minute-taker.
I imagine the structure of the review roughly as follows, with a duration of about 2 1/2 hours divided into 25-30 minute blocks:
- Brief team intro and recap of team's activities through the quarter,
compared with goals
- Drill into goals and targets: Did we achieve what we said we would?
- Review of challenges, blockers and successes
- Discussion of proposed changes (e.g. resourcing, targets) and other
action items
- Buffer time, debriefing
Once again, the primary purpose of these reviews is to create improved structures for internal accountability, escalation points in cases where serious changes are necessary, and transparency to the world.
In addition to these priority initiatives, my recommendation would be to conduct quarterly reviews for any activity that requires more than a set amount of resources (people/dollars). These additional reviews may however be conducted in a more lightweight manner and internally to the departments. We’re slowly getting into that habit in engineering.
As we pilot this process, the format of the high priority reviews can help inform and support reviews across the organization.
Feedback and questions are appreciated.
All best, Erik
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Narrowing_Focus [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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On Saturday, March 23, 2013, ENWP Pine wrote:
Tilman,
Thanks, it's great to see the momentum here in Mobile Contributions.
Was there any discussion about how to convert the "selfies" uploaders and people who sign up for the watchlist feature into more active contributors? This seems like an opportunity to make progress on what I think should be the #1 WMF-wide priority right now, which making progress on the active contributor statistics.
Pine
This is very interesting to all of us on the Product team, because we think a lot about how to convert high quality contributors on every feature, mobile and desktop.
Converting users who signed up with one set of intentions to do something even slightly different can be a very difficult thing. This is why, for example, AFT5 users who accept a call to sign up edit at dismal rates compared to "natural" converts to registered editing. In product development we ideally prefer to think of ways to attract and support users who are interested in a useful activity, rather than say, try to turn readers who want a reading list into editors using a watchlist. Making that conceptual shift is a big ask for people with no prior experience editing.
The "selfies" group is an interesting example to talk about because these people clearly are open to contributing. I would venture that they just have the wrong mental model for what a useful photo is. Maryana and the design team have been working on a mobile "intro to contributing photos" that I think is a really great example of how to not just build in the base functionality of something like mobile photo uploads, but actually try to target new users who have the right motivations and concepts about the feature. I'm sure Maryana, Vibha, and Munaf could expand on this more. :-)
--
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:32:54 -0700 From: Tilman Bayer <tbayer@wikimedia.org javascript:;> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:;
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Quarterly reviews of high priority WMF initiatives Message-ID: <CAPDdKA6M+PLM7OHfJNKQcNVp_cS0EUEeBMATjvS= jjYDv01DeQ@mail.gmail.com javascript:;> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
Minutes and links to slides from this week's Quarterly Review meeting of the mobile contributions team have been posted at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_re...
On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi folks,
to increase accountability and create more opportunities for course corrections and resourcing adjustments as necessary, Sue's asked me and Howie Fung to set up a quarterly project evaluation process, starting with our highest priority initiatives. These are, according to Sue's narrowing focus recommendations which were approved by the Board [1]:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (mobile contributions + Wikipedia Zero)
- Editor Engagement (also known as the E2 and E3 teams)
- Funds Dissemination Committe and expanded grant-making capacity
I'm proposing the following initial schedule:
January:
- Editor Engagement Experiments
February:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (Contribs + Zero)
March:
- Editor Engagement Features (Echo, Flow projects)
- Funds Dissemination Committee
We’ll try doing this on the same day or adjacent to the monthly metrics meetings [2], since the team(s) will give a presentation on their recent progress, which will help set some context that would otherwise need to be covered in the quarterly review itself. This will also create open opportunities for feedback and questions.
My goal is to do this in a manner where even though the quarterly review meetings themselves are internal, the outcomes are captured as meeting minutes and shared publicly, which is why I'm starting this discussion on a public list as well. I've created a wiki page here which we can use to discuss the concept further:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_re...
The internal review will, at minimum, include:
Sue Gardner myself Howie Fung Team members and relevant director(s) Designated minute-taker
So for example, for Visual Editor, the review team would be the Visual Editor / Parsoid teams, Sue, me, Howie, Terry, and a minute-taker.
I imagine the structure of the review roughly as follows, with a duration of about 2 1/2 hours divided into 25-30 minute blocks:
- Brief team intro and recap of team's activities through the quarter,
compared with goals
- Drill into goals and targets: Did we achieve what we said we would?
- Review of challenges, blockers and successes
- Discussion of proposed changes (e.g. resourcing, targets) and other
action items
- Buffer time, debriefing
Once again, the primary purpose of these reviews is to create improved structures for internal accountability, escalation points in cases where serious changes are necessary, and transparency to the world.
In addition to these priority initiatives, my recommendation would be to conduct quarterly reviews for any activity that requires more than a set amount of resources (people/dollars). These additional reviews may however be conducted in a more lightweight manner and internally to the departments. We’re slowly getting into that habit in engineering.
As we pilot this process, the format of the high priority reviews can help inform and support reviews across the organization.
Feedback and questions are appreciated.
All best, Erik
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Narrowing_Focus [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 1:08 PM, ENWP Pine deyntestiss@hotmail.com wrote:
Tilman,
Thanks, it's great to see the momentum here in Mobile Contributions.
Was there any discussion about how to convert the "selfies" uploaders and people who sign up for the watchlist feature into more active contributors? This seems like an opportunity to make progress on what I think should be the #1 WMF-wide priority right now, which making progress on the active contributor statistics.
Yes, those "selfies" are a very fascinating user group :) It's pretty early in the game, but I think we can already make some statements about the kinds of mobile web users we're seeing trying out our features: they're very international, very new to the Wikimedia ecosystem, and very excited to be a part of Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, they don't quite know how to contribute yet, but this is a good problem to have! Far better than needing to convince completely uninterested users to contribute or malicious vandals/spammers to stop.
There are some elements of targeted education that we're planning on adding to the UI to help: we've built a mobile friendly upload contributions view, and we'll be adding on a lightweight mini tutorial for new users who have never uploaded to Commons before (an early mockup herehttps://www.dropbox.com/sh/oqgwmlwlpdwhff3/FrXZvJJTMK#/). But the tiny mobile screen is just not conducive to long information-dense tutorials like the desktop UploadWizard, so I think the most successful way of "educating" new mobile web users is simply to guide them directly to the kind of work that needs to get done, and to make it as painless and rewarding as possible for them to do it.
That's why we created the one-step "lead image upload/add to article" workflow for articles with no images, and why we're working on a Nearby view that lets users see all the articles around them that could use an image. This takes all the guesswork out of what kinds of images are appropriate to upload, a problem that the "selfies" appear to be acutely afflicted by :) It also provides a constant source of more stuff to do. I think as long as we continue to build crystal-clear, new-user-friendly, and intrinsically valuable workflows, we'll have a much easier time converting some of these curious one-off users into productive contributors.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org