Hi,
in a recent discussion[0] on foundation-l about the increasing use of CentralNotice as a way of informing users, Erik proposed to have a "Community Broadcast Tool" (CBT), which would allow users to better control which information they receive.[1] Basically, the idea is to use tags/streams/categories like "fundraising", "community events", "strategic updates", etc. which users can individually Opt-Out to for all Wikimedia projects. The goal is to write an extension with those capabilities and get it up and running on Wikimedia. It might feature a completely new way of informing users or build on the existing extension CentralNotice and use banners.
Since the Wikimedia Foundation currently isn't working on such a tool[2], I'm evaluating whether Wikimedia Germany could fund development of a CBT via its community project budget[3]. I'm drafting a corresponding proposal right now. A recent survey on German Wikipedia found that a vast majority of users find the current use of banners bothersome and support the development of a technical tool to solve this problem.
However, there are still some very basic technical / organizational / HR questions open: 0. Is there already a similar tool available or in development? 1. How much work will it be to develop such an extension? (Translate: How much will this cost? ;)) Need only a very rough estimate at this point. 2. Development by a (small/large?) team or an individual? 3. Contractor vs. hiring staff? (Since it's mostly non-recurring work, I favor hiring a contractor. But once the software has been written, it has to be maintained by someone, so that's an issue)
This project proposal is at a very early stage, so please excuse its unsophisticatedness. If you have any questions, answers to my questions, comments or want to join me in my effort to make banners not suck for the community, please go ahead! :)
Kind regards, Tobias User:Church of emacs
[0] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-May/thread.html#65558 [1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-May/065648.html [2] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-May/065801.html [3] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community-Projektbudget – sorry, only in German. Basically, it's 200k€ set aside for large community projects (>5k€ each). There is also a budget for <5k€ projects.