On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 5:57 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com wrote:
This!
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_(Product)/Product_Surve...
Thank you to the WMF Community Engagement team for trialling this new way of prioritising improvements to tools - by asking the community for some structured feedback. As the page says:
"The *Product Roadmap survey* intends to offer a lightweight,
data-informed way for communities across the entire Wikimedia movement to contribute ideas the Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) product roadmap. The question we are currently wanting to answer is: If the communities were to collectively decide on a gadget or tool which could be expanded into an extension for use across all Wikimedia-supported projects, what would it be?"
I saw this today as a Watchlist notification. The survey has just over 20 ideas which the user is asked to rank in a series of paired comparisons. A simple, easy, and intuitive way to get some genuine feedback from the editing community about the improvements that we believe would be of most use to us. [it would be nice if there were more options to compare in this survey]
As the FAQ section explains - this is an experimental process and not a promise that the 'winner' will be built - and that's perfectly fair. One reason I particularly like this is that I think that if the WMF would regularly invest in building tools that were prioritised by the so-called "power users", that would help ease the tension that can occur when the WMF builds tools that focus on the needs of new editors (but which also change the existing-editors' workflows).
The "Page Curation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Curation" system was a step in that direction - a genuine effort to make the work of new-page-patrollers easier, in recognition that "tools for power-users" help decrease their stress levels which indirectly helps to decrease the likelihood of good-faith newbies being unintentionally "bitten". From what I can see, the "product survey" idea is a more formalised approach in that same general direction. So, thank you. I hope this pilot project is a success.
-Liam
Thank you for your feedback, Liam! Very appreciated. Keep in mind that anyone can submit an idea as well as the ones that are already entered (we pre-loaded the survey, but there are certainly gadgets and tools in existence which communities may want to see improved which we have not yet entered). We're beginning to go through feedback that has been submitted and are also still getting the es.wp survey off the ground. We also welcome feedback about what works and what might not work on the discussion page (for example, some of the character limitations allowing for feedback is restrictive, so that is something we already know :)
cheers, -rachel