Hey Pine,
Had to laugh a little bit about a consultation about consultations, but I understand the rationale for it. Your point is well taken that information management is important to think about when there is much going on.
I think the community notification calendar https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement/Calendar that Gergő has mentioned above is a good place to start thinking about improvements of managing information. Anecdotally, some of the issues I have seen and heard about are:
* having to follow mailing lists that are too active (like this one), * having to follow too many disparate mailing lists, * getting pinged too many times from user talk page messages sent through Special:MassMessage. * Too many consultations focused on overlapping audiences
A centralized calendar can help mitigate some of these issues. In general, the calendar has been used for planning and scheduling purposes, but I like the idea of making it more usable to for folks wanting to know what consultations are happening. Lodewijk recently suggested to me that some filters and other descriptors (e.g. country, projects targeted) will be needed to help users see what is relevant to them. Building those components is one technical challenge, and would be making sure the calendar gets used by the relevant consultation audience is another. We would need to think about how to inform people about the calendar without also falling back to doing more announcements on the usual channels a la "Hey, this new consultation is on the calendar."
One issue I don't have a good answer for right now is how we can solve the problem of having too many announcement channels while also being confident that when a consultation is announced (by anyone) in some set of approved channels, can they expect to get sufficient and representative participation? That might be something we can figure out in a survey about consultations generally as you've suggested.
- Chris
Chris "Jethro" Schilling I JethroBT (WMF) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:I_JethroBT_(WMF) Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home
On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 1:40 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Attempting to summon Chris Schilling over here from the other thread. (:
I think that some kind of analysis about optimal use of consultations and surveys would be beneficial, and I'd welcome seeing something like that in the next Annual Plan. Perhaps there might even be a consultation or survey about consultations or surveys, which I know sounds ironic but may be helpful in figuring out how much is too much or too little, timing, locations, etc.
Information management is a big deal. We have watchlists, email, social media channels, Echo, and lots of other tools, but even so -- or perhaps because -- there are so many channels, it's easy to drown. I imagine that holds true for both staff and community members, and I'd welcome some initiatives to improve the situation. Perhaps someone will have some ideas that they can submit to IdeaLab.
Pine