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(a)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