Thank you, Quim Gil and your team all the effort that went into
discuss-space. We've seen a great platform being developed.
It was far from ready, however, and my impression was we were in a
pre-release phase. To add to the lessons learned, let me share my thoughts
on this.
From the recurring feedback that the forum did not
become part of
contributors' everyday workflow, that groups are still using
facebook for
similar purposes, we can deduce that a crucial feature-set was missing:
integration with our everyday on-wiki workflow. This would include 3
features:
* Notifications within Echo.
* Automatic listing of active and on-topic discussions on wiki pages (in
project namespace mostly).
* Including (transcluding) discussions on wiki-pages.
The first one is crucial, the next two "just" very important. If there will
be any similar solution in the future, these will be the hard criteria for
adoption and success.
Without these features the expectation that this forum becomes widely
adopted was unfounded: it's still in its infancy and it was judged too
early.
The foundation of it - an established forum engine - is solid, any solution
that would be chosen in the future would recreate this or similar
functionality. That would be a massive endeavour. The WMF devs have their
hands full all the time, how would that be possible?
I'm sure the success of such a project hinges on the above critical
features. Even if the WMF stops developing these features, nothing is lost:
interest from volunteers might be enough to develop some of these features.
I've shown interest in one of these, GSoC also will be an opportunity for
motivated developers to contribute and grant proposals could be made for
the most important features. In true collaborative fashion, the WMF can
enable the community to turn this experiment into a fully-featured,
integrated product. I believe this is the best path to take, that's in line
with the Mid-Term Plan's targets.
On Tue, 18 Feb 2020 at 11:31, Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
While we remain committed to this important goal ...
Given how overwhelming the positive expectations are about this project, I
think the best path to take for the WMF is to halt the development, but
continue operating the platform and motivate volunteers to get involved
with its development. At least that's how I see the ideal role of WMF in
our Movement.
The Space blog, which continues to fill
a need to share news for the movement by the movement,
will continue in a
new home.
A subjective note: I think both the blog and the forum would be more
accessible on simpler URLs, I've always found "discuss-space" unusual.
Wikimedia Space is a good name for those projects all together but in the
URLs I find it confusing.
I would have suggested these URLs instead:
* "discuss.wmflabs.org"
* or simply "discourse.wmflabs.org" as usual in the free-software
community
* or "forum.wmflabs.org" (following the KISS
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle> principle)
* "blog.wmflabs.org"
* "events.wmflabs.org/calendar"
* "events.wmflabs.org/map"
If any of these is released to production, ".wmflabs.org" would be replaced
by ".wikimedia.org"
Thank you, Quim for asking feedback from the community.
Aron (Demian)