Notes from Etherpad:

Wikimedia Technical Conference
Atlanta, GA USA
November 12 - 15, 2019

Session Name / Topic
Wikimedia Space solves all your (communication) problems*
**no warranty is expressed or implied :)*
Session Leader: Chris; Scribe: Deb
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238237

Session Attendees
Sam, Cormac, Elena, Andre, Gergo, Galder, Nes

Notes

Question: Who are the audiences for technology and developers?
Significance: Who wants to know about stuff? How do we write for them?
Question: How do we reach them?
Significance:What do we write? How do we get useful participation? How can we set expectations on engagement with communities?
Question: How can we structure efforts around strategic campaigns?
Significance: Thinking about communication as an ongoing effort that brings continued awareness to efforts can provide more near and long-term success to initiatives. Our movement has a spotty history of keeping people in the know as progress (and change!) happens. How can we be more thoughtful in this area and how can we make it easy for folks to create and follow a plan?

Working on Space since earlier this year, pretty cool on what we're doing - looking for feedback on it all.

• what is Space? it's a platform for open sourced collaboration, blogs and discuss sections. 
• it's a protoype at this point ( on wmflabs)
• multi-lingual - welcoming for all folks
• safe - moderation and has a code of conduct. but all are welcome
• Questions that folks might ask:
  • how can I learn about what's working for other communities
  • how can I tell communities about what we're doing
  • how to publize things?
• (shows image of what Space looks like right now)
• feeds of blog posts, feeds of discussions, high level front page
• Blog Space:
  • blogs, side bars, navigation
  • keeping scope of Space open, but topics that aren't good to submit are:
    • opinion pieces
    • needs to be related to the Wikimedia movement in some way
  • use images from Commons as much as possible (with attribtuion)
  • need to join Space to submit
  • write your blog draft in Wordpress
  • use publish press for notifiying about a new blog is ready to be reviewed
    • moderators look for spelling errors, scope
    • moderators are not heavy handed with the content
    • all processes are documented on Meta for how to add blog posts
  • editorial board meets every 2 weeks, with Comms team support
    • open to anyone (these meetings)
    • wanting at least 50% particiation for the meetings to be commnity based (not just WMF)
    • meetings held online with etherpad notes
    • go through submissions, talk about if they're ready to be published, etc
    • gives feedback to writer
      • goes directly to that person via email through Space
  • Chris actively reaches out to folks to get more interest in posting blogs on Space
  • Comments are on the 'discuss' side of Space, actual blog post is on 'blog' side of Space
    • threads that kick off conversations
    • WMF blog doesn't allow comments
•  Discuss Space:
  • using Discourse for formatting / collection of comments
  • it's a somewhat normal forum collection
  • high level groupings of things
  • lots of tags for things like events, languages, projects
  • can subscribe to tags
  • authenticate with your WMF account, or read anon
  • some favorite features:
    • calendar of events from around the world
      • automatically show you events in your timezone
      • might be online events or in person events or ...can be anything
      • looking to figure out how to filter by region or something...keep the calendar from being too busy
      • can subscribe to the calendar and import into your personal calendar
      • adding location to the events also helps to create an interactive map that shows the events around the world
    • closed groups
      • sometimes collaboration is safer in a closed environment
      • moderators can add / remove other moderators, users
      • was created because there are several other places folks are using to do closed conversations
        • things that are sensitive
        • working on an event prep, etc
      • will avoid folks from joining FB or slack or other group to have these types of conversations
      • collecting information in one place
      • movement hasn't really had a way to do this before
  • joining space
    • space.wmflabs.org
      • will eventually go to a long term production place
    • need to confirm your email in mediawiki... used to be through your phab user but has recently changed
  • sends out monthly metrics 
    • blog posts not in English
    • how many users joined, etc
• Q: how do people know about this website?
  • A: it's still very new, launched in June 2019. CE's have been going to meetings around the world to talk about Space and how to join, etc
    • still getting early adopters
    • looking to help add meta-ness to things
    • reaching out to many groups as we can
    • communicate what we're about, why, how
    • will also start reaching out to teams to do presentations during their team meetings / offsites / events to do a demo, talk about it
    • going slow on purpose, being very transparent, everything is on Phabricator, open for discussion at all levels
    • trying to consolidate things (ie: rather than having 4 event calendars, we have one)
• Q: the way we use IRC, Slack...could teams use their discussions here?
  • A: if you're working with the community on things, this might be a great place for those conversations to happen
  • ie: glam work (libraries, arts, etc) can have conversations here
    • can @ people and ping them and emails then go out to those folks, easy to access
  • we can use this for open or closed groups
  • not a replacement for Meta conversations on topics
  • not a replacement for Village Pump
• Q: I did a demo to WM Australia a few months ago, crucial thing was the ability to invite folks via email (not WM name) is this something that can be done? We don't really have the ability to 'invite' people to Wikipedia...why not? :)
  • A: good question, we don't have this funcionality yet.
  • maybe part of the welcome email to Space could have more information on how to join Wikipedia, how to log in, how to create an account etc
• Q: how mullti-lingual is this?
  • A: not as much as we have on Wikipedia, but we're working on it

• Demo:
  • uses poly-lang to add support for more languages as needed
  • taking request for new languages, it is fairly easy to add, but there are some technical limitations
  • easy to use the poly-lang software to type your wording in your language and it'll do an auto-translate into the new language