Page MenuHomePhabricator

Deploy Notifications for 2022 Board of Trustees election
Closed, DeclinedPublic

Description

The Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) team would like to deploy the Notifications system to notify eligible voters from the community to vote during the 2022 Board election. The community vote will happen from 15th to 29th August 2022. We expect this to be deployed on the first day of the voting.

Basic information

  • Purpose of the notification - Tell voters that they are eligible to vote in the 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election
  • Notification name - bot-election-2022-eligible
  • What triggers notification? - Users are eligible to vote in the 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election according to the voting eligibility criteria.
  • "Notice" or "Alert"? - Notice
  • Notification type (standard, bundled, expandable bundle) - Standard

Wording

Links

Icon

Details

Due Date
Aug 14 2022, 10:00 PM

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript
RamzyM-WMF renamed this task from Deploy Notifications for 2022 Board election to Deploy Notifications for 2022 Board of Trustees election.Jun 6 2022, 11:39 AM
RamzyM-WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)
Aklapper set Due Date to Aug 14 2022, 10:00 PM.Jun 6 2022, 5:37 PM

Hello @Mh-3110. Thank you for filing this task. I want to ask some questions because creating one-off notifications is something that has been done only rarely. I think I remember that CentralNotice is usually used to notify editors about Board elections. Is this a new idea this year -- to send notifications? Will there also be CentralNotice?

Hi @MMiller_WMF,
Yes, that is a new idea this year. We are planning to have notifications coupled with CentralNotice.
Thanks

@MMiller_WMF We've been mandated to further increase global election turnout, as tools like mass email and central notice become less effective over the years we're exploring other ways to broadcast the election to the community. We're looking at folding in Notifications as part of the top-level communications about the Board of Trustees election., with the understanding that this is a rare occurrence and we only make the request with the understanding from the board that this election (and UCoC voting again within the year) are top-level priorities from the Board to community for democratic participation.

We're at the point of this being a binary decision right now, is your team even interested/available to support this request or not. It's not planned work, it's an experiment we came up with, so if there's no space for the Growth team to accommodate this request it's understandable for sure. If it is possible, we're willing to take the next steps to keep scoping this out with your team.

There is a request for Wikipedia Library notifications (T131210: Notify editors that a new Wikipedia Library database is available to them) that shares some characteristics with the request in this task. Echo is designed to generate notifications in response to something happening on wiki.

This task proposes a different model, where we would have to create a notification that isn't associated with an on-wiki event, and also provide the ability to send these notifications via a maintenance script or on-wiki (T58362: Allow users to create custom notifications onwiki). I haven't looked closely, but I imagine this will be a decent amount of work to implement. Maybe there are other teams interested in this model of sending notifications? For example, I could see how the Campaign-Tools team might have some use cases that align with this.

If we were going to do some kind of hack with less engineering effort, I suppose we could pretend that a page view is the "event", and create a notification in response to that only if the user hasn't already received the notification. That has the downside of only working for logged-in users who visit the wikis during the period when we want to send these notifications, but perhaps that is sufficient?

At some point in the future, we should consider to have a community board announcement, where these kind of global notifications would live.

Regarding the task, there is some potential for pushback when notifying eligible voters. I know it just a way to display an information about our movement's governance, but it would be perceived as canvassing. Also, some users may request to have the same thing to inform the community about their vote or their project.

Regarding the wording:

Voting has begun in the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections!

Can we skip the exclamation mark at the end? Enthusiasm is nice, but again, it could be perceived the wrong way.

Notifying eligible voters, shouldn't ask voter "to verify their eligibility". They are notified because they are eligible. :) Only eligible voters should be notified, at the wiki they are more active.

Some users have no idea of what is the Wikimedia Foundation. Should this notification provide some context?

This notification must be translated to be efficient. It means that the sentences have to be on translatewiki.net, with the right formatting for dates for each language. And given the impact of deploying a new notification, it shouldn't be a one-time notification. Are you considering to reuse it for the next round of elections?

Can we skip the exclamation mark at the end? Enthusiasm is nice, but again, it could be perceived the wrong way.

Yes, this should be configurable.

Notifying eligible voters, shouldn't ask voter "to verify their eligibility". They are notified because they are eligible. :) Only eligible voters should be notified, at the wiki they are more active.

Some users have no idea of what is the Wikimedia Foundation. Should this notification provide some context?

This is an early draft, so as above, yes we can change it. I'm not entirely convinced if we should explain what the Foundation is (we still have the unresolved debate of whether the Foundation "operates", "owns", or "hosts" Wikipedia and its sister projects... I don't think we want an ensuing uproar about this). Then again, Board election voter demographics are mostly people that have at least a basic understanding of what the Foundation do and do not do.

Are you considering to reuse it for the next round of elections?

If this goes well, absolutely.

After talking about this with @Keegan and scoping it with the Growth team, we've decided that we can't do this task for the coming year. The Growth team's bandwidth has been limited by being down one engineer, and since Echo is not currently built for one-off notifications, sending this particular notification would be a hack that would be difficult for the team to manage. @Mh-3110, thank you for filing this task and discussing it with us. I'm sorry we couldn't help. I leave this task with you to move it or resolve it as you see fit.

Thanks @MMiller_WMF, for taking the time to scope this.

Hopefully for another time.

Many thanks

jrbs changed the task status from Resolved to Declined.Jul 6 2022, 7:50 PM

Technically this is Declined, not Resolved, so switching that. :)