Updates from ArbCom/T&S Meeting (1 June):

• ArbCom would prefer an external-facing White Paper, rather than a learn.wiki course. Future researchers would then be able to drop a citation to the Foundation White Paper on best practices for doing Wikipedia research.
• March 2024 seems to be a reasonable timeframe for delivery.
• It would be useful to put timeline milestones into this Phab ticket.

Updates from ArbCom Meeting (6 July):

• Set-up: Nathan and I attended. 6 ArbCom members were present at the portion of the meeting related to this task.
• We started Exercise Zero during the call. The attendees answered 2 questions to help with better understanding the motivations for the requested work as well as how failure can look like for this project.

Next steps on my end:

• Reach out to all members of ArbCom (independent of whether they participated in Exercise Zero or not) and give them a chance to share their responses (1 week turnaround time)
• Process the input and prepare a draft of motivations and failure scenarios, share with everyone for our shared understanding and alignment.
• Plan the next step(s): Defining/clarifying roles and responsibilities is a good one. Developing the high level process and project plan for the work ahead is another. There may be others. (help me here if you're reading this update and you have input.)

Open questions for me as of now:

• what is the right cadence of engagement with ArbCom and expectation of the time they have for this project? We can answer this after we agree on roles and responsibilities. (context: At the start, I feel I need more frequent touch-points with ArbCom, the latest once a month, and assuming we can do some work asynchronously together.)

@NForrester please check the first bullet point under Next steps above. Can you let me know the instructions for doing that or help me with it? (I'll put the draft body of the email together.)

@leila The first bullet point is good with me, and in general the ArbCom mailing list will be the place to do this. I can lead liaising with En.WP ArbCom and any others we choose to engage in the White Paper process.

Next steps on my end:

• Support definitions of roles and responsibilities;
• Build a policy brief on doxxing/revelation of PII policies to support scoping of project and potential for broader community engagement.

While

They have been very clear that they prefer to have the scope smaller and have something around March 2024 (a timeline that in all fairness we proposed first;) than an expanded scope with a later delivery time.

is undeniably true, speaking for myself there would be a point where the scope was so reduced that I would rather wait.

@Barkeep49 noted and appreciated. (fwiw: a too reduced scope project is also harder to create motivation/excitement about.)

Hi folks. A few updates on this epic tasks:

• as many of you know, we already have a reasonable draft out for feedback. We're going to iterate on the current text based on the feedback and some other todos we already know we have.
• I'd like to update the delivery time for the whitepaper for the following reason. We are currently past March which was our self-imposed deadline for the whitepaper and there is still some work to do on the paper (given the previous point). We also have a member of the writing committee going on a 2-month leave. We agreed within the writing committee that we want everyone whose name is on the paper to have a chance to read the final version of the paper before it goes out (logic: if your name is on something, you should know what it is.:). With all of this in mind, I'm going to update the deadline for delivering the final paper to July 27th. Based on earlier conversations with en:ArbCom I don't expect major issues raised by ArbCom as the group wanted to see progress and we're making progress. If I have read the signals wrong or misunderstood, please speak up and I'm happy to go to the drawing board. Otherwise, July 27th it is.
• By July 27th, what we aim to deliver is: the paper itself plus the communication plan and perhaps some parts of the communication ready to be executed.