User story:
As an organizer, I want to specify the type of my event, so that people who are interested in that event type can more easily find my event and join it.
As an editor, I want to be able to view event information (on the event page or in the Collaboration List) by event type, so that I can find event types that interest me most to join.
As a Campaigns team member, I want to know the breakdown of event types that use our tools, so we can establish a baseline of event types and then try to work against that baseline to diversify the types of events that use our tools.
As a data/product analyst, I want to know what type of event is being organized, so that I can include this information in my data analysis and reports on organized activity on the wikis.
Background:
We have learned in the last year or so that people are using campaign event registration tools for events beyond campaigns. People use them for monthly meetups and trainings, which are not campaign events. See the related Slack conversation. We are also expanding our focus area so that other forms of collaboration, such as WikiProjects, can use our tools.
In order to provide accurate data, we need a way to differentiate the events so that at the time of reporting the team is able to receive data on events, which is the primary use case and goal of the tool (vs meetups and trainings).
Organizers already try to communicate event type in the titles of their events, so we are giving them a more powerful, data-driven way of doing this.
Many of these event types will map to a larger project/program infrastructure, which will be nested above event type (see T385342) and more specific tasks and goals (see T387045), which will be nested below event type.
We want to allow more than one event type, but we think allowing for 2 event types is sufficient for the MVP. We have run many examples of real events and they all seem to fall between 1-2 event types (doc with examples).
Our current list of event/collaboration types - collaboration type:
- Contributions
- Editing event
- Media upload event
- Backlog drive
- Contest
- Community
- Workshop
- Training / seminar
- Meetup
- Hackathon
- Conference
- Other
- Other
Notes:
- We want to encourage people to be accurate and precise when they pick event types, but we also understand that some events cover more than 1 event type. For this reason, we will allow users to pick 2 event types, except for cases when 'Other' is picked (and, such a case, the user can only pick one selection - Other). If we hear feedback that there is an interest in more event types, we may expand it to allow 3, but we want to experiment with 2 event types for now.
- We can have definitions of each of these types for documentation (on perhaps Meta-Wiki or Mediawiki.org), and there can be links to these definitions in the UI.
- Organizers already use event types in many of their event names, so this can be something we look into for a reference point
- You can pull event titles to see how people are already communicating event types as inspiration
- We will work on event type before event tasks/goals
- We probably want to allow organizers to select more than one event type, but limit it to perhaps 2 or 3 types
- I'm debating whether it is useful to have separate categories for 'workshop' and 'training/seminar.' Some events would fall under both, but some would be just one, so I'm inclined to keep them as separate for now.
- We won't have an event type that is specifically for adding references (such as campaigns like 1Lib1Ref in the MVP, but we can consider it as a category in the future if there is enough interest. For now, 1Lib1Ref could fit under 'Editing event' and could fit under 'Adding references' as the task type in T387045.
- For people who are doing editing activity as part of a course or academic program, they could choose editing event and/or training/course/seminar.
Out of scope:
Decisions related to event type:
- I removed "campaign" as an event type, since I think indicating if something is a part of a larger campaign is in the scope of T385342 - in other words, we are still thinking about the singular, one-off event for this stage of work
- I removed "content drive," since it closely relates to "editing event." If someone wants to have a "challenge" that is a type of editing event, they can specify the details when we allow task type and goals.
- I removed "single article collaboration," since it fits under "editing event" and a task type could potentially be single article collaboration
- I removed "proofread-a-thon" since Proofreading will be a text under task types
- I removed "data-a-thon" because contributing data is a form of editing, and people can find what they specifically want by searching for Wikidata events or task types such as 'adding wikidata items'
- I removed "photography walk" since it was too specific. Organizer can choose "meetup or community call" and/or "media upload event," and then they can choose "uploading photos" as a task type
