Design exploration request: Provide design examples and a report/summary of learnings on how we could generalize Event Registration so that it can be used for on-wiki collaborations that are not necessarily time-bound. Design examples should show a few versions of how this could work, so we can share with community members & get feedback. Examples of such collaborations include WikiProjects, a weekly collaboration on a topic, etc. The goal is that organizers of many types of collaboration can be able to use our tools in the future. However, any risks and/or concerns with such a vision and approach should also be shared in the course of this exploration.

Time period: This is a time-boxed exploration, due on Sept 2, 2024.

What will we do with the design exploration?: Once complete, we will share these design concepts with organizers of on-wiki collaborations. We will see what feedback they have. Then, when Gregory is back from parental leave (before going back on leave), we will share what we learned and then see if he continues/expands these designs or if we pivot to something else. In total, this means that this design exploration will help us determine if we want to proceed to generalize event registration to work for other use cases, namely on-wiki collaboration.

Background: The Event Registration tool was originally built as a way for campaign event organizers to manage events, especially for in-person events and smaller to medium-sized online events. We have learned that the tool is useful for a variety of use cases, such as many different event types (edit-a-thons, hackathons, meetups, community calls), and we have seen it used for increasingly complex events (such as multilingual events, larger online events, etc). This has led us to wonder: What other use cases could be accommodated if we expanded or changed some elements of the tool?

Meanwhile, we have begun thinking about how the larger work of the Campaigns team can help contributors on the wikis connect with one another, so it is easier for contributors to find a sense of belonging and work on tasks together on the wiki. This is because we believe that many contributor are happier and more productive when they have communities and groups that they can rely on and feel like they are a part of.

This has led us to wonder: Could Event Registration help with other forms of collaborative activity on the wikis? This way, we could make it easier for people to come together with other like-minded contributors, so they can work on projects together. Meanwhile, our other organizer tools (Event List and Invitation Lists) either already work for collaborations beyond events (such as Invitation Lists) or we are in the process of expanding their focus (such as transforming the Event List into a Community List).

Overall, we would like to explore what an experience could look and feel like if we were to generalize Event Registration for on-wiki collaboration. We want to know what ideas come up and what concerns/issues may arise as well. This can help us think through if such a project could be worth considering for the team in the future, and it could help us see what questions and issues we would need to confront and think through early on.

User story:

As an organizer, I want to be able to easily create and manage collaborative activities on the wikis, so that I can more easily reach the goals of my activities.

As a participant, I am excited about joining a collaborative activities because they offer a positive community experience and make it easy to have an impact

Problems we are trying to solve:

Summary: There is a lot of collaborative organizing that is happening on the wikis, but it is a complex, manual process for organizers to create these activities, so we believe this makes it harder for organizers reach their goals and for participants to have a fulfilling experience. Also, there may be other people who are not starting up collaborations at all because it is just too hard to get started, so we're missing out on a new generation of organizers who could help fuel further collaborative activities.

For organizers of collaborative activities on the wikis, it is hard to create & manage these activities. For example:

• There is no standard way to create spaces for collaborative work
• There is no standard way to collect participant usernames
• There is no no universally accessible way to communicate with participants in bulk
• There is no easy way to know when/how participants have done work in the scope of the activity

For contributors on the wikis, it is often hard to join a group/collaborative activity and develop a deep sense of belonging/identity within the group without substantial work on the part of the contributor. For example:

• It can be hard to find out about collaborative activities
• Onboarding can be confusing; what do I do? How do I know that I am doing the right thing?
• The impact of one's work or of the activity overall can be hard to gauge

For the Wikimedia movement overall, we have the following problems:

• Many collaborative activities are largely invisible to us, so we don't understand their impact very well
• We do not have an easy way of determining how many people are members of WikiProjects or other collaborative activities.

Some things to consider:

• What do we mean by generalize?
  • We don't want to remove the existing behavior, but rather offer support for both events and other types of collaborations. We still want to be able to support events.
  • We want to design something that works for many forms of collaborations on the wikis. This can be WikiProjects or different forms of collaboration. We should not limit the use case to specifically WikiProjects, but this should ideally also be usable by WikiProjects.
• Differences between events & other forms of collaboration
  • On-wiki collaborations may or may not be time-bound, so I think dates/times should probably be optional.
• Information that we may want to collect
  • Important information to collect from organizer may be: type of collaboration, topics, tasks
  • Important information to collect from participants may be: what are you interested in working on?, why are you joining? -> it could be a good idea to look at the questions people are asked when they join WikiProjects
• New feature requests
  • When we talked to organizers of other types of collaboration at Wikimania, we heard interest in a version of Event Registration but with an added feature for a participant to indicate what they worked on. For example, if someone registers for an activity, there can be a checkbox or drop-down that allows them to indicate if a contribution they are making is in the scope of the activity they joined. If they say yes, then the organizer and all members can easily see that such a contribution is for that activity. There can also be a way for them to indicate that a past contribution is for an activity if they forgot to initially indicate it being so (such as in the user contributions, recentchanges, etc). The flow would not need to necessarily follow this; this is just an example. The goal would be to have a light-weight way for users to say that a contribution they are making is part of a collaborative activity.
• Big questions to consider
  • If we generalize Event Registration, does it provide enough of a value for organizers and participants of other forms of on-wiki collaboration, or would they need a lot more to be built out?
  • Would there need to be new features to make such an expansion useful to organizers of on-wiki collaboration
  • Would we just need something that is totally different from Event Registration?

Design explorations
Figma