WMF organizational changes in the last ~12 months have meant that the WMF Research Team now consists of individuals previously part of multiple teams, all with established practices of their own (e.g., Design Research's Research Participation Program). As such, there is currently an opportunity to ensure our practices around incentivized research are aligned and consistent, in particular when it comes to surveys. In arriving at a unified approach to incentives for survey participation (amongst other research type participation), we should minimally consider industry best practices, organizational needs, participant diversity, and equity, amongst others. Included in a unified practice should be clear criteria for which, if any, survey participation activities are incentivized, and how.
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Hi @Bethany, could you help us scope this task sometime before the end of March, so we can place it in the staged column? As you do some basic scoping, you may want to consider what the general process should look like: who should be involved (and in what capacity), what steps will be involved, what the anticipated output will be, and approximate time needed to complete the task. Please also anticipate a communication component in your scoping; as we align around best practices as a unified team, how might we communicate this outward, both publicly and to other teams at the WMF? (relatedly, are there any current places of documentation that will need to be reviewed and updated as relevant? And, where will documentation of updated best practices live?) Thank you
I discussed this question with Yu-Ming and Tanja to gather their perspectives on whether we need to unify participant incentive practices for surveys across the team. We reached a consensus that large, representative sample surveys should not be incentivized, both for practical and ethical reasons. However, we agreed that smaller, user-feedback surveys can be incentivized when needed. Incentives are a useful tool for ensuring sufficient responses to asynchronous feedback requests. Surveys are often better suited for a project than an unmoderated test that would be incentivized. Offering incentives for such surveys also enable us to draw on our participant database for respondents—where we’ve promised users who sign up that they will only be contacted for incentivized research opportunities.
Our Design Research website & MediaWiki page both outline which activities are and are not incentivized, and it notes that surveys are not incentivized unless explicitly offered.
After sharing the outcome of this discussion with Debra, we agreed I should close this task.