NOTE: This is an idea for what may be worked on during the 3-week timeboxed period that is reserved for a design exploration this quarter. However, no final decision will be made until after Wikimania.
**Design exploration request: **Provide design examples (ideally, with a few versions for how it could work) 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 timebound (such as a WikiProject, a call for collaboration on a wiki around a topic, etc). To do this, users may need to create their activity/collaboration in a different namespace and enter different information. There may also be a different user right than the event organizer right (or maybe not).
**Background:** The Event Registration tool was built as a way for event organizers to manage registration, demographics information, messaging of participants and other features associated with events. We have learned that the tool is useful for a variety of use cases, such as many different event types (editathons, hackathons, meetups, community calls). 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 has led us to wonder: Could Event Registration help with other forms of collaborative activity on the wikis, such as WikiProjects or general collaborations when people are engaged with specific topics/workflows together?
For these reasons, we would like to explore what an experience could look and feel like if we were to generalize Event Registration. 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 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.
**Problems we are trying to solve:**
* There is no standard way to create spaces for collaborative work on the wikis
* There is no standard way to collect participant usernames for collaborative efforts, which makes it hard to then gain data insights on membership
* There is no easy way to message and communicate with participants in bulk (such as a mass email)
**Some things to consider:**
* 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.
* WikiProjects are usually in the project or the WikiProject namespace.
* Other forms of collaboration don't necessarily have a namespace. Would a new one be created, such as Collaboration?
* On-wiki collaborations may or may not be timebound, so I think dates/times should probably be optional.
* 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