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 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. 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.
**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 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 create a positive experience for my participants and so that I can more easily reach the goals of my activities.
**Problems we are trying to solve:**
For contributorsSummary: There is a lot of collaborative organizing that is happening 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.but it is a complex, For example:
* There is often a subpar onboarding experiencemanual process for organizers to create these activities, in which people do not always know what to do:
** There is no standard way to join spaces as a member
** There is often no 'welcome' message or structured onboarding after someone joins an activity
** It if often hard to understand the expectations/group norms as a newcomer to an activity
** It is often hard to find how to start/what to do as a newcomer to an activity
* Communicationso we believe this makes it harder for organizers reach their goals. Also, there may be other people who are not starting up collaborations because it is just too hard to get started.
For organizers of collaborative activities on the wikis, it is hard to create & manage these activities. For example:
** It* There is often hno standard to know how to connect and communicate with other membersway to create spaces for collaborative work
* Impact tracking* There is no standard way to collect participant usernames
** It is often hard t* There is no no understand the impact of the activity and how joining in the activity can helpiversally accessible way to communicate with participants in bulk
For organizers of collaborative activitiecontributors on the wikis, it is hard to create & manage these activitiesoften 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:
* There is no standard way* It can be hard to create spaces forfind out about collaborative work on the wikisactivities
* There is no standard way to collect participant usernames for collaborative efforts,* Onboarding can be confusing; what do I do? which makes it hard to then gain data insHow do I know that I am doing the rights on membership thing?
* There is no easy way to message and communicate with participants in bulk (such as a mass email) 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 may be impactfulare largely invisible to us, but they're largely invisible outside ofso we do understand the core group of those involved in them.ir 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:**
* 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
* A question to consider and explore: 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? Would we just need something that is totally different from Event Registration?