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Campaigns/Foundation Product Team

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Community Content Campaigns

The Campaigns product team of the Wikimedia Foundation aims to improve the experience of Wikimedia campaigns. The team was formed in 2021, as part of the Product department. We focus on the needs of campaign and event organizers and participants. We plan to incrementally build and improve features in the campaigns ecosystem over time.

Projects

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The team has built various features for the CampaignEvents extension, includingː

  • Event registration: We have created an on-wiki tool that lets organizers add a 'Register' button to their event page. The event registration solution also includes many other features, such as: the option for participants to register privately, automatic confirmation emails after registration, integration with the Programs & Events Dashboard, and more.
  • Collaboration List: The Collaboration List is a global, automated list of events on the wikis, and it is also a list of WikiProjects on a given local wiki. Organizers don’t need to do any extra work for their event or WikiProject to appear on the Collaboration List. As long as they use Event Registration for their event, their event will appear in the Collaboration List. Meanwhile, as long as their WikiProject has a Wikidata item, the WikiProject will be included in the Collaboration List. The Collaboration List also includes filters, so users can easily search for specific types of events.
  • Event discovery (invitation lists): The event discovery project aims to create or improve tool(s) that make it easier for editors to learn about campaign events on the wikis. For this project, we are developing an Invitation List tool, which allows organizers to generate a list of contributors who they may want to invite to their events.

We plan to start with these projects, and see what we learn from working with Organizers.

If you want to be updated on our roadmap and technical developments please join our update subscription below.

Follow our work

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Telegram group

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You can join the Event Organizer group on Telegram, which is a multilingual chat group for organizers of events in the Wikimedia movement. We post announcements and updates about our team's work in the Telegram group, and we also take in feedback, such as feature requests and bug reports. Organizers are encouraged to share their updates, tools, and ideas in the group too.

Newsletter

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We previously sent regular newsletter updates via MassMessage, however we have more recently been sharing our updates via Telegram (see above). However, we may revive the newsletter in the future, so people should still feel free to still sign upǃ

Previous updates:

If you would like to subscribe for these updates to be sent to your user page, please subscribe here!

Office Hours

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Product team: Background

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Starting July 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation has a Campaigns product team focused on the needs of campaign organizers and participants. The Campaign product team will be addressing Organizer needs through software development that will help Wikimedia communities invite new participants to activities and programs that address key knowledge gaps through the Movement Strategy Topics for impact recommendation.

Our objective is to build software to help campaign and event organizers so that they can effectively engage participants as successful editors and retain them as contributors on Wikimedia projects. Our software will be focused on building tools that help organizers bring participants from discovery and registration of events through event participation to invitation to future activities in the movement.

We know that Movement Organizers need to be able to invite, coordinate and support new and diverse editors who join the Wikimedia Movement and fill knowledge gaps on the platforms (see Movement Organizers Research). For most of Wikimedia’s history, campaigns and editing events on platforms like Wikipedia or Commons have relied on a complex mix of social systems and volunteer or affiliate maintained tools that are not fully integrated into the MediaWiki software. However, these tooling solutions don’t always scale or address needs in new and emerging contexts, creating barriers for new and experienced organizers, especially as the movement focuses on Knowledge Equity.

The product team collaborates with community investments in the Wikimedia Foundation through grant making, capacity development and partnerships. To understand the complex processes involved in organizing campaigns, we recommend the organizer workflow document. To support these other needs we work with the Campaigns program team.

People

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Team plans & vision

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As a team, our vision is to build robust, long-term support for Wikimedia campaign events. To make this possible, we plan to create a Campaign Events platform, which we call the Event Center. This platform will have an organizer and participant side. The organizer side will provide the tools and resources that organizers need to create and manage impactful campaign events. The participant side will provide the guidance and support that participants need to meaningfully engage with Wikimedia campaigns. Note that the details of this platform are still being determined.

Overall, this platform will be:

  • Modular: This means that features can be separated and recombined, based on the special needs of a wiki or community.
  • Extensible: This means that features can be added over time by our team, other teams, or volunteer developers.

At first, we’ll be focused on building the organizer side of the platform, which we are currently calling the “Organizer Center” (note: this name may change, along with all feature names we mention at this stage). The first tool in the Organizer Center will be a registration configuration solution. Over time, we plan to address the top campaign event requests (as detailed in the image below). We determined this list of requests by conducting interviews with 50+ organizers across the movement, along with digging into existing research and studies.

Regarding the participant side of the platform, we recognize its tremendous importance. For this reason, we also plan to focus on it later on, after we have built some of the foundational infrastructure for the organizer side.

 
Top requests to improve Wikimedia campaigns, based on feedback from campaign organizers

We believe that registration is a solid first building block for this platform. By working on it first, we’ll be in a strong position to work on subsequent projects. We don’t yet know the order in which we will tackle the other requests, but we have provided this mapping (see below) to demonstrate some potential paths we can take.

 
Organizer center and registration functionality as building blocks for future potential campaigns work

We will keep this page updated as our thought process on our team plans and strategy develops. In the meantime, you can follow our project page or subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated.

Evidence

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The movement has long requested better tools for organizers. WMF has worked on fixes for distinct steps in the reporting and implementation process for events and campaigns (such as improving Central Notice for advertising events or Community Tech Wishlist features), or key requirement around reporting and other process steps (i.e. metrics tools). However, WMF has not systematically invested in the the whole experience of organizers and participants at events.

We are using previous research on Organizers and Programs to help our team understand needs. Major research consulted includes:

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Has there been previous investment in a tool or software that supported campaigns? Please connect it here:

Subpages

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Subpages of Foundation Product Team
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