Grants talk:IdeaLab/Meetup Creation Tool

Combine with WMF toolkit

At Grants:Evaluation/Library/Tracking and Reporting Toolkit, JAnstee (WMF) and EGalvez (WMF) are developing tools to track users which come to meetups. While I want all the benefits of getting the results of that toolkit, the cost of using the toolkit seems high enough to be a burden especially considering that its target user demographic is Wikimedia community builders who are highly proficient in a range of skills unrelated to grant reporting, and consider that the tools are years from being in a user-friendly interface or community friendly format.

Wikimedia community organizations have more than 10 years of precedent of using a suite of outreach strategies which are just now becoming codified at Grants:Learning patterns, and this toolkit is currently an off-wiki interface which asks coordinators to redundantly input some information collected in traditional on-wiki channels along with some new questions which compromise the social status of community organizations by pressuring them to ask robotic or inhuman questions of conference attendees in order to participate in metrics tracking.

Again, I want the results of metrics tracking, but ultimately, I wish that metrics tracking could be done in such a way that it is a part of natural Wikimedia community behavior and not an unnatural or forced intervention that specialized volunteers are pressured to execute. I wish that there were some way to design a meetup creation tool which automatically sorted cohorts of participants such that metrics, such as number of new user signups, level of engagement, quality of edits, and impact of contributions (like by counting the number of pageviews in the articles developed), could be automatically calculated based on or build in alignment with the well-established traditional of organization around Wikimedia meetup pages. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:56, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Testing area

Want to hold a Wiki Loves Pride event of your own?

Calendar Solution!

So, what if these meetup events also showed up on a calendar? MediaWiki Calendar extensions have been historically under-supported, which is unfortunate for everyone! However, there's a new very simple plugin called Yet Another Simple Event Calendar that implements the jQuery UI calendar interface, creates the Event: namespace, and allows users to list events in the calendar by simply creating Event: articles that begin with a date formatted as YYYY/MM/DD.

Coupled with a simple "create page" button as made possible by the Inputbox extension, one can easily add new events to the calendar without any experience. One can provide the preload= parameter with a value that is a Template in order to ensure users are prompted to format the rest of the valuable calendar data as appropriate. Here's an (off-wiki) example of how that can work!

This should be complementary to the template comments above as well.

-- Mattsenate (talk)

Made a prototype of a button for a COI "Request Edit" project: en:User:Mattsenate/request_edit/contest

-- Mattsenate (talk) 23:13, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Well, if there were a calendar solution, then that could mean that the Wikimedia calendar would have the potential to be the only major open non-profit platform hosting a calendar of community events. Many allied organizations seeking community engagement, including EFF, Open Knowledge, New America Foundation's TA3M, Free Culture Foundation, Consumers International's Access to Knowledge project, Mozilla, Tor, and then all the software meetups all have problems staying in touch with each other, combining their events to reach grassroots community activists. If we first streamlined the Wikimedia meetup process then it might be the case that aligned community events could also either export the Wikimedia calendar or export their events into it, which could radically increase cross-community collaboration.

I cannot say how practical it would be to develop a Wikimedia calendar right now, but I can say that as someone who has tried to manage multiple calendars for multiple related communities, finding online software solutions is not easy in any case and more difficult when trying to use open tools.

The idea is brilliant but I never considered it just assuming that it would be impossible to implement. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:05, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

+1 interesting prospects here. What's most exciting is how simple and stable this solution is, I hope we can work with Meta to make it happen. It would be a good start for outreach. Syndication / import is an interesting question we can work on after that, which should make things even more interesting. Mattsenate (talk) 02:58, 4 June 2014 (UTC)