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Learning and Evaluation/Archive/Boiler room/Portal plan

< Learning and Evaluation | Archive | Boiler room

This page is for planning the design of the Evaluation Portal that will be maintained by the Program Evaluation & Design (Programs) and the Learning & Evaluation (Grantmaking) teams in the Wikimedia Foundation. The evaluation portal will contain resources that help Wikimedia movement entities (Chapters, user groups, and individuals) pursue mission-aligned activities successfully and measure the impact of those activities effectively.

We're using this page to specify the information architecture and functional requirements for the project space itself.


Nomenclature

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(TL;DR most of this is basic, but including lots of terms for thoroughness)

  • Landing page. The page people land on! The top-level in the navigation hierarchy; links to the pages in the next level. Generally hosts very little longform content of its own.
  • Content page. One of the reader-facing pages of the Evaluation Portal (e.g. "Printing press", Library/Learning_patterns", "Parlor/Introductions").
  • Learning resource. A page that presents information related to evaluation in a consistent format, such as a learning module or design pattern.
    • Learning module. A step-by-step, multi-page instruction resource. (example)
    • Learning pattern. A single-page design pattern that offers an actionable solution to a well-defined problem. (example)
    • Case study. A longer report or post-hoc analysis of an event, project or program. (example)
  • Call to action. A widget or message (such as a button or "see more…" link) that encourages someone to take an action, such as navigating to another page to view something, or leaving a comment.

Basics

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This portal will be used by a diverse set of participants with a diverse set of needs. The content the portal provides reflects that diversity. Unlike other interactive project spaces like the Teahouse and IdeaLab, which are focused on particular tasks, we are inviting people to participate in and through the portal in quite a few different ways: people can ask and answer questions on the Questions page, create a profile on the People page, make an announcement in the Press room, create a Learning Pattern, join social media or IRC groups, write a blog post, and of course... post on the talk page.

But most people will just want to read the information resources we've created. So making it easy for people to find the right resources is important. We can use several different approaches to make stuff easier to find:

  • good global navigation menus.
  • no more than three levels of hierarchy before you get to a resource page.
  • standardizing the format of resource pages as much as possible. A standard format makes the documents more readable, by both people and bots. It also gives the impression that this is a curated collection of resources, not just a jumble.
  • surfacing relevant content through galleries, feeds and guides.
  • keeping non-resource pages as short as possible, so that people don't have to scroll a lot and read through lots of text for important links.
  • encouraging people to ask questions.

Sitemap

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The pages in the evaluation portal. Does not include pages for learning resources (such as individual case studies, learning patterns or learning modules), which may exist outside the Programs namespace entirely.

 
Draft sitemap for meta.wikimedia.org/Programs:Portal

Primary pages

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Detailed descriptions of the main content pages of the Evaluation portal, with a brief rationale for each page.

Programs:Evaluation portal

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The landing page for the whole site. The place we expect most people to visit first.

Content
  • primary navigation, with major links (maybe: About - Library - Machine shop - Parlor - People - Press)
  • brief summary of the goals and scope of the Evaluation portal (a few sentences at most).
  • One (or two?) galleries that feature dynamic profiles of learning resources and people. Similar to the galleries on the IdeaLab.
  • Activity feed that shows a variety of recent events (resources recently added, people who joined, etc.)
  • Calls to action, in the form of mid-length (2 sentences and a picture?) static profiles that advertise and link to the first-level subpages of the portal: Parlor, Library, Press, About, and Machine Shop.
Considerations
  • We don't expect people to linger, so we don't need a lot of extraneous text beyond what's in the profiles.
  • the 'about' Call to Action could be visually separated from the other four, since that page presents a different kind of information. Maybe a short sentence is all that's needed "Find out about Program Evaluation & Design".
  • the gallery and activity feed should be near the top, above the fold.

Programs_talk:Evaluation portal

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This is the primary talk page for the whole portal, and is available behind the 'Discussion' tab on the landing page.

Content
  • General discussion forum, so minimal formatting. Maybe a banner at the top advertising the Q&A forum to people who want to ask questions?
Considerations
  • We probably don't have to advertise this page; Wikipedians know to look for it. All other talk pages will be redirected to this one, to keep discussions centralized.

/About

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This page offers a simple summary of the Portal and its purpose.

Content
  • Paragraph explaining how the Portal came to be, what it's for, and the teams that run it.
  • Links to the Program Evaluation and Learning & Evaluation spaces on Meta, maybe to the Grantmaking & Programs section on Foundation wiki.
  • Prominent Call to Action to browse the Frequently Asked Questions
Considerations
  • I prefer to make the FAQ a separate subpage (see below) and then transclude it onto this page. I prefer to keep different kinds of content on separate pages. But we could also just make the FAQ part of the /About page itself.
  • Although this page will talk about the two teams that are running the portal, I don't think it makes sense to advertise individual team members or put contact information here. We should direct people to ask questions in public (the Q&A board, the talk page). The team members will have profiles on Parlor/People, just like everyone else. Contact info, if needed, could be put in the /Press page.

/About/FAQ

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Frequently asked questions about evaluation, the role of PED or L&E, etc.

Content
  • To start with, will contain whatever we anticipate people will ask.
  • Eventually, we can add in questions and answers directly from the Q&A board, if people seem to be asking the same question over and over in that forum.
Considerations
  • We expect this list to grow, which is one of the reasons it might be better to have it on its own dedicated page to begin with.
  • Should this be linked to directly from the landing page? Or in the global navigation?

/Press

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The printing press, a news and communication hub.

Content
  • News bites. A manually curated list of recent/upcoming events. Unlike the activity feed, these items can have longer summaries.
  • Perhaps: a simple call to action encouraging other stakeholders to add their own news bites (for instance, a chapter could advertise an upcoming workshop here).
  • Links to communication channels. Examples: WMF blog, Facebook group, IRC channel, external event calendar (an open google calendar?).
  • Call to action to write a blog post about a relevant activity or experience.
  • Contact info for media-related requests, like you would find on a "Press" or "Media" page of a normal website. Email or User talkpage for contact person.
Considerations
  • If we have a call to action encouraging people to write a blog post, we should link to instructions on how to write a post for the WMF blog, and who to contact.
  • If we link to the blog itself, would be useful to link directly to a page that displays a list of all previous posts that deal with PE&D (improves findability).

/Parlor

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A kind of secondary landing page, which directs people to our two primary community pages:/Parlor/People and /Parlor/Questions.

Content
  • Short summary (1-2 sentences) about what the parlor is, and what you will find there.
  • Two galleries: one for recent questions, one for profiles of recently-created (or recently active) people. Similar to the Teahouse landing page.
  • Calls to action for each gallery: "create a profile" and "ask a question".
Considerations
  • none, yet

/Parlor/Introductions

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The profile page, where people can introduce themselves and talk about their role or interest in PE&D.

Content
  • A guide containing user profiles, sorted for recent activity by GrantsBot.
  • A prominent call to action to create a profile, which triggers a simple profile-creation workflow similar to the one on the Teahouse and IdeaLab.
Considerations
  • We need to decide what kind of information we want to include in these profiles. Rather than asking people for their general interests or biographical information, could be useful to ask them to list skills, affiliations, etc. Could even encourage people to advertise events they have led, projects they have participated, or resources they have contributed to (like patterns, or project reports) in their profile.

/Parlor/Questions

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A Q&A board for all things Evaluationary!

Content
  • Questions. And (hopefully) answers.
  • Call to action: "Ask a question."
  • Short encouraging statement letting people know they can ask any sort of question here, and anyone can answer it.
  • Prominent link to FAQ, in addition to the one that may be present in the global nav.
Considerations
  • The Teahouse Gadget would be fine here. It surfaces recent questions, and reduces barriers to participation for more peripheral movement partners--which is important since this is meant to be an inclusive space, after all. People who don't want to use it can edit directly, or post to the main portal talk page instead.
  • We'll eventually want an archiving bot. Not sure if there's one active on Meta already?
  • We'll want to encourage people who respond to link to the questioner's talk page in their response, which triggers a Notification for the user, letting them know someone has responded.

/Library

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The main hub for our various learning resources related to evaluation.

Content
  • Short explanation of the types of resources we offer.
  • Guides for each of our various types of learning resources that we can make profiles for. Currently I believe we can do this for Learning Patterns and Learning Modules. In the future, we could do it for Case Studies too. Each guide is a list of profiles generated from the individual resource pages. Similar to the way the IdeaLab Ideas page contains several different guides for different classes of idea (New, IEG Draft, Participants wanted).
  • Prominent link to the Machine shop, which will also display information about learning resources that are related to our tools.
  • Call to action to create a new learning resource (Pattern?)
  • List of links to other learning resources, like presentations, glossary, externally-created resources or to a /Resources subpage that hosts such a list of links.
Considerations
  • We want to keep this page from becoming a forest of links!
  • There will likely need to be subpages of this page that describe each type of learning resource in detail. We probably shouldn't try to host that content directly on this page, because that would likely make the page much longer than it should be.
  • There won't be a large number of Learning Patterns or Learning Modules available at the beginning, but that's okay. The trick is designing the page so that it is useful with a little content, but scales well to host a lot more content in the future.

/Library/Learning_modules

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Contains the guide of all existing learning modules (which is transcluded onto /Library) as well as basic information about learning modules.

/Library/Learning_patterns

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Contains the guide of all existing learning patterns (which is transcluded onto /Library) as well as basic information about learning patterns.

/Shop

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The Machine shop is kind of a specialized Library page, focused on the evaluation tools we offer and how to use them.

Content
  • Brief summary of what these tools are for, letting people know that they are available for any stakeholders to use, not just Foundation staff.
  • Contact information for a 'technical lead' who should be contacted if someone has trouble setting up one of the tools.
  • Call to action to ask questions on the /Parlor/Questions page.
  • A brief description of each of the tools we have available.
  • Calls to action to browse the specific pages devoted to the description of each of the tools we currently offer: WikiMetrics, Community Visualization(?), and Qualtrics surveys.
Considerations
  • none, yet.

/Shop/Wikimetrics

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Contains a basic description of Wikimetrics, what it's used for, and links to the Wikimetrics learning module and other related resources.

/Shop/Qualtrics

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Contains a basic description of Qualtrics, what it's used for, and links to survey-related learning patterns and other related resources.

/Shop/Community_visualization

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Contains a basic description of the Community Visualization tool, what it's used for, and links to any modules, patterns or other related resources.


/Boiler room

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The boiler room is the equivalent of the Teahouse Hosts Lounge. It's a space for project coordination, and will have it's own dedicated talk page. It should be linked to from some other pages on the Portal for transparency, but it may be desirable to leave it out of the primary navigation.

/Boiler room/Portal plan

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This page! Project documentation.

/Boiler room/Forge

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Coordinating space for evaluation teams to develop resources, reports, etc. Mainly used by staff.

Maintenance pages

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These pages are relevant to the design and functionality of the Evaluation portal, but are not intended to be viewed or edited directly by end users.

Templates

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NEEDED TEMPLATES

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  • Template:Evaluation/Resource/Infobox: a generic infobox for all learning resources that we want to feature, other than patterns (which have a special infobox 'cause they are more dynamic). Put in a couple parameters like "summary" and "image" so that at some point in the future GrantsBot can automatically make profiles for each new resource that is created.

MYSTERY TEMPLATES

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Categories

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Primary page categories
Learning pattern categories
Template categories

NEEDED CATEGORIES

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Process pages

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Content creation workflows

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Activity surfacing

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To do

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  •   Done update all existing patterns with correct template parameters.
  • assure activity feed entries have correct parameters (Template:Evaluation/Activity/Entry]])
  •   Done add header & remove "draft" template to/from all main pages
  • summary content for all pages
  •   Done update the text in the question box so it doesn't say wikipedia
  •   Donecreate real editintro for Programs:Evaluation portal/Endorse/Editintro
  •   Done create real editintro for Programs:Evaluation_portal/Library/Learning_patterns/Editintro
  • redirect all the dang talk pages, at least the ones in the Program:namespace.
  • feature some resources other than patterns
  •   Done update pattern-creation Editintro
  •   Done add in type= param to learning pattern profiles
  •   Done hide community visualization stuff
  • make profiles for the other learning modules: Meta:Training
  •   Done Add MiszaBot to Q&A forum.
  • Add Archives box to Q&A forum. See Template:Archive_box_auto (@ User:Jmorgan (WMF) can you give this a go? I fail at it every time I do it.
  •   Done Remove test Q&A, populate with Q&A from old forum.
  •   Done Create Forge (Sarah)
  •   Done Create other resources section (Sarah)
  • Redirect shortcuts from old PE&D portal
  • FIgure out what the hell to do with the old share space content.

Heather is gonna work on this

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Heather: I didn't see that you'd taken this on, and I started to do this. Feel free to change everything I did. I'll keep my hands off for now :) Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 01:02, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Post launch

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  • Check out questions and ideas in the boiler room talk page
  • Have both teams add to the FAQ
  • Make it possible for people to suggest categories?
  • badges/stickers to signify endorsements, translations, quality (as per AFT)
  • sublists of patterns by category (either in category trees, or transcluded subpages)
  • Make it more obvious (in the edit window perhaps) that the talk page in the portal space is for the portal itself not to talk about evaluation. Take that to the Parlor.
  • Design an invitation for talk pages to invite portal visitors to create profiles. SarahStierch (talk) 19:52, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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