User:Philippe (WMF)/VisualEditor change management

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This page is currently a draft.

More information pertaining to this may be available on the talk page. Community members are welcome to comment and give suggestions on the talk page, please - I'll follow it as closely as I can given time constraints, but this is very much a document that I'm authoring and will accordingly take responsibility for. I would ~love~ community suggestions as I do that, but can't promise that this will be a consensus product. Philippe (WMF) (talk) 11:09, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Overview

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The change management strategy itself has three major goals:

  1. It will help prevent community rejection of the tool through three mechanisms:
    1. Escalation paths in critical languages;
    2. Engagement in native languages, as much as possible; and
    3. Communications - Regular and frequent, appropriate for the level of engagement.
  2. It will create a repeatable infrastructure for future deployments with a focus on reusability:
    1. Reusability - Community Liaisons (CLs) and Community Advocates (CAs) will be capturing usernames of consistently helpful people and encouraging them to sign up for the Wikitech-ambassadors list and the translators list
  3. It will augment existing community resources with staff resources as needed, but always respect the role of the community while recognizing that, sometimes, the community needs to be prodded to change.

This strategy will overlay on top of existing plans and deployment dates (pre-set) within Engineering. It goes without saying that a critical success factor here is the ability of James F. and Philippe to work closely together on this project. As a result, Philippe will be reporting to James F. In addition, given tight timetables and the need for flexible and efficient execution, Philippe must oversee and manage our other community-facing team members assigned to this project through a dotted reporting relationship.

It’s important to say that - while I strongly believe that this strategy will achieve those three goals, it’s not a “slam-dunk”. No program of this size and nature is without risk. Significant risk factors include a delay in starting; insufficient resourcing, time spent on internal politics because of hazy reporting structure, and outside influences. However, I believe that this strategy, if faithfully executed, will have the best chance of delivering the success factors.

Engagement levels:

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Level 1: Light engagement

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Characteristics of a light engagement include wiki-tech ambassadors who may occasionally drop by, regular bot-delivered notes, and a local feedback page which is routinely scraped by a bot to gather feedback which may or may not be quickly answered on that page. We will track and gather the names of those who step up to help out with these wikis, for future project use.

Level 2: Medium engagement

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Characteristics of a medium engagement include a volunteer who commits to an "above and beyond" effort in supporting the deployment, occasional check-ins from senior staff to users (with frequent check-ins between the volunteer language advocate and senior staff), and a local feedback page where the volunteer language advocate will attempt to answer questions in native language, escalating where she is uncertain of the answer. Wikis in this category are designated as “high priority” wikis for us, and the category will be locked down prior to engagement, so as to prevent us adding more languages to this group, and to also assure that they are all roughly in the same “place” in the socialization plan (without having one start three weeks later than others because we just had a volunteer present themselves, etc). We will track and gather the names of those who step up to help out with these wikis, for future project use.

Level 3: Full engagement

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Characteristics of a full engagement include a staff member assigned to watch the wiki and serve as an information conduit, frequent check-ins from staff to users, and a local feedback page where feedback left is synthesized and responded to fairly rapidly. We will track and gather the names of those who step up to help out with these wikis, for future project use. Tentative list of full engagement wikis (with responsible staff member):

  • English (Oliver, Maggie)
  • German (Jan)
  • Spanish (Jan)
  • French (Guillaume)
  • Italian (Erica)

Staff roles and responsibilities

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Function Assigned Reporting to Description
Program manager James F Howie / Erik ultimate go/no-go authority, overall responsibility for the project
Director, Community Advocacy Philippe James / Geoff owns internal community communications strategy, coordinates with Communications team, advises James F, manages team
Sr Community Advocate Maggie Philippe owns tactical day-to-day operations execution
Language Community Advocates Jan, Guillaume, Oliver Philippe (or, if non-LCA, to their own manager with a dotted line to Philippe) own the transactional work of preparing their assigned wikis for deployment with a deep engagement, including establishing and monitoring feedback loops
Community Liaisons Erica, Keegan, Sherry, Patrick James / Howie, with a dotted line to Philippe

own the transactional work of operating broad focused communications methods, such as EdwardsBot, assuring for watchlist notices and centralnotice, etc. They will not be deployed to particular wikis, but will monitor large numbers of them.

Volunteer Language Community Advocates TBD Philippe

the principal point of contact for their wikis, and will have agreed to an "above and beyond" type of role.

Engineering Community Management Sumana RobLa / Messages to be signed off on by Philippe Work with the CLs to see that they have access to the people and tools needed; management of wikitech-ambassadors communications (after getting “go” from Philippe)

Communications and Change Strategy

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The communication and change strategy will focus on two things:

  • Broadcasting (owned primarily by CLs, with CA support)- using tools such as EdwardsBot, watchlist notice, centralnotice, sitenotice, talk page messages to influential community members, concise and well written and translated FAQs and announcements, IRC chats. Documentation will be published in at least English and German, but preferably as many languages as possible (a practical compromise may be our tier 3 languages - English, German, Spanish, and French). The structure of the documents will lend itself toward ease of translation and prioritisation (e.g., first paragraph always a summary paragraph) and will use existing tools as much as possible, supplemented and augmented by professional translation resources where necessary for reasons of speed or quality.
  • Receiving (owned jointly by CAs and CLs) - create feedback loops through defined locations to leave feedback, appropriate service level/escalation time periods, Google Translate use, summaries of findings from statistical data, etc, Q&A sessions, communications with chapters.

Timeline and communication products

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Key: B = Blog post / WL = Watchlist notice / CN = Centralnotice / VP = Village Pump / EM = email / MW = mediawiki.org

Date Task Method Target Assigned to Status
13 May Send update to WMF staff as to the change management and structure of VE deploy EM WMF staff Philippe   Done
3 June Post announcement about general socialization, discuss A/B test scheduled for weeks of 10 - 24 June. B, WL Enwiki, global Guillaume (draft & publication), Philippe & James (review)   Done [1] [2]
10 June Draft an FAQ for VisualEditor MW reference CLs & CAs (add questions), Guillaume (draft, organize, maintain), Philippe & James (review)   Done
17 June Reach out to translators to start translating the FAQ MW reference Guillaume   Done
18 June
23 June
Begin A/B Testing on En Wikipedia (50% of new editors receive VE as default).
25 June Send update to WMF staff as to the deploy of VE and schedule EM WMF staff Philippe, James
26 June Publish banners & blog post for 1 July deployment to enwiki B, CN Enwiki, global Guillaume (draft & publication), Philippe & James (review)
28 June Prepare banners, WL snippet & VP message for phase 2 wikis VP, CN, WL de / es / fr / ru / jp / pt / nl / it / he Guillaume (draft & publication), Philippe & James (review)
30 June Go / No-go decision.
1 July Deployment of the VisualEditor to enwiki, as the default, for all logged-in users.
1 July Begin translations of comms materials for deployment to phase 2 wikis VP, CN, WL de / es / fr / ru / jp / pt / nl / it / he CLs and CAs
1 July Prepare banners, WL snippet & VP message for phase 3 wikis VP, CN, WL all others Guillaume (draft & publication), Philippe & James (review)
7 July
15 July
Deployment of the VisualEditor to enwiki, as the default, for anonymous and logged-in users
7 July
15 July
Deploy message to de / es / fr / ru / jp / pt / nl / it / he language editions VP, CN, WL de / es / fr / ru / jp / pt / nl / it / he CLs & CAs (VP & WL); ? (CN)
7 July
15 July
Begin translations of comms materials for deployment to phase 3 wikis VP, CN, WL all others Wikimedia translators
15 July
22 July
Deployment of the VisualEditor to first-tier, non-enwiki wikis - list still to be determined, but definitely de, fr and itwiki, for all users
15 July
22 July
Deploy message to final deployment group VP, CN, WL all others missing
15 July
22 July
Prepare blog post celebrating the deployment to all WPs. VP, CN, WL all others Guillaume (draft & publication), Philippe & James (review)
22 July
29 July
Begin translation for blog post celebrating the deployment to all WPs. B global Guillaume (translate setup), CLs, CAs & Wikimedia translators
29 July Deployment of the VisualEditor to all other wikipedias, as the default, for all users, minus those wikis (such as zhwiki) where the VisualEditor definitively does not work
29 July Publish blog post celebrating the deployment to all WPs. B global Guillaume (publication)

CentralNotice banners

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This table is for coordination purposes among the team. If you edit something other than the text, please update the actual CentralNotice calendar as well.
Dates Wikis Users Preview CN campaign CN template ve-coming-soon
ve-coming-soon-all
ve-is-there
ve-is-there-all
call-to-action call-to-action-url Notes
June 26–July 1 en.wikipedia logged-in VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all logged-in users. Learn more, help out and give feedback. VisualEditor deployment phase1 VisualEditor deployment VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all logged-in users. VisualEditor is now enabled for all logged-in users. Learn more, help out and give feedback. //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor
July 1–6 en.wikipedia logged-in VisualEditor is now enabled for all logged-in users. Learn more, help out and give feedback.
July 15–29 de, es, fr, he, it, nl, ja, pl, ru, sv Wikipedia logged-in VisualEditor will soon be available for all users. Learn more, help out and give feedback. VisualEditor deployment phase2 VisualEditor will soon be available for all users. VisualEditor is now available for all users. Learn more, help out and give feedback. //www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEditor/Portal Link to be localized in translations if the page exists on local wikis. Default link goes to mw.o.
July 29–31 de, es, fr, he, it, nl, ja, pl, ru, sv Wikipedia logged-in VisualEditor is now available for all users. Learn more, help out and give feedback.
August (date TBD) phase3 wikipedia wikis logged-in VisualEditor will soon be available for all users. Learn more, help out and give feedback. VisualEditor deployment phase2 VisualEditor will soon be available for all users. VisualEditor is now available for all users. Learn more, help out and give feedback. //www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEditor/Portal Link to be localized in translations if the page exists on local wikis. Default link goes to mw.o.
August (date TBD) phase3 wikipedia wikis logged-in VisualEditor is now available for all users. Learn more, help out and give feedback.