Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Help us improve the blog

This was a draft for a blog post that has since been posted at https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/04/help-us-improve-the-wikimedia-blog-by-taking-this-survey/

Draft post

Title: Help us improve the Wikimedia blog

In the last four years, the Wikimedia Foundation Communications team has used the Wikimedia blog to share updates and accomplishments from the Foundation, including software releases, updates to critical infrastructure and the monthly updates for all the departments. Just as significantly, we've used the blog to showcase the work done by tens of thousands of Wikimedia volunteers from all around the globe - whether it's software improvements, editathons or the distribution of financial resources. We recently surpassed 1000 posts on the blog, and hope the material we've covered has been helpful and interesting to our readers, but we have much more that we'd like to accomplish with this platform.

So far the blog has functioned as a good chronological history of the Wikimedia movement, with quite a significant focus on the Foundation. Over the last year, we've substantially expanded the coverage of the volunteers who contribute to the projects and we've showcased the great work they do, from profiles of Wikimedia Commons photographers, to interviews with editors and contributors on the many different language Wikipedias and sister projects. We've expanded multi-lingual content and we've recently presented a number of video interviews that were produced at Wikimania 2012. And we want to do so much more.

With all this new content, we're seeing significant limitations of our current blog design and functionality. The standard chronological blog format makes it hard to curate and feature articles, especially when we have many interesting posts per day. The Communications team is working with designers from several departments at the Foundation on a complete renovation of how we communicate movement successes to the world, who does it, and how we display that work. We'll be transitioning to a format that more closely resembles online magazines and we'll bring our design closer inline to some of the changes we've seen from our mobile site and editor engagement teams.

We'd like our readers to be a part of these changes and we'll announce various ways you can participate as we move forward. As a first step, we've launched a survey on how our readers use the blog and what you'd like to see from it. You can find the survey here - please fill out as many questions as you're comfortable with. With your help and suggestions, we can make sure that the redesign serves what our readers and our broader community.