User talk:Mchua/Braindumps/Volunteers portal

A lot of this looks really good. I don't know how much of this will be cleanly implementable, but the introductory mentor idea sounds like it would be really helpful. I'm less sure of the proposed project setup, although having official authentication of projects does enforce quality control. Is the 6 week trial period just to convince people that your project is worthwhile? If so, why an entire 6 weeks? --Nikki 01:17, 28 July 2007 (EDT)

6 weeks is to convince people that your project is going to move forward and last and be completed and actively worked on more than it is to make sure the idea is worthwhile - it's easy to come up with a great idea but hard to follow through with it. And since the trial projects get all the same resources (hosting space, lists, whatever) as an active project (they're just not listed as active projects), it's not like we're denying them anything they need. Plus it means people have enough time to get something really spectacular up and running before their project is announced, so the new projects announcement has a high signal to noise ratio (SNR) and can point to already-working stuff... because new contributors are more likely to join a project that's actually got something going than one that's just got a vague idea, you know? Although I will concede 6 weeks is long. Maybe we can do 4. Mchua 12:00, 28 July 2007 (EDT)

Feedback

Introduction

So far so good. We should check in with someone from the main team in terms of summarizing, for consistency.

Sign-up

We need to get together a list of communities, which may or may not end up being painful. This will probably take a long time.

Personal contact/mentorship

• Create a place for current users to sign up for this
• Maybe a way for people to sign up for new users and receive reminders? (like, "it's been 1 week since User:XYZ has joined, have you checked up on them recently?")

Tiny Tasks

Implementing the tracking system may or may not be hard, depending on who does it. I don't know much about incorporating this sort of thing into the wiki (I've seen that it can be done, I'd love to learn how, but I'm on the 'before' end and not the 'after'). Also, this sounds organization heavy. Finding ongoing tasks to jump start the database will take a while, although it should go quickly if current wiki users are notified and encouraged to add in their tasks/projects.

Contribution Communities

A really fun part; building up a bunch of communities to the point of being able to take in newbies, train them some, and get them going. Should tie in closely with the problems under Sign-up.

Starting your own project

Shouldn't be that hard once we agree on a system (where new projects should go, for example) and find people to regularly review projects. Coding end might be a little tricky for me, but this has already been implemented with the SoCon setup.

Translation guide

This is a good idea. If people use it, this will be a great resource.

--Nikki 14:32, 3 August 2007 (EDT)

More feedback

Re (1), Introduction, yes, definitely. To write an email to friends saying "come help out", I should have simply been able to cut and paste a couple of paragraphs from the wiki, instead of having to write my own intro.

Re (2), Sign up, note that many people may start contributing before they sign up. My fuzzy impression is a large portion of Wikipedia contributions are still made anonymously. And even people who might eventually sign up, may initially start with small simple edits. And encounter the slippery slope of incremental commitment. We want to make that slope slippery and non-scary. Think how disastrous a "you must create an account and user page before you can edit" policy would be. Basically, we want to try to flatten anything which looks like it might possibly sometimes be a barrier to entry to someone.

Re (3), Mentoring and community followup, great ideas.

Re (4), tiny tasks, note that this can be much more difficult than it might seem. The overhead of maintaining such a the list, and of coordinating with potential contributors, can be quite large. I've tried, and failed, to create one of these. One might need a person for whom maintaining the list is "their thing".

Hmm, I wonder if one could create something low overhead which might be similar. Eg, might wp support people saying on their User page {{I wish|I knew whether wikipedia had a way of collecting text from many instances of a template into a single page}}, had have it show up in a common place. With datastamps and backlinks. Or something.

Re (6), projects... there are a couple of issues.

(which I'll elaborate on in a moment)