Sentiment: Overall agreement. Criticism is based on the idea that volunteers need to understand how Meta works.
Summary of opinions:
Positive - Yes, it can be useful to welcome and retain new volunteers, and also help people more easily get involved in Movement Strategy discussions.
Multilingual conversations and automatic translation of text-heavy discussions are great features that open opportunities for participation we have been missing.
Neutral - This forum can retain newcomers if the platform is constantly improving, diversifying its topics, and creating a social atmosphere, for instance through sharing events, frequently asked questions, reminders of activities, etc.
Negative - No, this forum will only make newcomers understand less how Meta works. In the long term, this is making newcomers abandon MediaWiki.
No. There is limited possibility that a forum-style communication platform is going to assist in editor retention, nor will telling new volunteers to learn another platform make them more likely to feel welcomed.
At least in my experience, communication platforms succeed in promoting editor retention when there is a social atmosphere, where people can make friends and discuss. Human connection helps people feel happy and welcome somewhere. Pushing new volunteers towards a dedicated Movement Strategy platform is…the exact opposite of that.
I don’t like the idea of looking at this as an editor retention thing. If you want to have consultations here, as long as there’s sufficient information given directly to local editing communities about how you don’t need to make a new account, ease of use, etc., sure. But this is not a retention tool.
أعتقد أنها فكرة جيدة للإحتفاظ بالوافدين الجدد، بشرط التحسين المستمر للمنصة وتنويع موضوعاتها، وخلق جو اجتماعي فيها، مثل مشاركة الأحداث، الأسئلة الشائعة، التذكير بالمواعيد والأحداث وضم الصور التفاعلية الخ
Sorry, I can see how the original title of this topic can be confusing out of the context of the community review and this forum. Our fault, and I have just edited the title from
Do you think this forum can be useful to welcome and retain new volunteers
to
Do you think this forum can be useful to welcome and retain new volunteers to Movement Strategy?
This forum isn’t aiming to address editor retention. This question is about how useful can this forum be at attracting newcomers to the Movement Strategy implementation process and keeping them involved contributing to it.
Ah perfect, my problem there. I think it can definitely, and also help people more easily get involved in Movement Strategy discussions. MediaWiki is unfortunately not the greatest platform for consultations, especially for new volunteers, and setting up good and long-term places on a place like Meta-Wiki is quite difficult.
I’m finding it very powerful that Nehaoua can type in his native language and I can understand him with a click of the translation button (which appears to be doing a very good job). This has never been a capability within our movement before and is a “killer feature” that opens opportunities for participation we have been missing.
For that reason alone, it makes this off-wiki platform a potential major benefit for our multilingual community. This is even more true when it comes to text-heavy discussions around the Movement Charter, or the Global Council. In fact, we know that there is fatigue around engagement for Movement Strategy, so anything to help lower the barrier to involvement is a great thing.
I would even go as far as to say it is not worth doing any work on the MC or GC without a true multilingual platform, and Discourse has the best potential in this area so far. The state of AI and machine translation has come a long way since Wikipedia’s founding 20 years ago.
No, it will only make newcomers understand less how Meta works. In the long term, this is making newcomers abandon MediaWiki. This is the worst way to make things. -Theklan (talk) 10:02, 29 May 2022 (UTC)
The first post contains a summary of the discussion so far. The top post is editable, and anyone can contribute to improving it. We will try to update it on a weekly basis in conjunction with the community review weekly reports.
More opinions are especially welcome on this topic!
It might be useful not to use the term volunteer and especially next to retain here as it is the only one of many identifiers of new contributors and also only one aspect in which mode/capacity one can act… It also deepens the fake binary of paid professionals vs. volunteers - no?
I like what WM DE is trying to do with MOVE podcast as listening to summaries and insights, but for more efforts and more forms - more (? resources) is needed.
(notice:
I may not be able to brainstorm casually in Discourse
as I already maxed out with number of replies and
had to pause for the system to let me post again…
not sure how low is the limit and is it only on ‘first day’,
but maybe it is worth checking out in default settings.)
Ah yes, there is a spam/vandalism prevention setting for the first 24 hours of an account that is set to 10 posts. Given that Wikimedia login acts as a decent (so far) spam filter, now it has been increased to 24.
Yes, it will be useful for direct contact with users. My concerns are if there will be a mobile version with a user friendly interface for easy access and navigation. Then sound notification is also useful for updates
