Movement Strategy Forum community review

(If you prefer, you can read this text on Meta-Wiki, and comment there.)

The Movement Strategy and Governance team invites everyone to review this proposal for a new Movement Strategy Forum. The goal is to improve community collaboration on a multilingual platform that is welcoming and easy to use.

This review is open between May 24 and July 24. A functional forum is available for testing and discussion. If the community feedback is positive, the Forum will launch in August 2022 before Wikimania. If not, we will follow the feedback received, changing the proposal or closing it.

If you prefer to test first and read later, join the MS Forum with your Wikimedia login now!

Why a Movement Strategy Forum

The implementation of the Movement Strategy (MS) requires collaboration across communities, projects, and languages. Hundreds of people must be able to learn from each other, work together, and have fun together. Newcomers should enjoy their MS involvement as much as oldtimers. Casual contributors should find opportunities to take part. Dedicated contributors should find the tools they need to get things done.

Currently, we lack the infrastructure to solve these needs. Meta-Wiki and Telegram are good for documentation and chat, but this is not enough. Discussions are scattered. Collaboration happens within isolated groups. People not fluent in English are at a clear disadvantage. Newcomers feel lost. This needs to change.

Main features

The Movement Strategy Forum is based on Discourse, a powerful open-source platform for community discussions. You can expect all the features of web forums and the ease of use of social media. These features are especially relevant for the problems we want to solve:

  • Anyone can join with their Wikimedia account. No registration is required.
  • Multilingual conversations are possible thanks to automatic translation in more than 100 languages.
  • Newcomers are welcomed with an interactive tutorial and badges for achievements.
  • Notifications can be adjusted to follow or mute topics, categories, and tags.
  • Conversations can use easy text formatting, expanded links, images, and emojis.
  • Complex conversations can be summarized by their participants, also split or merged.
  • Posts can be flagged anonymously for moderation. Community moderators ensure that the Universal Code of Conduct is observed.
  • All features are available on mobile and desktop browsers.

This is not an exhaustive list. If you are missing any feature, you can propose and upvote requests. If changes are easy to implement (e.g. texts, processes, settings…) we will make them as we go.

Community review questions

Here are questions to start the conversation. Anyone can share their opinions in the forum or on Meta. Everyone can participate in their preferred language. Anyone can ask further questions.

Next steps

The goal of the community review is to build consensus for a decision by 24 July 2022.

Summaries of the discussions are shared and updated as the review proceeds. Anyone can contribute to these summaries with feedback and edits. A report of the review including the decision will be drafted openly.

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@Qgil-WMF ; I fully support full implementation of Discourse, as typified at this forum, and full acceptance of it as a well-built and valuable resource for the community. is it valid and appropriate for me to express my reply here on this thread, to express this? please feel free to let me know. thanks!

Hakika nayi matukar farin ciki da wannan tsari, kuma ina da tabbacin zai taimaka sosai a bangaren Hausa, domin za’a samu cigaba da kara fahimta a tsakanin masu bibiyar shafin Hausa da kuma duk masu ma’amulla da Hausa, hakan Kuma zai taimakawa shugabannin mu sosoai yadda ya dace. @Yusuf_Sa_adu

June 24! This #forum-community-review started on May 24, and this forum is just one month old now.

The community review ends on July 24. After these weeks of first impressions and exploration, it starts to be the time to converge and agree on the next steps.

I would like to see an active response to this survey, which will support retention of this highly-valuable forum, as a community resource.

The community review period concludes this Sunday, and we will start drafting the report on Monday.

this sounds highly important. let’s stay proactive on this.

hi @Qgil-WMF . just wanted to ask, when you get a chance, could you please let us know if there are any updates, in regards to the Community Review, as referenced above? thanks.

We have the final report – we’re just trying to figure out how best to share it on here that would make the most sense, but the goal is to have it up by the end of this week.

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Finally! I invite you to read the Community Review Report for a summary of activities and results from the 2 months of community review.

We continue to welcome feedback and suggestions to improve the MS Forum, even if the review period is closed.

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