Sentiment - Different ideas have been suggested for metrics and also factors beyond metrics. There is still work to do to agree on specific goals, for the community period and beyond. There is criticism about the Forum proposal not including shared goals beforehand.
Summary (work in progress)
Factors to look at:
Attractive for newcomers.
Simple to get involved.
Community conversations continue to happen.
Linguistic and regional diversity of participants.
Diversity in type of contributors.
Originality of topics and opinions not easily found in other channels.
Creating metrics is hard. Optimally…geographic and editor type (affiliate-focused member, content editor, admin/functionary) distribution, usage of non-English and translation tools, proper notifications to smaller communities.
For me it is not all about metrics, even if metrics are important - I would consider this forum successful, if different voices than those that usually are heard in discussions onwiki show up here and if a wider range of ideas and perspective gets shared. This might be just one comment or two in languages other than English, perhaps coming from a wiki where there is no discussion in their language.
Great ideas! I have tried to list the factors mentioned in the first post, which is now editable. Does this list capture your points? What other factors should we look at?
I suggest we discuss first the factors worth considering, and then we can think about ways to measure them.
أعتقد أهم مقياس هو مقارنة عدد مشاركات المستخدمين في المنصة مقارنة بالميتا مثلا، وكذلك نسبة التفاعل مع المنشورات بينهما،
كذلك يُمكن عمل تجارب بإعلانات محددة (دعوة لإبداء الرأي، اجتماع،…) ومقارنة مدى الإستجابة (يُطرح دوما سؤال بسيط: كيف سمعت بهذا الحدث)
In my opinion, I believe this forum can be considered successful for as long as it stays relevant. If community conversations continue to happen here, then that’s the evidence that there’s a use for this. And in support to what has been said, if we get to attract voices that are different from those dominant in the other channels, then I’ll be even happier about this forum!
Onboarding better ration of non-English native contributors should suffice in my book, but maye having at least 2-3 initiatives activly using it in next 2 months would render it fully relevant beyond just automatic text translation.
I would love if WIKIMANIA or SUMMIT would adopt it as tool as it seems it is most-perfect fit for short term pre/during/post-festum use for onboarding people into highly participative exchanges.
Not really, it can mostly be achieved by administrative action (just reduce the number of WMF staff moderators) so aren’t really related to successfullness. A fixed goal (like 5 volunteer mods and 1 volunteer admin) would be a better success metric. Don’t we have something like that already, though?
Diversity of affiliation (including no affiliation) among moderators is an important goal but it shouldn’t be the only one. Gender, regional and linguistic diversity are very important as well to offset potential biases within the team, also for better coverage of time zones and social & cultural backgrounds.
It would have to demonstrate that it makes a valuable contribution to the discussion and solution of an actual pressing problem of some controversy and magnitude. One example of this would be the discussions of the revisions to the universal code of conduct - would use of the Discourse add to the ongoing discussion? Or would it just provided a ‘second consensus’, which would make coming to a real consensus harder? TomDotGov (talk) 14:14, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
The Movement Charter has been mentioned as an example (see here and here). Pressing, controversy, magnitude… it has all the potential ingredients.
There is an ongoing discussion about [DRAFT] Minimum Criteria for Hub Pilots. Probably by the end of this month, we will be able to evaluate the role of the forum in this conversation.
