New Editor Experiences/Workshops

We have completed a series of workshops to collaboratively decide how to apply the learnings from our research toward retaining new editors. Below is a high level outline of these workshops, and the goals associated with them, and the outcomes (in process of adding more to outcomes).

General community conversations

Broad presentation about the research and findings, description of next steps, and how to participate. We held two conversations in order to welcome people across timezones.

Who: Wikimedia Foundation staff, broad invitation, anyone welcome.

Goals:

Present findings and personas (report and personas shared in invitations)
Gather feedback, answer questions, about report, personas and findings
Open lines of communication with those interested in the new editors project
Gather examples of work already being done toward attracting and retaining new editors.

Outcomes:

Gathered feedback on specific findings
Collected some ideas
Notes from these meetings

Steeping workshop

Get to know the report and personas. Some seed questions, to inspire conversation, will be provided ahead of time: any surprises? Anything super obvious? Stuff we absolutely should do / not do, etc. (2 hours over video conference. First week in October)

Who: Wikimedia Foundation staff, new editors team

Goals:

Everyone on the team to get very familiar and conversant with the findings memo, personas and user journeys.
Discussion and Q&A about the research, findings, and the workshops to come.
Build interest and get team thinking about opportunities to support new editor retention in CZ and KO wikis

Outcomes:

Collected open questions
Collected new and old ideas
See our working board here

Whiteboard containing the work of our Steeping workshop.

Czech community conversation

Will be held at a time that works for Czech community. Will be a 2 hour conversation over video conference, or whatever works best.

Who: Czech community members who want to participate, a few Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Goals:

Present findings and personas, to gain familiarity, and continue the conversation around the research and future work.
Gather feedback, answer questions, about report, personas and findings
Learn which research findings the Czech community participants find most important to focus on for their community.
Share plans for future work for the project, gauge people's interest in being involved as we move forward.
Learn about other efforts, we may not know about, that are also working toward new editor retention.

Outcomes:

Korean community conversation

Will be held at a time that works for Korean community. Will be a 2 hour conversation over video conference, or whatever works best.

Who: Korean community members who want to participate, a few Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Goals:

Present findings and personas, to gain familiarity, and continue the conversation around the research and future work.
Gather feedback, answer questions, about report, personas and findings
Learn which research findings the Korean community participants find most important to focus on for their community.
Share plans for future work for the project, gauge people's interest in being involved as we move forward.
Learn about other efforts, we may not know about, that are also working toward new editor retention.

Outcomes:

Focus workshop

Collective decision making about which finding/s to focus on in our first round. Which findings can we address to increase new editor retention in KO and CZ Wikis? Half day workshop, fully remote.

Who: Wikimedia Foundation staff (new editors team)

Goals:

Decide how many findings to focus on Decide which findings to focus on (1-3?)
Align around criteria for making the decision and assign weighting to criteria.
We will collectively decide which findings to focus our efforts on, by taking into consideration:
- KO and CZ community feedback on findings (which are most important to each respective community)
- WMF resources, capabilities, and strategic goals
- Current and previous work around that finding (is there already work being done, and success of failure in that area?
- How easy or difficult might it be to “move the needle” on new editor retention in this area?
- What kind of collaboration and dependencies might focusing in this finding require for success?
- Which findings will better retain new editors in Korean and Czech Wikipedias

Outcomes:

Concept generation with Czech community

Generate new concepts and bring existing solutions forward to address the findings we decided to focus on that address our goal of attracting and retaining new editors in medium sized Wikipedias.

Who: anyone in Czech community who would like to, and has time to participate

Goals:

Reach out and invite community members to share solutions ideas they have
Integrate concepts from Czech community into all of the concepts we are collecting toward attracting and retaining more new editors in medium sized Wikipedias.

Outcomes:

Concept generation with Korean community

Generate new concepts and bring existing solutions forward to address the findings we decided to focus on that address our goal of attracting and retaining new editors in medium sized Wikipedias.

Who: anyone in Korean community who would like to participate

Goals:

Reach out and invite community members to share solutions ideas they have
Integrate concepts from Korean community into all of the concepts we are collecting toward attracting and retaining more new editors in medium sized Wikipedias.

Outcomes:

Concept generation workshop 1

Collectively (across teams) generate new concepts and bring existing solutions forward to address the findings we decided to focus on that address our goal of attracting and retaining new editors in medium sized Wikipedias.

Who: Wikimedia Foundation staff (new editors team)

Goals:

Discuss and gain alignment around the focus areas
Generate concepts to address findings 5 and 7
- Individual and group brain storming
Add new ideas to the collection of precursors and new ideas that were collected in various conversations
Practice working together fully remotely (doing visual and audio work across time zones)

Content and outcomes:

Workboard with concepts that were chosen from precursors, and generated in the workshop, lined up along persona user journeys:

Workboard used to re organize all the concepts chosen and developed in this first concept generation workshop:

Conceptual understanding document, to ensure everyone on the team is thinking about the findings we are creating concepts to address, in the same way.
Deck used to lead the team through the 4 hour workshop.

Concept generation workshop 2

Collectively (across teams) generate new concepts and bring existing solutions forward to address the findings we decided to focus on that address our goal of attracting and retaining new editors in medium sized Wikipedias. In this workshop, we wanted to enable the team to focus more specifically on the varying needs of each persona, and ensure we were generating ideas to cover all their needs across their user journeys. So, we used three work boards, with two personas on each, and divided the larger team into 3 smaller teams for more ability to focus on one or two personas and their needs at a time.

Who: Wikimedia Foundation staff (new editors team)

Goals:

Organize the collection of solutions around the findings and the user journeys of the personas (to assess which solutions might directly address the challenges of new editors via the lens of our two groupings of findings: "Conceptual understanding" (findings 5 and 8) and "Pathways to editing" (findings 7 and 9)
Generate concepts as a group to address any gaps in the user journeys that need to be addressed regarding the findings groupings.
Reduce redundancies in our solutions sets.
End the session with several groupings of concepts that could address the findings groupings for the personas, and be cross departmental.

Content and outcomes:

Work boards (2 different personas on each board) displaying re organized concepts from previous workshop and discussions with addition of new concepts as needed.

Team A:

Team B:

Team C:

Notes from discussion during the workshop.
Deck used to lead the team through the 4 hour workshop.

Concept evaluation workshop 1

Collectively evaluate the findings groupings against criteria in order to decide which solutions groupings the teams should start working on and experimenting with.

Who: Wikimedia foundation staff (new editors team)

Goals:

Assess concept groupings against criteria (Impact, difficulty and resources needed, and if solutions are both programatic and product oriented or not)
Discuss individual and team perspectives
Decide on a set of concept groupings that we will move forward to begin experimentation and implementation

Outcomes:

Concept evaluation workshop 2

Complete collectively evaluating the findings groupings against criteria in order to decide which solutions groupings the teams should start working on and experiment with.

Who: Wikimedia foundation staff (new editors team)

Goals:

Assess concept groupings against criteria (Impact, difficulty and resources needed, and if solutions are both programatic and product oriented or not)
Discuss individual and team perspectives
Decide on a set of concept groupings that we will move forward to begin experimentation and implementation

Outcomes: