The Research & Data team is currently experimenting with a tool called Trello for tracking progress and simplifying monthly reporting [1].

We don’t have a good solution for tracking progress on research/data support requests originating from the community or from non-WMF researchers. Using the same board for these requests is not going to work:

the board is currently set up as read-only for non-WMF users
it mostly reflects work prioritized by the team as part of our quarterly planning [2] and it’s not designed as a generic inbox for data requests
repurposing the board as a generic backlog would set the wrong expectations that the team has bandwidth or a mandate to support these requests as they come in

What if we set up a public (read/write accessible) board where anyone (including volunteers) can create, pick up, execute and complete requests? The purpose of this would be purely to categorize, track and (self-)assign or reassign tasks: the actual requirements and the output of a request would be hosted on Meta (for example in the Research Index or the Labs2 portal) and/or in a public data repository.

How do people feel about this? We also have a bugzilla component for generic analytics requests that people have been using for a while [3] but I don’t think it has been particularly successful because BZ is mostly focused on development and bug reports or feature requests for analytics infrastructure.

The bottom line is that I don’t want to create more work for WMF researchers – we are a small team of 2.5 FTE staffers supporting the whole organization, if we exclude WMF analysts that are not part of Analytics – but test if a lightweight tool like Trello can be used to distribute tasks and track progress on a body of research and data requests.