Dear collab-orators,
since Stockholm I have been trying to help with the development of the
Program&Events
Dashboard <https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/> which is, at some point,
likely to replace the outdated Education Extension. Yesterday Amanda
Bittaker (CC'ed) gave me a guided tour of the current state of dashboard
and I had an opportunity to ask questions. I will also be taking part in
biweekly calls with the developer team to make sure that the Dashboard
development is going the right direction.
Some of you are probably already using it but most of the large country
programs are not using it yet on a large scale. I think there is a lack of
reliable and trustworthy information about the P&E Dashboard so let me give
you an update what it does:
- Is is an open system letting *anyone *with a Wikipedia account log in
and create his/her own course pages. There is nothing like userrights
except for developer access
- advantage: no barriers,
- disadvantage: possible vandalism or trolling.
- When you create a course page, you can send a link to this course
page so that participants can log in. Students need to *fill in a
"password" *- this can be publicly announced on the course page or
entirely private
- advantage: enables to "close" course for a desired group people only
- disadvantage: participants have to overcome one more step when they
want to enrol in the course
- you can *create a course *by cloning one of your past course pages
(not someone else's) or by starting a completely new page. In the course
page set-up, you can choose your "home project" and "home
language".
- there is probably *no way to add "templates" to course pages*. For
example, each our course page on Czech Wikipedia has a template
which links
to guidelines, helpdesk etc.
- you can *edit the course page* if you are the creator or the
creator has assigned you as the "facilitator" of the course.
- advantage: preventing changes done by people who have no relationship
or knowledge about the project
- disadvantage: teachers creating course pages have to assign local
coordinators as facilitators otherwise the facilitators cannot help them
design the pages or curate them. This will lead to a load of
e-mails saying
"Can you please assign me as a facilitator to the course, sir?"
- *creating campaigns (groups of courses)* is not available yet. It is
not sure when it will be ready but hopefully before March. This is crucial
to large country programs - we need to have a list of "our" projects.
- advantage: you can include some information or links or training
material to the individual course pages
- disadvantage: anyone will be able to create campaigns - this will
lead to a mess
Overall the Community Tech team has done a good job in recent months!
Thanks for your work on this and especially for all you are planning to do.
But we need more work before the large programs like ours are likely to use
it on a large scale.
For more information please see this page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Programs_%26_Events_Dashboard>.
You can give feedback on the discussion page there. This will be very
useful for the developers who are eager to get some input, especially about
the campaigns, according to Amanda.
Also I think we need to think about the *name of the dashboard* more... I
cannot imagine telling our students to open browser and type
*http://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/
<http://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/> *- we should make a shortened
version too with a catchy name than can be easily communicated without
knowledge of English. My Phabricator ticket for this is here
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T146332>, without any comments for two
months now.
I understand there will be some announcements coming from the Community
Tech team in near future.
I think this would be also useful to the education(a)lists.wikimedia.org
people. There has been no official information about the Dashboard for
months on that mailing list!
best,
Vojtěch Dostál
předseda rady / chair of the board
Wikimedia Česká republika |
http://www.wikimedia.cz
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