since Stockholm I have been trying to help with the development of the Program&Events Dashboard which is, at some point, likely to replace the outdated Education Extension.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. 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/ - 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, without any comments for two months now.

I understand there will be some announcements coming from the Community Tech team in near future.