Extension:Education Program/July 2015 roadmap notes

Strategy
Our flagship platform, the EducationProgram extension for MediaWiki, has reached the end of its impressive software lifespan. Fortunately, a group of ex-WMFers and others have already created an superior replacement web app called the Wiki Edu Dashboard, maintained and developed by an independently funded organization called the Wiki Education Foundation. They've been working with us closely and are extremely responsive to the needs of the Education Program, but their charter is not the same as ours, and they should not be expected to remain so responsive for much longer without our direct support.

We need to make changes to the Wiki Edu Dashboard to render it usable to our unique population of learners, so that it works across all languages and on sister projects. Currently, it is only usable on English Wikipedia, and is customized for use only by university courses supported by the Wiki Education Foundation. The Wikimedia movement has an exceptionally strong internationalization track record, so we're confident that this generalization project will end in success, assuming that we allocate the resources necessary to.

We can either invest money, tech staff time, or both, to address this problem.

A small group of volunteers has been looking at potential solutions, and we agree on the following recommended technical roadmap, which will push us at least to MVP status. Once this first goal is reached, the WMF's Education Program team will have a more secure future and will be better able to support education programs around the world. Then we could choose to iteratively add some other important features, which will make the Dashboard much more versatile in its application.

Ideally, we would finish this minimum implementation before the fall 2015 semester begins. Otherwise, our job will be complicated by a busy season of active courses and urgent bug reports about the legacy system.

Roadmap (MVP)
Everything on this list is a "must have". Most of the work is already outlined in Phabricator.
 * Rebrand the WEF Dashboard. 20 hours of tech time.
 * Support all languages and projects. Less than 120 hours of tech time.
 * Run the web app on a production cluster. Fixed hardware cost. 20 hours of ops time to set up and 5 hours/week for maintenance.

Follow-up
These are projects that capitalize on and extend what we will develop above, listed very roughly in priority order.
 * We've started a pilot collaboration with the Art+Feminism edit-a-thon organizers, which should give us some ideas about how to generalize the software for any group editing wiki articles together. This could include wikiprojects (see WikiProject X), edit-a-thons, translation campaigns, and so on. Supporting this effort might take up to 80 hours of tech time, but can be done incrementally.
 * Full Wikimetrics integration is going to be simple, through a single API interaction. Our editor communities should be able to pull their global impact metrics with a single button press. This might take 20 hours of Analytics time.
 * Reach feature parity with the legacy EducationProgram extension. Reevaluate what we really need here. Can be done incrementally, up to 300 hours of tech time for perfect parity.
 * Integrate with Gather, as that becomes available. This gives students a shareable, mobile-ready view of the articles their class has been editing. Needs estimation.
 * Isolate the "campaign" component into its own library, to help editors form and track groups for collaborative editing, review, and metrics. This makes editor campaigns available to MediaWiki or any third-party software, outside of the Dashboard. This could be used for editor recruitment drives, etc. 80 or more hours of tech time, depending on the implementation.
 * The Wiki Edu Dashboard is written in Ruby on Rails, a rapid prototyping framework. We should view the WEF Dashboard as a testing ground for innovative features and UI design, that we can eventually draw from and integrate into new, general tools. This process could be accelerated by User Research time.