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. It's leaking bile. 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 work for much longer without our direct support.

What we need to accomplish is to make changes to the Wiki Edu Dashboard which render it usable by our unique population of learners, so that it works across all languages and sister projects. Currently it is only usable on English Wikipedia, and is customized for use by university courses. The Wikimedia movement has an exceptionally strong i18n track record, so we're confident this generalization project will end in success, assuming we allocate the resources.

We can either throw money, tech staff time, or both at this problem.

A small group 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 Education Program department will have a more secure future, and then we would have the luxury to choose to iteratively add some other important features.

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
Projects which capitalize on and extend what we will develop above. Very roughly in priority order.
 * We're starting a pilot collaboration with the Art+Feminism editathon organizers, which should give us some ideas about how to generalize the software for any group editing wiki articles together. This could include wikiprojects, 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 button press.  This might be 20 hours of Analytics time.
 * Integrate with Gather, as that becomes possible. This gives students a shareable, mobile-ready view of the articles their class has been editing.  Needs estimation.
 * Isolate the "campaign" component, to help editors form and track groups for collaborative editing, review, and metrics. Also has uses for editor 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.