Community Engagement (Product)/Collaboration process/Draft

This Community Collaboration methodology uses WMF’s Product Development process to define steps for community communication and collaboration. As the Product Development Process is also still a draft, please treat this as a draft also. Additionally, as this Collaboration process cannot be developed without input from communities, please provide feedback on the Discussion page.

This draft currently attempts to outline the communications and methods in each step of the product development process.

Decision making process
The decision-making has not been determined at this time, but the following tools would be utilized with communities during this stage
 * Requests for Comment
 * Community Consultations
 * Surveys, voting and ranking mechanisms

Introduction and Concept
This phase presents and initially describes the impetus and logic behind any product or individual feature. During this phase, reasoning behind the feature must be defined, communication surrounding scope with users.

Tools and methods used
The following tools may be used in this phase:


 * MediaWiki Product Page (must have)
 * Newsletter/Tech News articles (maybe)
 * Setting up for product-specific news features (depends)
 * Community Consultation with clearly defined parameters (maybe)
 * Targeted sitenotice for notifications (maybe)
 * Notifications in any product-related official communication channels (must have; TBD)
 * Coordination with Design Research to get users signed up for testing

Communications
The following information must be presented during this phase:
 * Who is this product intended for? (Readers? New editors?)
 * What problem does this solve?/Why is this feature needed?
 * Include supporting data/information/strategic ideas
 * ”What this is not”
 * Where - Commons? Wikipedias? All RtL language projects?
 * When Is there a timeframe commitment to launching this? Is there a blocker (does this need to be accomplished before moving onto other projects) Is this a major project that will take a few years to complete?
 * How Are there technical constraints? Does this need to function in a particular way?
 * Is this product intended to change, break or fix any workflows?