Community Engagement (Product)

 Community Engagement (Product) serves readers, contributors, and the Wikimedia Foundation by supporting the Product and Engineering departments in their collaboration with WMF-supported communities. We focus on collaboration and communication related to product development and roll-outs. The CE(P) is part of the Product Department.

Our mission is to increase collaboration between WMF Product teams and the foundation’s hosted communities.

Background
The Wikimedia Foundation hired its first community liaison in May 2011, in the now-dissolved Community Department. The initial role of "community liaison" was to be a point of contact between Wikimedia community members and the Wikimedia Foundation and to answer general questions about the Foundation and internal processes. Over the course of the following year this job description transitioned away from liaison to Community Advocacy. In October 2011, Product hired its first community liaison, with a focus on communications between product managers and developers. An additional four community liaisons were brought aboard within the Product Department in June 2013 in order to communicate changes to community stakeholders during the roll-out of VisualEditor, and another was added in August 2013 to facilitate communication on Flow. The current department grew out the product liaison, coming together formally in June 2014.

What we do
Community Liaisons play a vital role within product development by setting and implementing communication plans. We act as a bridge between the communities and the product teams for communication and decision-making, incorporating broad community perspectives into technical and product decisions, and holding dialogues with our contributors about the scope, pace and features of upcoming changes to Wikimedia projects. We ensure that communication is cohesive and productive, not acting as a replacement for direct communication between a product team and communities, but handling the heavy lifting of communication processes. We do this in part by:


 * Planning communications around product development
 * Shaping discussions with communities around features and rollouts
 * Gathering and prioritizing feedback and features requests from communities
 * Providing deep community insight at every stage of product development
 * Working with Product Managers to schedule deployments, identifying any first communities for product deployment
 * Working with community translators to ensure system messages and documentation are properly localized
 * Estimating the communications timing needed for a successful deployment, including sufficient support coverage
 * Building up a network of volunteers from all wikis (including translators), increasing the number of projects we can interact with
 * Filing bug reports and enhancement requests
 * Ensuring that communities are represented in the decision-making process and that planned software adequately reflects user needs
 * Monitoring Wikimedia projects, with the assistance of a network of volunteers, for emerging issues that have an impact on product development

Who we are
The Community Engagement team currently consists of 5 people: Rachel joined the Wikimedia Foundation in May 2014 as Director of Community Engagement, and is new to the Wikipedia communities. She was previously Head of Safety at Couchsurfing. Erica has been in the Movement since 2005, mostly active at the Italian Wikipedia and on the Italian queues of OTRS. She joined the Foundation in 2013 and is primarily liaising for VisualEditor on most of the Wikipedias where it's already enabled as the primary editor. Keegan has been an editor on the English Wikipedia since 2005 and an administrator since 2006. He's also an Oversighter and CheckUser there. Globally he's an OTRS administrator and a member of the Communications Committee. He is an encyclopedia geek, which is how he wound up here both as a volunteer and working with Wikimedia, where he's the lead liaison for Multimedia projects and for the SUL finalization. Sherry has been a regular editor at the English Wikipedia since 2007, and she's been in the top 500 most prolific editors of all time for a couple of years. Her interests run from medicine to pastry to education, with odd points in between, but she also spends a lot of time working as a metapedian. She's the go-to liaison for VisualEditor on English-speaking WMF projects. She's fond of flowers that look like dandelions, but actually aren't. Nick has been an editor since 2005, helping with everything from page and site redesigns to informal mediation. He lives in Canada, and is interested in anything related to words, felines, connections, and design. Since late 2013, he's been working as the liaison for Flow, and various smaller changes.
 * Rachel diCerbo (Rdicerb)
 * Erica Litrenta (Elitre)
 * Keegan Peterzell (Keegan)
 * Sherry Snyder (WhatamIdoing)
 * Nick Wilson (Quiddity)

Collaborating with us
We have written a list of action items so that editors can help us support better their communities.

Staying up-to-date
Learn about what we're currently working on and get the latest news about the products we are liaising.

Contacting us
Do you have ideas, compliments, concerns, questions for or about the Community Engagement team? Please reach us at cep@lists.wikimedia.org.

You can also chat with us on IRC using the freenode network:  The Community Engagement team