Structured Discussions/Community engagement

Releases
At the moment we've plotted out two, small-scale releases, only one of which is to active projects, along with a set of informal discussions for different usergroups

Discussions
The first set of interactions with Flow won't be formal releases or active software: they'll be discussions. Two of them, in fact. One of them will be with random (but intelligent) people at the WMF office, who are being brought in to play around with the software and give us feedback on how it looks to people unfamiliar with Wikipedia. The other will be an office hours session in #wikimedia-office with editing community members, and will be open to any editor who wants to attend. Our intention here is to get feedback on the latest design iterations and workflows, ask some questions and get a general idea of what sticking points there are likely to be, and where we need to put additional thinking in.

The office hours session will be advertised via ??? and...

Sandbox release
The first release is a "sandbox" release, in which Flow will be put on a temporary labs instance (toro? ee-labs? unicorn? Someone, please tell us). A moderately-sized group of users will be invited to use the software and give feedback on it - primarily users who have demonstrated the ability to be constructive. This is fundamentally not "people who agree with us"; you can agree with us and be non-constructive, or disagree with us and be totally constructive. What we're looking for is people who accept the fundamental premise of Flow - that the confusing nature of talkpages is impeding user and project development - who can productively critique the implementation of that premise. We fully expect them to tell us we're wrong, and for us to be wrong, and to have to course-correct: that's what the process is there for.

Said users will be sent talkpage notifications inviting them to play around with the prototype and give feedback where do we want them giving feedback? - this will undoubtedly also hit talkpage stalkers/followers/random other editors, which is awesome. Our thoughts on who is good for this are unlikely to be canonical, and finding new people to participate is always a good use of time. Once we've got that feedback, we'll discuss it with the users and make tweaks to ensure both the developers and the editors are happy with the outcome (or, at least, equally unhappy. That's how consensus works).

???
Let's see how the others go!

Open tasks

 * Nick
 * Identify people to invite to the sandboxed release
 * Get documentation ready for the Wikiproject release
 * Oliver
 * Maryana