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Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Portal retrospective 2016-07-07

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Format

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This retrospective was conducted using the "Five finger retrospective" format.

Action Items from last month

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  • Chris: Update the "Project portals" page on Meta (task T136163)
    • Yes Done (enough)
  • Deb: create rough mocks of some of the ideas for the future work and add to page on wiki for further discussion
    • Yes Done (search results)
  • Deb: send email(s) on production releases and upcoming A/B tests
    • Yes Done (so far--more to come)
  • Kevin: Will continue to suggest A/B test retros at times
    • There didn't seem to be opportunities this past month; no tests scheduled, so moot
  • Kevin: Try to resolve code review delays
    • Kevin will continue to work on this
  • Kevin: Schedule one hour for next month's retro, since a half hour was too short
    • Yes Done

What happened since the last retro (June 6)

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  • We're getting a new analyst! (Partially Portal related)
  • Qualtrics survey on "how you arrived on the portal" launched and wrapped up
  • Asked community about adding mobile app badges to the portal page (lots of feedback and the issue has been shelved for a few weeks)
  • Wikimania
  • "Portal offsite" in Poland
  • Wrote documentation about portal development process and guide to contributing
  • and thus: got some community contributions to the portal
  • Added USA regions to dashboard analytics
  • Got the ball rolling on getting portal text into translatewiki.net
  • Added first visit clickthroughs to the dashboard
  • production releases of legal links, readmes, etc for portal
  • Jan at Design offsite in SF

Thumb: Thumbs up--something that went well

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  • Wikimania and (small) team offsite in Warsaw
    • face-to-face time Deb/Jan was very helpful
  • Data results from last A/B test for language dropdown (collapsing lang by article count)
  • Help from Chris on navigating community talks dealing with portal
  • Volunteer contributions to portal page ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/WPOR/history/master/ )
  • got the ops/script blocking task fixed for updating portal stats

Index finger: The ONE thing you want people to know about the last month

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  • people are interested in the portal and everyone has an opinion +1 +1

Middle finger: Something that did not go well

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  • There's apparently a sustained spike in no-actions and a drop in searches (visible on dashboard)
  • Jan feeling the need to +2 own code a couple of times.
    • and community pushback for doing so
    • we should have a discussion about our team norms, constraints, etc.
    • Small changes usually can get someone to +2; large visual (javascript) changes are harder to get someone
    • Julien is the only other Discovery person well-qualified to review
    • Distinction between visual (html/css) and tricky code (javascript)--or both in the same commit
    • Distinction between "does it work" vs. "is this the best technical approach" vs. "is this the right UX"
  • something about the communities response with the app badges - frustrating
  • asking the community about adding mobile app download badges to portal page (pushback from internal to WMF and external)

Ring finger: Something about relationships--within the team, between teams, other

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  • Deb did (and continues to do!) a great job multi-managing teams while Dan was away
  • Jan always super helpful and seemingly glad to help +1+1
  • Talking with community members and other WMF'ers, chapters during wikimania
    • everyone wanted to know what the Discovery team was doing (or suggest things we should be doing)
    • Lots of goodwill from those conversations
    • We should do more in-person outreach (e.g. conferences)

Pinky: A little thing (good or bad) that would be easy to overlook

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  • Translation setup for incorporating new words into portal (for sister project descriptive text) from community
    • Lots of collaboration between different teams; quite a bit of work
    • Splitting the translatable text out was slightly challenging, and then gluing them back together
    • Jan learned quite a bit about translations and localizations
  • Translating our (major) communications should be more common (this is on me - CK)
    • Takes effort, and also takes time (like a week). Need to account for that when planning.
    • What are people requesting to be translated? Targeted comms, such as mobile badges and question marks

Action items

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  • Deb: send out email RfC for language dropdown and chat up the new updated page design
    • if all goes well, push it into production in next few weeks
  • Kevin: Carry idea of a/b test retros over to the search team
  • Kevin: Continue to work on timely code reviews
  • Chris: Communicate that after we wrap up a few things on the portal that we'll take a bit of a less active role on the portal for a while (focus on accomplishments so far)
  • Mikhail: provide some data (ticket has already been created)