Thank you everyone who provided feedback on updating Global Metrics! Global Metrics has been updated based on all the community feedback received. A summary of the new grant metrics requirement and a summary of all the feedback (and changes made based on the feedback) can be found here.
Global Metrics is a set of six metrics (and one question) that all grantees of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) grant programs - IEG, PEG, SAPG, APG - are required to report as of September 2014, when relevant to their grant activities and goals.
As the first full year of all grantees reporting Global Metrics concluded at the end of December 2015, the Community Resources team, in conjunction with the Program Capacity and Learning team, is embarking on a retrospective and update of Global Metrics, with the goals of:
Understanding how useful the current metrics are to Committee members, grantees, and relevant WMF staff
Understanding the major issues
Understanding how those issues could be addressed
Project timeline
Phase 1: Collecting feedback – February 2016 to March 25 2016
Small group Interviews: February 2016
On-wiki and survey feedback live – March 2 – 25 2016
Summarized feedback reported on wiki posted – 13 May 2016
Phase 2: Designing solutions – April 24 to end of May 2016
Voting and collecting feedback: June 6 to end of June 2016
Phase 3: Update – July 2016
A summary of the new grant metrics requirement and a summary of all the feedback (and changes made based on the feedback) can be found here.
Phase 1: Collecting feedback - COMPLETE
The first phase of the project involves collecting feedback from across all grant programs, Committee members, and relevant WMF staff. This feedback can be provided in three ways:
A more detailed history on the development of Global Metrics, and lessons learned from past mistakes
The benefits and issues associated with the current form Global Metrics
Phase 2: Designing solutions and voting - COMPLETE
The second phase of the project focus on addressing the issues raised in Phase 1, by brainstorming and designing solutions openly on Meta based on ideas and suggestions gathered in Phase 1.
Simplify the requirement of Global Metrics, i.e. the structure, the measures used, and the way it is included in grant proposals and reports. The goal of simplifying the information requested by WMF is that it will hopefully provide more space for the other metrics and data that grantees find useful. As Global Metrics will never be comprehensive, it will aways need to complement other measures and data.
Update, simplify and integrate the extensive existing documentation and resources (e.g. the learning patterns), as well a create a new resource: The Metrics Library. This library will aggregate the many quantitative metrics and qualitative measures for capturing outputs & outcomes, that have already been used by current or past grantees, as well as link to the relevant grant or tool (if it exists). This new resource aims to answer the commonly reported issue of "What could I be capturing for my project? How could I do it? Who has done it before?", by aggregating the collective knowledge in grants and moving toward a community of practice.
Update Wikimetrics to become the primary tool for collecting Global Metrics, e.g. resolve long-standing user-interface issues, update the metrics included and their definition, etc.
While it is these three solutions together that can address the three problems stated, the second and third parts depend on the first, and need a longer timeframe to implement. As such, right now we are collecting feedback on the first part of the solution: simplifying and updating the requirement of Global Metrics.
