Grants talk:IEG/The Wikipedia Adventure/Midpoint

This midpoint report has been accepted. Congratulations on completing the first 3 months of this Individual Engagement Grant!

Feedback[edit]

Hi Ocaasi, thanks for sharing your progress and learnings in this report - it appears you've accomplished a lot in the past 3 months! A few thoughts/questions:

I appreciate all of the links you've provided here to your background research, notes, twine script, moodbars, and other artifacts you've made for this project along the way. Awesome to have screenshots too. These are great examples for anyone looking to follow your footsteps in future projects along these lines.
Thanks for the detailed financial update, and congrats on being on-track with budget. To clarify, you're planning to use some of the "expert consult" funds in the second half of your project for the MediaWiki coder, correct? (That expense does seem to fit the definition of expert consult, although perhaps not the kind of expert you'd originally had in mind?)
The thought you've put into the learnings section of your report should be quite helpful to others leading similar projects in the future, thanks for doing this. I'm curious about the time-management piece - would you care to share how much time you've been spending (per week or month) on this project? That info could be a useful benchmark for other grantees in the future, I expect - ambitious projects like this do take time! I'm also wondering a bit about the connection you mentioned between the main obstacle of working on many different pieces at a time, and the plan going forward also being to keep moving things forward on all fronts - is there anything you're doing differently as a result of recognizing the obstacle, or is it more about accepting this is the nature of a big project like this, and so just continuing to juggle as much as you can?
Appreciate your honesty about the reporting requirements, both in theory and practice. :-)

Congratulations on your first 3 months - looking forward to seeing the complete game and any impact it has on new editors who play in the fall. Siko (WMF) (talk) 19:27, 19 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback Siko, it's been a challenging and fun ride so far.

Yes, that's correct that I plan to use the expert consultation funds to pay a coder who built a critical piece of the game. It ended up being $350, so I'm still under the original allotment for expert consultation. I'll update my budget table.
As far as time spent, I could just ballpark an estimate at 20 hours per week. Some have been significantly higher or lower, but on average I'd say around 20. It's also been far easier to work on this project because I had 2 years of prior work and planning on it. I don't think I could have done this from scratch in 6 months without putting in much more than 40+ hours/week. So, I'm kind of cheating.
As far as balls in the air, I've found it helpful to keep a list of what needs to be done and then just work on the ones that strike my interest on a particular day. The caveat to that is keeping in mind that some parts of the project are simply less appealing, and some pieces are sequentially needed to work on other steps. A big help here has been keeping in the back of my mind where progress isn't happening, and either asking for help at those points or putting them at the front of the to-do list to make sure they get finished. It's amazing how a handful of tasks becomes less overwhelming just by getting them out of your head and onto a list somewhere.

These are just some initial thoughts about the process. It's frankly difficult to have much perspective on process while I'm still in the thick of pieces coming together. Cheers, and thanks for your support throughout this process. Ocaasi (talk) 19:29, 23 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the info and taking time to share the perspective you do have - I know how difficult it can be to see the forest when you've got so many trees to handle. I appreciate that you're documenting as you go though because memory can be such a tricky thing... Siko (WMF) (talk) 22:25, 23 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]