Grants talk:IdeaLab/Full Circle Gap Protocol: Addressing the Unknown Unknowns/Final

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Report Accepted[edit]

Dear Shameran81,

Thank you for this very thorough and useful Final Report. I really appreciate that you've used your report not just to document what you did, but also to provide a thorough analysis of both the process and the outcomes--with equal transparency about both failures and successes. Despite my delay in actually posting an approval, I have been referencing it often since you completed it and referring others to what you learned and shared here. As I imagine you know, your work was the basis and the inspiration of a new IEG project, just funded this month: Effective Engagement with Health Topic Experts using Guided Checklists. Suffice it to say that your findings are having an impact beyond the life of your project. I expect I'll continue to reference this report, not only for the content of the learning you've shared here, but also for the model way you've reported on it.

I'm accepting your report today, with the following comments:

  • Bravo for hitting all of your targets!
  • I very much appreciate your adaptive management of this project. Because of your willingness to tweak your plan as you progressed based on your observations of what was and wasn't effective, you came up with some specific groundtruthed strategies that are innovative and useful. For example, the scheduling difficulties you faced might have been a showstopper had you been a less agile project manager, but instead you pivoted and created a very useful guide for engaging busy academics on their own terms. Well done!
  • The two learning patterns you created based on your discoveries are invaluable outcomes of this project. Your approach to engaging non-Wikipedian academics, through strategies like the close reading, is one I have been sharing widely with other Wikimedia volunteers. Your bestiary of gaps is also a very useful, succinct overview of where more work needs to be done.

It was a pleasure to work with you on this grant and learn along with you as your project unfolded!

Thank you for your strong contribution to the Wikimedia movement.

Warm regards, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 11:21, 30 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]