Talk:Movement Strategy/Forum
Dear all,
One year ago, the Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) team at the Wikimedia Foundation launched a proposal for a new Movement Strategy Forum. The proposal was open for a 2-month community review period, ending on 24 July 2022. Many users expressed their doubts on this Forum, not because we don't need a place to discuss, but because this should happen inside our ecosystem (ideally, on Meta). Nevertheless, the MSG continued with their proposal and launched the Forum itself using an external platform. Their main argument was that we didn't have the tools for a forum-like discussion on Meta, but embracing Discourse was easier, cheaper and more feasible.
Some months later, starting on September 2022, a monthly report was posted in the forum: https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/monthly-report-of-forum-activity/1665/1. This monthly report come, as the name suggests, every month till April: https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/monthly-report-of-forum-activity/1665/13. The last one showed evidence that after the first months, interest, posting and usefulness had declined: 15 new users per month, 8 users engaged per day and only 6 new contributors per month. More than a third of the 49 topics created in March were done by the staff members. There's only one topic that could be counted as active and thriving, and I think it is a very interesting one: "Japanese connection" (https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/japanese-connection/203).
As in this year there hasn't been any improvement in our platforms to have a better discussion forum (having a place where online discussion could happen should be the main goal of the MSG team), and we don't have any clue about how the MS Forum is going, I wonder if the lack of monthly statistics is because the forum is itself shrinking, or because the WMF doesn't have resources to continue with the reporting.
I whid that we could have a better platform to discuss and that the WMF invested money, resources and staff in this goal. Let's hope we see that in the near future. Theklan (talk) 21:09, 9 July 2023 (UTC)