User group meeting & agenda 9 December 2008

= Proposing ideas for this agenda =

To propose or discuss ideas for this agenda, please use the Discussion tab above. As the meeting draws near, we will review the items proposed on the Discussions page and decide which ones should get highest priority on the agenda.

= Agenda =

Administrative items

 * 1) Assignment of time keeper and note taker
 * 2) Introduction of new members: 10 seconds for name and desired takeaways.
 * 3) Prayer --
 * 4) Review of Minutes
 * 5) Today's agenda preview

Information items

 * Interest in partnering with Kentucky Technology in Genealogy group (see Lise Embley's email to Mollie Forbes, and comment on Discussion Page).

New Items

 * 1) Research Wiki User Group Evaluation  * What is working well with our Research Wiki User Group meetings?   * What isn't working well - what can we do to improve?   * Should we be looking to increase our numbers?   * If so, how?
 * 2) Research Wiki Evaluation  * What is working well - what do I like about this wiki?   * Is the wiki helping people find their ancestors?   * What isn't working well - what don't I like about it - how can we improve it?   * What is keeping people from finding their ancestors?   * How can we increase the number of people using the wiki?   * What can we do to encourage content growth and contributors?

= Minutes =

Facilitator was Jim Greene, Note taker was Jimmy Parker, Time keeper was --.

Prayer by Darris Williams

This week, there are now 5820 registered users of the FamilySearch Wiki. That is an increase of 101 new registered users over the last week.

Attendees
Jim Greene, Darris Williams, Stephen Bobowski, Diane Loosle, David Samuelson, Sister Felsted, Jimmy Parker, Alan Mann, Don Stringham, Baerbel Johnson, Kip Enger, David Crowther

Remote Attendees
(Anne Roach), (Jim Greene), Lise Embley, Thomas Lerman, (Mollie Forbes)

Items Discussed

 * The minutes from last week were briefly reviewed. The Action Items from last week will be carried over to next week.
 * Jim Greene gave a brief report on the latest sprint (#10), which ends tomorrow. He indicated that in some ways this sprint was a disaster, although in a way, it will prevent some future disasters. Some of the Project Team went to a users group meeting for Semantic Media Wiki, recently held in Boston. It was learned that this tool has been and is being written by computer "geeks" who care little about usability. It does not work with the FCK editor being used for our Wiki. So, a decision was made to put its use as a search engine in the Research Wiki on hold and to use the current search engine for our release on FamilySearch. The sprint was also impacted by the Thanksgiving holiday and by personal leave which must be taken by some of the staff before the end of the year.
 * Jim Greene also explained the various instances of the Wiki which exist. A development instance is for the engineers where they can try things, make adjustments to programming code, etc., without affecting the version seen by users. A staging instance also exists where changes can be tested in a production-like atmosphere before it is released to the public. And there is also production instance which is what the public sees.
 * Jim also indicated that one of the things being worked on is "common identity," which means a user could register in one FamilySearch product and have it apply to all products. It looks like that might be working in the staging environment in the next day or two. When it moves to Production, it will require all users to register again--which may not be until Feb or later.
 * Lise Embley has asked the Project Team to consider working with a group called the Kentucky Techinology in Genealogy (KTIG) group to facilitate their contributing to the Wiki. The team committed to provide whatever support is needed for that to happen and are excited to have such a group willing to participate. On-line training will be provided for them. This discussion also raised the issue of "barn-raisings." It was announced that two barn-raisings are planned for January -- Maryland (led by Michael Ritchey) and England (leader to be announced).
 * Some time was taken in evaluating the effectiveness of the Research Wiki Users Group. Among ideas discussed were (1) a "News and Events" announcement area should be on the Main Page of the Wiki; (2) a broadcast message could be sent to all registered users who are not blocking their emails requesting their cooperation in providing feedback; (3) users should have the option to subscribe to news about the Wiki; (4) the possibility of creating a news or events page and have users add that page to their watch list.
 * The suggestion that the users group be divided into two groups, one for contributors and one for the more general users, was discussed. The Project Team is not opposed to such a division, but feels it should be driven by need. Perhaps a general broadcast message could be sent out and linked to a questionnaire asking users to tell us what is needed.
 * It was announced that the Project Team is working toward being tab-integrated with FamilySearch by "early next year."
 * A brief discussion ensued on what needs to be fixed in the Research Wiki. Jim asked us to respond to the question, "If you could have one thing fixed that is wrong with the Wiki, what would that be?" Out of that discussion came a suggestion that how to report a bug or problem in the system needs to be made easier. The support team needs to specifiy what needs to be reported so they get the information they need and it is easier for the user to report a problem. Perhaps a form with standard questions could even be devised.
 * A suggestion was made by Stephen Bobowski to have the navigation bar on the Wiki anchored in such a way that it always appears on the screen, even when you scroll down a long page.

Action Items

 * For next week's meeting, a demonstration on how to flag and article and how to explain why that page was flagged will be made by Michael Ritchey.
 * For next week's meeting, good and bad examples of the use of religious images could be presented by Michael Ritchey.
 * Kip Enger will invite Mark to next week's meeting.