User:Isarra/OPW proposal

This is a proposal for an Outreach Program for Women (OPW) project to help develop design documents for Flow, a game-changing project headed by Brandon Harris that seeks to redefine how MediaWiki users interact with and understand the communities with which they work.

While Flow is intended to eventually take the form of a feed bringing all of the disparate notices, discussions, and relevant changes into more manageable forms and places, it is currently in the initial design phases. This proposed OPW project will work within that scope to create relevant interaction designs and visual treatment mockups.

Project overview

This is a project in a broad-context working on an existing project on a flexible timeline and with flexible goals set according to how it progresses. The internship will be directed by the Flow project lead, who will also be acting as mentor. Others involved with the project may be of help as well, though specifics remain to be seen.

Flow itself is, of course, much larger than the OPW project, and work done here will fit into a broader picture of design and development. Failure of particular aspects at this stage can potentially be as valuable as success as it can serve to help guide future iterations of design with regard to what does and doesn't work, and thus what not to do. Should this entire OPW internship project fall through, however, though it would be decidedly unfortunate and a waste of resources, it should not significantly detriment the Flow project as a whole due to the scope and the range of work being done.

At the end, completed aspects will be there in the hope that they will be useful, but with no guarantee of ultimate applicability.

Potential risks and concerns

Risk	Concern	Mitigation
Scope of the project	Flow is a very large undertaking - working with any pieces of it has the potential to get out of hand.	General direction and management will be handled by the project mentor.
Other time commitments	I will be taking classes part-time in the spring in order to finish university. There is also an ongoing project to move Uncyclopedia in which I am very much involved, and while it should be moved by then, maintenance is a major concern.	Decent planning should cover for the classes, as they are indeed not a full workload, and as for Uncyclopedia, that's what minions are for.
Lack of a distinct timeline and plan	The plan is vague and timing will depend on how it proceeds, which could potentially become an issue.	Given the mentor's experience and position this should not be a major issue. Any issues that do come up can be addressed as they do.
Lack of specific design experience	While I have worked on a few projects involving web design in the past, my particular work has not been the most in-depth with the matter, nor am I particularly well-versed in the art of making mockups. Creating templates and general wiki page formatting is a little different than dealing with layouts of major site interfaces.	This is what I'm here to learn!

Applicant background

Greetings. I am Kim. Unfortunately, instead of writing about myself, I generally prefer to slap a picture on a page and call it filler, so I'm not entirely sure what all to put here.

As for background itself, I am a Wikipedian as well as a bit of an Uncyclopedian and a bit of an Illogicopedian, and I particularly like making the things pretty, working with templates, organising project pages, and, most recently, even throwing patches in gerrit to try to get things to line up properly.

Though I do also contribute to other projects such as MediaWiki and Wikimedia Commons, I mentioned Wikipedia, Uncyclopedia, and Illogicopedia in particular because (along with being my effective home projects) they encompass a strangely representative spectrum of sizes, scopes, and hosts, very much affecting how their communities interact and function on what is still essentially the same platform for each. They are, indeed, absolutely nothing alike, and yet at the same time it is so easy to run into the exact same cultural and technical problems on all of them, and a familiarity with each of these provides a background that could, perhaps, prove quite interesting working on a project such as Flow. Perhaps.

I initially started out contributing to Uncyclopedia and Illogicopedia, but after some difficulties with server outages and personality conflicts, I eventually migrated to Wikipedia and Commons in the beginning of 2012 and just fell in love with the environment - so many lovely crazy people on one mass of virtual space working for such an intriguing common purpose, and on top of that, the drama is simply fascinating. I don't ever want to leave.

Because of this, any such opportunity to work with Wikimedia further would simply be too much to pass up and the prospect of a project like this one in particular makes me very interested indeed. -— Isarra ༆ 01:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Endorsements

Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:35, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
ori (talk) 08:18, 14 December 2012 (UTC)