Submissions/Project Management best practices for WikiProjects

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.

Project Management best practices for WikiProjects.

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation): Presentation

Author of the submission: Arjuna Rao Chavala

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences): arjunaraoc (at) gmail (dot) com

Country of origin: India

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.): Not applicable

Personal homepage or blog: http://tech4society.blogspot.com

Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

Most Indian language Wikipedias are about 5 years old. These are experiencing rapid growth in terms of page views, though the number of active wikipedians and quality of the content is not upto the mark. Many editors work alone for long time. Use of WikiProjects can help improve the quality. Even when WikiProjects are used, there is weakness in the strength of practices followed depending on the project founder/coordinator. For example, only the scope may be defined broadly, there may not be any limit on iteration duration and inadequate communication/coordination.

Project Management discipline has evolved set of best practices. Some of these are oriented towards large construction projects while the other are more oriented to software development. The practices of agile software development and best practices and tools from PMI's PM Book of knowledge (PMBOK) are explored to provide guidance on applying them for WikiProjects.

Typical practices suggested include

Defining realistic scope appropriate to the iteration duration
Communicating the progress (dashboard) and impact of the project (eg: page views)
Making the project visible through other media
Meeting at regular intervals virtually/physically to build teamwork.
Identifying the bottlenecks and addressing them
Documenting the lessons learned at the end of iteration and publishing them in the wiki news so that the knowledge of wikiproject is shared with community.
Relating the concepts of Initiation, Planning, Execution, Monitoring and Control, Closure phases of a conventional project to the WikiProject context.

Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure): Knowledge and Collaboration

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

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