Add design elements across WDTK that show that volunteers are actively supporting the site, and that encourage people to consider the option

[TomSteinberg]

No description provided.

[hsenag]

Consider the option of helping to support the site themselves? One problem is that there aren't all that many things that non-admin volunteers can do, though it's gradually expanding.

[RichardTaylor]

If we marked annotations by administrators as administrators specially ( #34 ) a list of the latest such annotations would show some slice of administrator activity and could be made public.

[TomSteinberg]

Another thing to consider in #1523 #1525 & other redesign tickets

[RichardTaylor]

Some volunteer administrators on WhatDoTheyKnow focus on maintaining the public body database; adding new bodies, adding and updating descriptions, removing defunct bodies etc.

It would be nice to publicly show this activity - showing users recently added/edited bodies for example.

Also flagging administrator actions maintaining the public body DB in some way would help administrators review each others' actions. Transparency of admin actions within the admin team is important to ensure the team is working together consistently and to enable discussion of any disagreements, and concerns - another benefit is simply being able to recognise and thank admins who're doing work which is currently entirely behind the scenes.

[garethrees]

another benefit is simply being able to recognise and thank admins who're doing work which is currently entirely behind the scenes.

Yeah – I'm really keen on doing this more to encourage users to go from someone who may just follow a request or two, to someone who actively helps out with small maintenance tasks.

Also flagging administrator actions maintaining the public body DB in some way would help administrators review each others' actions.

While its not public, we've now added an "authority changes" filter to the timeline which shows what field changed and the admin that changed it:

[RichardTaylor]

Consider how GitHub shows which users have contributed to a particular file and imagine something similar showing which users (admins and general users) have contributed to a public body listing on WhatDoTheyKnow.

This could be just a list of contributors, or it could, perhaps on expansion, be more detailed eg. suggested by x added by y, notes updated by z etc, maybe with dates. This would be making public some of what we already have on admin pages.

We'd need to be clear that we were making this information public, and perhaps offer an opt-out.

You could also envisage this on a per-request level, with a note / box somewhere listing the admins who've manually taken some action on the request.

[RichardTaylor]

We could have a public league table of most active admins, perhaps showing a breakdown of activity.

Without context this could be misleading though, eg. if an admin was shown as taking lots of material down with no context as to the reasons. Also admin actions on the site don't directly relate to the amount of work put in dealing with complex situations.

[RichardTaylor]

As some admin actions are now taken by staff, eg. staff supporting the "Pro" service, this ticket could be expanded to publicly show the scale of admin activity which is needed to run the service generally.

Perhaps showing the staff / volunteer breakdown would still be useful.

[RichardTaylor]

A further benefit of transparency over what admins are doing is that it might help when prioritising tickets for developer action to prevent problems, and automate actions.

It might not be obvious how much volunteer time is going into eg. dealing with spam, updating public bodies, etc. so some statistics on admin actions might help.

[RichardTaylor]

In terms of awareness among admin team members, and those in the organisation more widely, of the amount, and type, of volunteer work going into running WhatDoTheyKnow, there is currently only really good internal visibility of actions which involve emails to the support inbox.

Other actions are not well logged / reviewed and those other than the individual doing them may not be aware of them. One example which came up recently was hiding old non-FOI correspondence, and deciding not to inform the users given the age of the correspondence threads.

In terms of public body edits, another area where work can be low-visibility, the internal

/admin/timeline?event_type=authority_change

page does exist, this shows "Authority changes in last two days", expanding that kind of timeline to all admin actions, with filters, covering a longer time period, and making it public, appears to be the kind of thing which would address this ticket.

This comment notes this ticket would be useful for running and managing the service as well as for external transparency and recruitment.

[RichardTaylor]

Note mySociety's https://data.climateemergency.uk/ has a feedback system which shows avatar images of some of the people involved in the project.

This idea was described in a blog post:

First of all, we’re thinking about a pop-up asking visitors to click a few buttons and let us know who they are — what sectors they work in, what they’re trying to find, et cetera. Zarino is working on the hunch that if we add our friendly faces to this request, showing the real people behind the project, it might get a better take-up

If it works this is an idea which could be taken-up by Alaveteli sites.

The Alaveteli system already enables all users, including admins, to have profile images. Admins could be encouraged to have profile images of their faces, and they could be shown in relevant places on the site.

[garethrees]

We should do more to call out our existing actions – classify old requests, update body contact details, report misuse, etc – as (micro) volunteering. While those volunteers won't be "a volunteer", they will be "volunteering". Perhaps improved language would resonate with people more and inspire them to go one step further than they ordinarily would.

[RichardTaylor]

Given we now have more actions being taken by paid staff perhaps this ticket should be both about:

• making public the manual actions which are being undertaken to keep the site operating
• showing which of those actions are being carried out by volunteers

[RichardTaylor]

We could expand the expand the credits list to explain what people have done.