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Art+Feminism User Group/Planning/AnnualPlan2018-2019

< Art+Feminism User Group | Planning

Introduction

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This plan explains the progress to date for the Art+Feminism initiative. For more detail regarding our specific strategies for growth and development, please see our strategic plan here. The main grant page is here.

Overview

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Over 4,000 people at more than 285 events around the world participated in Art+Feminism’s fifth annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, which took place during the months of March and April. This global effort created or improved nearly 22,000 articles on Wikipedia, almost four times the output of the 2017 events. The goal of the Art+Feminism campaign is to bolster coverage of feminism, gender, and the arts on Wikipedia — as a response to the encyclopedia’s well-known content gaps.

Highlights of the 2018 Edit-a-thon include content added to and pages created for notable figures including Christina Battle, Alexandra Bell, Torkwase Dyson, Silvia Federici, Dara Friedman, Juliana Huxtable, Gertrude Jekyll, Chō Kōran, Griselda Pollock, Annie Pootoogook, Collier Schorr, Tschabalala Self, Roberta Smith, Nobuko Tsuchiura, and Sam Vernon.

As we enter our sixth year of organizing we will continue to employ technology (like Slack) and provide supplemental training to make our organizers more independent; to continue the strategic outreach making the project more inclusive; and to continue to refine our materials (training, promotion, organization) to reflect the breadth and depth of our community. We are continuing the process of becoming a non-profit (see Strategic Report for more information) and growing our leadership team. We recently named McKensie Mack Director of Art+Feminism. Mack (pronouns: they/them) was brought on as Program Coordinator in 2017, to support the exponential growth of the global initiative. McKensie quickly made themselves invaluable, revitalizing our core leadership group with new ideas and insights into existing processes. They’ve facilitated the growth of the project in Latinx countries and fundamentally changed the scope of the project. In advance of becoming a non-profit, the choice of Director was clear.

Art+Feminism International Editathons Goals

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  • Build upon our expansion in Latin America, Africa and Asia to expand the reach of international Art+Feminism Editathons:
    • We want to double the number of events in Africa and Asia.
    • In 2018 we tripled the number of events in 2018 in Latin America, so we seek to maintain the Latin American community that we have built and create a platform for sustainable growth;
  • Retain existing organizers: our goal is to have 50 percent of 2018 organizers return in 2019.
  • Improve organizational capacity, and share institutional memory and knowledge:
    • We will expand our global team by bringing on 10 regional organizers and one lead co-organizer
    • We will refine our staffing strategies, and resources
  • Continue to increase participant diversity in terms of gender, race, economy, language, and culture:
    • Formalize partnerships with a minimum of four partner organizations that focus specifically on marginalized knowledge and communities of color.

Activities

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Our main activity is our annual edit-a-thon, which takes place around the world. In conjunction with and support of this event, we organize other events, as well as participate in research and publications.

You can see our activities from our 2015 IEG here and our 2016 IEG here.

In 2016-2017 we organized the following events: public programming on information activism; WikiData hackathon with Artsy; speaking on Wiki community panels about our work; training webinars on editing and collective organizing for volunteers and organizers, in English and Spanish; creating the Call to Action Art Commissioning Program, where each year, an artist will be selected to create a Creative Commons licensed artwork and Divya Mehra was selected for the inaugural commission; and publishing a statement of beliefs.

In 2017-2018 we shifted our priorities towards social media, online engagement and Wikidata. This past year, our social platforms have doubled with a combined 200% increase in community across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook; we started an Instagram page which is now home to 1K+ followers. We implemented a video series on Facebook Live called Office Hours, seven (7) 30 minute live videos created to help organizers and new editors understand the steps to planning and hosting Art+Feminism edit-a-thons, using the Dashboard, and finding funding for events. We presented the series in Spanish and English with our Regional Ambassador for Latin America, Melissa Tamani, leading the Spanish tutorials and our Regional Ambassador for West Africa, Mohammad Abdulai Sadat, leading the tutorials for organizers and editors in West Africa. We made quick guides to organizing and editing in Spanish and English. We also wrote We have written a full Wikidata Work Plan, which you can find summarized here.

During the MoMA editathon, we also organized a panel discussion moderated by design researcher and artist Caroline Sinders, featuring Sydette Harry, Editor, Mozilla Foundation, and Editor-at-Large, Coral Project; Sarah Jaffe, Reporting Fellow, the Nation Institute, and author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt; and Salome Asega, artist and two very popular break-out sessions in the afternoon, lead by McKensie Mack and Shelly Eversly that touched on implicit bias and teaching with Wikipedia (65% of MoMA's survey respondents said they attended one or both of the breakout sessions).

See below for a more detailed run-through of our metrics goals and our planned schedule for outreach, planning, and implementation.

Metrics Goals

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During our 2018 campaign, over 285 events took place on all six inhabited continents and online. At least 3800 participants created or improved over 43,000 content pages (22,500 articles, 18,000 wikidata items, over 2,500 images to Wikimedia Commons). Detailed outcomes from 2018 are here. Our metrics goals for 2019 are predictions based off of our model which you can view in this google sheet.

 
Current growth models for Art+Feminism events, participants, and articles created, based off of 5 years of data.

Global Metrics

  • 4200 participants
  • 1400 newly registered users
  • 41,250 content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects. We are basing this off of:
    • 18,000 articles forecast by the models
    • 3,250 Commons images, based off of past trends
    • 10,000 Wikidata items -- this is reduced because it will be a maintenance effort, rather than a heavy lift like this year.
    • 10,000 contingent on another successful competition

Project Metrics

  • 340 Events
  • Greater than 50 percent repeat organizers

While the total number of content pages is roughly equivalent to last year in aggregate, it should be read as an increase in output given the shift in numbers from Wikidata to Wikipedia articles (which has been and remains our main focus), and the complexities and contingencies of our forecast models.

Metrics will be tracked in the shared google doc.

Calendar

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September - October

  • Onboarding of new Regional Organizers and Lead Co-organizer, including Anti-Oppression Training and Software Skills Training to get them up to speed on Slack, Trello, and Streak.
  • Email and Social media pledge campaign to to previous node event organizers confirming the March 2019 editathon dates.

October - November

  • Continued outreach to existing and new nodes.
  • Begin planning public programming around New York City event(s) to take place in March.
  • Use Slack to encourage collaborative node working on specific issues that have come up in previous edit-a-thons, e.g. childcare, curriculum integration and selection of topics, and online and offline harassment.

December-January

  • Outreach to build interest for new events in 2019.
  • January is our biggest outreach and engagement month.
  • Completion of APG Midpoint Report.
  • Plan and hold training webinars on editing, conflict resolution, and grant writing for:
    • MoMA volunteers
    • Art+Feminism organizers
  • Confirm details for public programs, technology, and break out sessions at MoMA.
  • Plan survey

February

  • February is a month full of activity where we implement all of our strategies from the previous year's cycle of preparation and planning.
    • Finalize event details with MoMA for public programming, use of space, break-out sessions, and pedagogical strategies.
    • Finalize details for all node events: confirm location, Wikipedian, training, reporting strategies, funding requests, etc.
    • Finalize online training sessions for new organizers.

March

  • The edit-a-thon! March is the month where we hold our MoMA edit-a-thon and support organizers hosting March events globally.
  • Metrics: post-edit-a-thon, we spend most of March compiling the outcomes from our various events in order to report on the number of attendees, as well as articles created and updated.

April

  • Review successes and areas for improvement within our global campaign strategy and goals.
  • Update website to reflect outcomes, press coverage, etc.

May-June

  • Begin planning 2020 event:
    • Begin program with MoMA.
    • Confirm ambassador participation.
    • Attend annual campaign strategy retreat.

July-September

  • Begin preparing outreach for 2019 event.
  • Assign administrative duties to Regional Ambassadors.
  • Publish call for 2019 event pledges.

Target readership

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Art+Feminism events have taken place on all inhabited continents. These events have created or improved articles on a number of different language Wikipedias: Arabic, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Thai, Odia, Spanish, Nepalese, Esperanto, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Swedish, Catalan, Welsh, Dutch and more. The Art+Feminism community includes artists, art workers, activists, librarians, scholars, students, and Wikipedians. As our event archive and our 2017 and 2018 Dashboards show, we have gained support from diverse communities, from activist spaces like Interference Archive, to major universities like University of Pittsburgh and MIT, to public libraries like Darien Public Library and National Library of Wales, as well as cultural institutions like Tate, London, and more. We've also seen support from within the Wikimedia community, from organizations like Wikimedia NYC and Women in Red, for example. Our events add a lot of content to the Commons and have led to spin off campaigns like AfroCrowd, For the Record, and more.

Fit with strategy

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Increasing Participation

  • We will continue to grow our reach in communities of marginalized people and abroad. For more on our focus, please see this section of our strategic plan.
  • Consistently, we run the largest Wikipedia edit-a-thon, which grows every year:
Year Locations Participants Articles
2014 31 600 200
2015 75 1500 900
2016 175 2500 3500
2017 228 2762 5881
2018 285 3808 22319
2019 (projected) 340 4200 28000
  • Our work has welcomed new editors and organizers into the Wikipedia community and empowered them to collaborate with one another.
  • Inspired the founding of other projects, like AfroCROWD which stands as one of our community partners.

Improving quality

  • Participants at our events have created or improved nearly 33000 articles over the past four years - like Mary Corse and LaToya Ruby Frazier - in key areas of the gender gap.
  • Diversity Review and UX/UI Review can serve as models for all Wikipedia initiatives that aim to be more inclusive, thus improving the scope and reach of Wikipedia.

Resources

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Risks

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As we enter our sixth year of organizing, many of the risks to the project remain largely the same as last year.

Burnout

The phenomenal success of Art+Feminism has been wonderful. However, it has created an incredible amount of work for the lead co-organizers to juggle with their already busy professional schedules. In 2017-2018, despite the continued amazing efforts of our Program Coordinator, McKensie Mack, the entire core organizing team experienced burn out, despite additional staffing. While we are hopeful that additional Regional Organizers and an additional Lead Organizer will ameliorate this situation, as our community grows, the core leadership team has been unable to step back in the ways that we have hoped. Further, working towards 501c3 status will continue to take a toll on the leadership collective in 2018-2019.

Friendly Space Incidents

Although Art+Feminism has elicited an overall positive response the project has received some unwanted attention. For example, each year there have been reports of harassment at events; there have been incidents where individuals have not followed our materials and this has resulted in several articles for deletion; and the lead co-organizers have been targeted by active editors who don't like the way we do things. We have also encountered harassment and microaggressions online and in person at Wikimedia conferences. The labor of recording and reporting these incidents as well as providing sustained guidance to the foundation and community members also contributes to the above risk of burnout.

Growth

The project has exhibited steady, and at times exponential growth, as you can see in our growth model. This growth could become a burden. Alternatively, it is unclear when/how it will taper off. Many of the strategies listed above are meant to address this risk and make the project more sustainable.

As we mentioned in our previous Annual Plan, McKensie has exceeded the original asks of their role as a project coordinator and project manager. Their incredible work was the rationale for naming them Director. However, without additional funding to increase their salary and hours, we risk continued burnout from them, despite the additional staffing we have planned for in 2018-2019.

Budget

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Please find a spreadsheet of our budget on this google doc.

Accounting Expenses

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Last year, we started working with our fiscal sponsor Qubit and we have decided to continue working with them next year. Typical Fiscal sponsor fees range from 7% to 10%, so 5% represents a significant discount. As we've negotiated this discount, we will still be responsible for accounting and have allocated funding in our budget for this expense. In addition, we had to request a re-allocation of funding this year to cover the cost of wire transfers and Paypal transfers to our organizers. In the best interest of equity, we consider it our responsibility to ensure that organizers are not paying out of pocket fees to receive event reimbursement (especially when most reimbursement costs fall between $75 and $125). We have added a line item in our budget to cover those fees.

Shift From Rapid Grants

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During the 2017-2018 grant cycle, we tried something new by partnering with the Rapid Grants team in an effort to divide up some of our workload in relation to event reimbursement processing. As a number of our organizers related to us that process of application for Rapid Grants was rather extensive given their limited time for organizing and planning their events, we've listened to their feedback and have decided to return to our initial model. Last year's cycle of reimbursements were handled primarily by our Project Coordinator (now Director) McKensie Mack. Returning the workload of managing reimbursement inquiries to McKensie (in addition to their expanded responsibilities as director), we expect will mean that their hours for the year will most likely be spent before the end of the grant term. We are currently working with an accounting consultant to mitigate some of the workload that comes with auditing and reconciling our business account.

Our calculation of reimbursement for events will remain the same. We will advise our organizers to apply for funding with the following structure:

Organizers can apply for funding by projecting their attendance for this year based off of the headcount from last year x 1.25, which seems to be the average growth. Allocate $5 per person for events 4.5 hours and shorter, or $8 per person for events longer than 5 hours. Childcare funding guidelines are the same, scaled per event size (approximately one caregiver per 50 attendees).

All nodes can apply for well articulated programming plans that require additional funds. Priority will go to existing nodes, or new nodes with demonstrated organizational capacity.

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