Background

Program story

Art+Feminism homepage (2021)

We are currently in process of our Simple APG grant for 16-months starting September 1, 2020 - December 31, 2021. This one-time 16 months request will align our grant cycle with one of the existing WMF Simple APG cycles to hopefully facilitate easier communications, funding, and reporting between WMF and Art+Feminism. Thus, this report is being written before the grant cycle/final report is complete.

Part of our 2019-2020 APG grant included a website redesign that was fully launched in December 2020. We worked with Partner and Partners, a US-based, worker-owned design firm to redesign our website. It serves as the main hub for our resources, tools, guides and information. It is currently available in 4 languages (English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) and we’re working on having it available in Arabic by the end of the year. We work with a team of translators who are also knowledgeable about Wikipedia instead of relying on machine translation, which is often literal in its interpretation of Wiki-specific concepts and defaults to masculine versions of words in languages that rely on grammatical gender because machine translations at this point are very literal and also default to the masculine translation. In line with our feminist mission and values, our translation team are able to provide gender neutral interpretation of our materials.

Many of our regional ambassadors noted that the updated version of the website facilitated their outreach to potential event organizers. With information about the campaign and resources on how to join us organized and accessible in multiple languages, the updated website proved to be a useful tool.

In August 2021, the Art+Feminism leadership team, composed of co-lead organizers and staff, initiated a pause on all programmatic activities as we prioritized the work to improve and create anti-oppression policies and mechanisms internally. This deeply reflective, and ongoing work is the foundation to create cultural shifts, policies, and protocols for us to operate in a way that centers our values.

Art+Feminism continues to grow and evolve in many positive ways. As we continue to work on internal processes and approaches, we’ve noticed the influence of our work in the larger movement and in the emergence of new gender gap reduction projects with specific approaches. This is the case of the global campaign to generate visibility for women journalists “Women do News” whose training guide on Wikipedia editing is directly inspired by our Quick Guide for Editors, and the project Art+Sports+Feminism, inspired in the Art+Feminism campaign and created outside of our leadership team, as well our long-time event partners at UBC who created a Wikipedia Toolkit that highlights many of Art+Feminism's own training materials, as well as other valuable resources.

Program Progress

Annual Campaign

Cartel para art and feminism 2021

We initiated our 20-21 Campaign with a Community Care Statement. We knew that our international community had been living under a range of governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and we wanted to encourage our organizers to prioritize the health and safety of their communities. Not only that, but we also knew that because of the economic and social impacts of the pandemic, some of our organizers would opt out of participating in our campaign altogether. But for those who were eager to return and for organizers to the campaign, we provided resources (training materials and additional event funding) to make virtual events possible. For organizers hosting in-person events, we followed Wikimedia Foundation guidelines and requested that event organizers who were applying for our microfunding, complete the foundation’s risk assessment tool. Our plan to provide new and relevant resources to support our organizers throughout the pandemic began to take shape last year. From March 2020 onward, we began planning and creating virtual meeting resources. These resources include our Virtual Meeting Guide and screen captures of various online platforms (i.e., Zoom, Google Meet, and StreamYard) that can be used in hosting Art+Feminism events.

Art+Feminism Virtual Meeting Guide (2020) available in English, French, and Spanish

Furthermore, we were able to support event organizers hosting virtual events, not only through our resource guides, but providing additional funding to be used for technology like Zoom and to help offset the cost of data for events occurring in places with structural internet connectivity issues (i.e., event organizers could redistribute funds to their attendees in this case). To achieve this, we increased the cap of our event funding award from $125 to $250.

At the time of this report, these resources have supported more than 2640 editors at 153 edit-a-thons around the world. During this year's campaign, the Art+Feminism community has edited more than 15,000 Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items, of which more than 3,000 are new entries. This set of entries has accumulated a total of 55,800 reads. In addition, more than 300 files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

More details can be found in campaign Dashboard hosted by WikiEdu: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/campaigns/artfeminism_2021/programs

This year, in addition to editing events, we invited new and returning organizers to consider hosting non-editing events, including Meetups and Panels/Lectures/Conversations. To date, our organizers hosted several panels and conversations, some of which were integrated in a schedule of events that included editing. Some notable panels include a conversation with cartoonist MariNaomi at The Ohio State University (in the USA), Closing the Gender Gap in Africa and Decolonising the Internet hosted by Wikimedia Botswana Community Usergroup, and Arte + Feminismo: Artistas hondureñas en la Wikipedia hosted by YWCA Honduras.

Art+Feminism 2021 event attendees in Nepal.

Community Hours

To support our growing global community, in late 2019 we introduced online “Community Hours” on a variety of topics that might be useful for our community of organizers like promoting your event or offering case studies from our global community. Topics have ranged from technical (like how to edit) to case studies or talks related to the arts and feminism (like working collectives).

We defined criteria and a process for anyone within the Art+Feminism community to facilitate/pitch a Community Hours. Because of our Year-End fundraiser we are able to offer a modest honorarium of $125 for facilitators work for these sessions. In April, we started offering a Data/Internet Connectivity Stipend for Community Hours attendees who reside in regions where expenses for private internet/data costs are prohibitively expensive, Art+Feminism is able to offer a $5 USD stipend to offset costs.

In reverse chronological order for 2021:

07/21/2021: Community Hours: Unreliable Guidelines Report Share Out (YouTube)
07/18/2021: Community Hours: A+F for #WPWP (YouTube)
06/17/2021: Horas Comunitarias: La Musea M.A.M.I. (Esta sesión será en español) (YouTube)
05/22/2021: Cómo organizar una editatona A+F en línea (Esta sesión será en español) (YouTube)

04/24/2021: Media Wiki translate-a-thon for smaller language Wikipedia Communities (Wikimedia Commons)
04/22/2021: Intro to WikiCommons (Wikimedia Commons)
03/24/2021: Wikidata, Lexemes and Minority Languages (Recording)
02/26/2021: Promoting your (virtual) edit-a-thon (Wikimedia Commons)
02/06/2021: Art+Feminism Funding Opportunities (Wikimedia Commons)
01/21/2021 and 01/23/2021: Creating a Theme for your 2021 A+F Event

We have plans for future Community Hours on topics such as translation, accessibility, Wikidata, and more.

Administrative Growth

Strategic Planning

Following the work completed in summer 2020, we entered phase two of Strategic Planning facilitated by Wayfinding Partners. What originally was intended to be two full-day sessions, we divided the sessions into four parts to accommodate being virtual and working across timezones. The first two sessions were focussed on alignment and revision around our mission, vision and values. We also analyzed and explored questions like “What do we mean when we say intersectional feminism? Decolonization?” We discussed the scope of our work - does it end with Wikipedia? Or begin?

In the final two sessions we came to our “big question” and also defined a strategy screen to use for all strategies moving forward. Our big question is “How might Art+Feminism become a truly global organization in an equitable and accessible way?” Wayfinding Partners delivered a Road Map in April, and we are currently using the tools to work towards our short-term and midterm goals.

Small Donor Cultivation

Starting on #GivingTuesday (December 1, 2020) we kicked off our first-ever Year End Fundraiser raised nearly $9000 with 95 individual donors. We’re directly investing these funds back into our community with the aforementioned honorariums for Community Hours facilitators and have created a Regional Ambassador Fund, a pilot initiative that provides funds (up to $500 USD) for Regional Ambassadors to use for Art+Feminism inspired work, projects or for training or other professional development.

Board Development

Working with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA) we were able to rework our bylaws to create staggered terms for our new board members. In collaboration with board members Roderick Schrock, Michael Mandiberg and Sheetal Prajapati, we have invited and elected a board of directors that is over 60% BIPOC and women/non-binary. We are committed to these voices not just having a seat at the table, but taking part in building an open table at the leadership level that embodies the values of Art+Feminism. We’re humbled and delighted that this group of changemakers are joining us in our work and believe their expertise and experience will be invaluable to this critical moment of the organization.


Board Member	Pronouns	Board Position	Professional title(s)
Sheetal Prajapati	(she/her)	Board Chair	Interim Managing Director, Common Field; Principal, Lohar Projects; Faculty, School of Visual Arts
Roderick Schrock	(he/him)	Treasurer	Executive Director, Eyebeam
Michael Mandiberg	(they/them)	Secretary	Artist; Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center
Adela C. Licona	(she/her/ella)	Board member	Founder, The Art of Change Agency; Associate Professor Emeritus, English, University of Arizona
Kerrie Cotten Williams	(they/them/she/her)	Board member	Head of the Reference and Reader Services Section of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress
Wendy Woon	(she/her)	Board member	Consultant; Former Deputy Director for Education, The Museum of Modern Art

WikiCred Grant Initiative

Unreliable Guidelines: Reliable Sources and marginalized communities in French, English and Spanish Wikipedia, the report for our inaugural research project Reading Together: Reliability and Multilingual Global Communities is complete. The project used an intersectional feminist methodology to address how Wikipedia trainers involved in the Art+Feminism movement approach the reliable source guidelines in French, English and Spanish Wikipedias. Rigorous analysis ends with recommendations for more inclusive and diverse Wikipedias. The report was designed by graphic designer Inés Viana and was made available in June 2021 on our website here: https://artandfeminism.org/resources/research/unreliable-guidelines/

Art+Feminism User Group/Reporting/FinalReport2020-2021

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