Art+Feminism User Group/Reporting/Meta2019

The Art+Feminism User Group was recognized as a Wikimedia user group in September 2017. This report outlines the accomplishments and activities organized by the group between September 2018 and September 2019

This report is essentially a summary of three other more detailed reports:

Summary

For its sixth-annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Art+Feminism exceeded all of our metrics goals: 311 events took place in 43 countries on all six inhabited continents and online. At least 4360 participants created or improved over 31,500 content pages (28,787 Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items, over 2800 images to Wikimedia Commons). Importantly, we expanded our focus to include non-binary folks and launched a large scale social media campaign advocating for an expansive understanding of gender. We saw significant growth in events in Asia and contributions to the Armenian language Wikipedia. Working with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, Art+Feminism became a non-profit entity, which will help secure our long term stability.

Finances

Our 2018-2019 Spending Report can be found here. We learned a few major lessons this year - notably around international payments. We ended up with a -347.78 deficit which was paid for out of our independent fundraising.

This year marks the end of our work with fiscal sponsors, and we have been actively working towards setting up our own accounting, payroll, and payment systems. As of September 2019 this work was still in progress.

Activities

International Editathons

For a more fleshed out reporting of events, see here.

4,360 people attended 311 events around the world in 43 countries, which took place during the months of March and April. 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 articles created and improved include Anni Albers, Winifred Hall Allen, Archivo Histórico del movimiento de lesbianas feministas de México, Mieke Bal, Deanna Bowen, Tania Bruguera, Jade Nasogaluak Carpenter, Elizabeth Catlett, Sarah Charlesworth, Sarah Charlesworth, Feminatywum, Rita Gonzales, Che Gossett, Barbara Hammer, Nancy Holt, Holly Lee, Luanne Martineau, Amara Moira, Haruko Okano, Judy Pfaff, Griselda Pollock, Gabriela Rodríguez, Leanne Simpson, and Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell.

This year, we saw a more than 300% increase in community across Facebook (86% growth) and Instagram (311% growth). We also made a major change to our communications and organizing strategy; launching the Gender and The Non-Binary campaign. The campaign facilitated greater growth and engagement among our digital communities due to the use of our hashtags #artandfeminism, #noweditingaf, and #beyondthebinary. Through the consistent use of the hashtag and our focus on engaging our online communities in conversation around their experiences related to gender equity, gender identity, women's rights, trans rights as human rights, and intersectional feminism we were able to amplify our messaging and reach.

Metrics

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).

Program and Events Dashboard

We continue using the Program and Events Dashboard. We found that our second year of using the Dashboard ran smoother than the first year. This was in part due to the organizational capacity built last year (training materials, repeat organizers with experience, etc), and also due to an extensive set of improvements that Sage Ross and Maudite completed. Several key improvements included: the ability to request new accounts via the dashboard interface and automatically add them to that program; both program specific queues and one centralized queue where we could approve accounts that were requested; and a much more sophisticated and publicly accessible alerts queue that was specific to our campaign.

Program Coordinator

Our previous Program Coordinator, McKensie Mack, was appointed Director on July, 2018. They left the organization in July 2019 to pursue broader anti-oppression work. With the hiring of our Executive Director, Kira Wisniewski and Project Administrator, Nina Yeboah, in September 2019, we have increased capacity to build out our existing community of organizers and Regional Ambassadors. We're excited spend this year nurturing our existing community and building organizational capacity for the project's future stability.

Media, Presentations and Resources

Press

Art+Feminism does not maintain a specific page that brings together International press mentions, but you can find a curated selection here.

Presentations and Conference Attendance

Two representatives attended Wikimedia Conference 2018, Berlin
A representative co-facilitated Decolonize The Internet.
Two representatives attended Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town
Two representatives presented at Research Data Access and Preservation Summit.
A representative presented at Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium
A representative presented at This Site Is Under Revolution
A representative presented at IMAGINEPEACE Forum at the Gardiner Museum, Toronto
A representative presented at Conférence 934: How do digital media shape the image of women?, Consulate General of France in New York

Material Resources

We have created a number of valuable resources, including:

Next Steps

Developing a Board of Directors and a formal structure as we build out Art+Feminism as a 501c3.
Developing clear processes for communication with and between our Regional Ambassadors.
Building an anti-harassment working group to help support global organizers in the face of repeated harassment.
Creating and publishing more translated materials
Creating an inventory of all Art+Feminism training and organizing materials and updating them as needed.
For more detailed information about our proposed plans for the 2019-2020 structure please see our 2019-2020 Grant Proposal