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Grants:IEG/Art+Feminism Editathon training materials and network building

< Grants:IEG
statuscompleted
Art+Feminism Editathon training materials and network building
summaryThe organizers of the February 2014 Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon seek support to expand the success of this highly successful bootstrapped event through the creation of training materials and organization of a +Feminism facilitator network.
targetPrimarily English Wikipedia, with secondary impact on Dutch, German, and Spanish Wikipedia.
strategic priorityparticipation
themeoffline outreach and partnerships
amount14,175
contact• artandfeminismwiki(_AT_)gmail.com
volunteer• BrillLyle
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created on18:07, 23 September 2014 (UTC)


What is the problem you're trying to solve?

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Wikipedia's gender trouble is well documented. In a 2011 survey, Wikimedia found that only 8.5% of its contributors are female. The reasons for the gender gap are up for debate: suggestions include leisure inequality, how gender socialization shapes public comportment, and the contentious nature of Wikipedia's talk pages. The practical effect of this disparity, however, is not. Content is skewed by the lack of female participation. Many articles on notable women in history and art are absent on Wikipedia. This represents an alarming absence in an increasingly important repository of shared knowledge.

What is your solution?

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On February 1st 2014 during a Wikipedia event called Art+Feminism, approximately 600 participants convened in 31 locations in 6 Countries (USA, Canada, Australia, Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom) to edit articles on Art+Feminism. During this day, at least 101 new articles were created, and at least 90 articles improved. Highlights from the 40+ press stories include a LA Weekly feature story, the most shared article in ARTnews history, and a 30 minute podcast from Bitch Magazine. By all accounts, this was a success, with some saying this may have been the largest multi-location edit-a-thon ever. Furthermore, initial exploration with Wikimetrics indicate a high editor retention rate.

The organizers of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon seek funds to expand the success of this bootstrapped event. This IEG grant covers startup costs to build infrastructure for years to come. A separate PEG grant covers operational costs for one year.

Project goals

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Individual Engagement Goals: We are requesting funding to allow us to build more robust procedural and personnel infrastructure that would allow for the project to grow, and for others to replicate our process. We will build on existing infrastructure on Wikipedia to create slides, advertisements, targeted training, and other reusable materials. We will build these so they can be used both by our group, and satellite events, as well as reused by other gender gap campaigns and outreach.

+Feminism ambassadors: We will establish a network of +feminism ambassadors in each city who will lead organizing efforts. We will follow the model of the Wikipedia Ambassador program, and have regional ambassadors. We will seek to establish this network in North America, as well as on other continents. This network will exist off wiki as an email discussion list, and as an on wiki list with clear guidelines for contacting ambassadors. These ambassadors will include three categories of people:

  1. Experienced Wikipedians who can facilitate Gender Gap editathons & trainings
  2. Librarians and others with access to facilities to hold editathons in
  3. Professors, and other organizers who are both subject area experts, as well as conduits to bring attendees to the event

We have found that all three of these components are required to organize a successful Gender Gap editathon. This will be a reusable network, so if a STEM focused group wants to organize a Medicine+Feminism editathon, they can make use of the Experienced Wikipedians and the Librarians, who can vouch for them as they seek out Professors who are subject area experts and can recruit attendees.

Levels of Expertise We seek to train facilitators of varying levels of expertise. We do not expect someone to go through two or three 90 minute training sessions, and immediately become an expert Wikipedian! We do expect that they will be able to help a total newbie editor find their way to a talk page, or show them how to add a reference. In many cases these are people who have substantial experience with teaching, technology, and/or scholarship, so they are not exactly learning from scratch. Our goal in training this multi-tiered team is to ameliorate the burden on the elite level Wikipedians, so they can help triage the notablity of proposed articles, patrol new pages to ensure they are well formed, advise on other matters, and deal with deletions and other conflict resolution.

Handouts will include:

  • Materials for organizers:
    • What we have learned about finding venues and putting together events.
    • Who the other ambassadors are.
    • Sample emails to send to venues and collaborators.
    • A detailed set of guidelines based off of our HowTo with an expanded section on outreach. Promotional materials, including sample press releases, web ready graphics, and customizable printable posters.
  • Training Materials for facilitators: Developed based off our our curriculum development this fall. It will include all materials developed for the training sessions, as well as the materials we will base our January facilitator meeting off of. We will build on existing models, such as those provided by Wikimedia DC's GLAM Boot Camp materials and the Systemic Bias Kit.
  • Materials for +Feminism participants: A welcome handout with suggestions for structuring their participation (e.g. "If you have x amount of time, you can do y"; how to get a user account; asking for help; where to find cheat sheets, etc)

Off Wiki +Feminism Website: We will flesh out our already existing off wiki website. We feel strongly about building an off-wiki web presence, partly because we feel that our recruitment and publicity was successful in part because it existed off wiki, in other networks. We found that the vast majority of our participants had not signed into the on wiki event page prior to arriving, and that a large percentage didn't even know it existed. For these reasons, it is essential to have an off-wiki clearinghouse for the basic information. We will build off of the the Art+Feminism tumblr we have maintained for the past year. We will purchase the domain name plusFeminism.org, allowing the set up of various thematic editathons (e.g. Art+Feminism, Medicine+Feminism) as subdomains (i.e. art.plusfeminism.org, medicine.plusfeminism.org).

Project plan

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Activities

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Please see the PEG activities for PEG timeline

December
  • Based off of October workshop (which will be run off of curriculum from February 2014 event), revise curriculum for December workshop.
  • Initiate planning & outreach for March event, including social media announcements, on wiki invitations to collaborate
  • Begin steps to establish network of +feminism ambassadors in each city who will lead organizing efforts
  • Share training materials and feedback from workshop with satellite organizers
  • Begin website work: purchase the domain name plusFeminism.org, as well as a more robust tumblr theme; continue to use tumblr as our CMS, while using art.PlusFeminism.org as the new custom domain name. For more on the technical aspects of this, please see this reference page. After the new theme has been installed, we will review and finalize organizing and editing resources, as well as laying out a calendar of updates for the blog/news section. We will also pay to boot the link to the website via Facebook advertising.
January
  • Continue outreach and satellite event support for March event.
  • Post on wiki initial network of +feminism ambassadors in each city who will lead organizing efforts
  • Initiate press outreach
  • Based off of December workshop, finalize curriculum for February workshop
  • Meet in person with recently trained NYC area +Feminism facilitators, to prep them to give February workshop.
  • Begin work on creating handouts and protocols for organizing +Feminism editathons.
February
  • Finalize all +Feminism ambassador outreach and satellite event support for March event.
  • Design and implement a Art+Feminism barnstar
  • Complete work on handouts and protocols for organizing +Feminism editathons.
March
  • Sunday, March 8th, Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon, in NYC and around the world. (See PEG Grant for details on this event)
April
  • Debrief with organizers
  • +Feminism network stands on its own to support one-off satellite editathons.
  • Begin work on the +Feminism kit, which includes all organizer materials produced
May
  • Revise and finalize a +Feminism kit
  • Prepare grant report for WMF

Budget

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  • Graphic design contractor, for design of collateral materials: (Amount) 2000 USD
  • Organizer labor; Includes organization, outreach, curriculum development, creation of collateral materials, and project management: (12,000) USD
    • This is calculated based off of 20 hours of collective work per week, for 24 weeks, at $25/hr
    • This work will be divided amongst the four grantees
    • Each grantee will track their hours worked, and will be compensated on an hourly basis
  • Tumblr Theme: ($75) USD
  • Domain registration for 10 years ($100) USD
  • Total Budget: (14,175) USD

Community engagement

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Our goal of organizing a network of +Feminism ambassadors will necessarily require us to engage with community. We will have ongoing dialog with the network of women and male ally Wikipedians we discovered last year during our organizing. Some of these are on our mailing list, others are active in organizing standalone Art+Feminism editathons, others we are in email contact with, while others we converse with over talk pages. These editors are members of key WikiProjects, which we will regularly post to the talk pages for engagement.

The success of the 2014 Art+Feminism edit-a-thon relied heavily on access to professional networks of librarians and art historians via listservs. In the months since, we have presented at the College Art Association’s THATcamp, the Art Libraries Society of North America, and Wikicon USA. We have a forthcoming publication in Women in the Arts magazine and plan to continue our outreach to professional organizations of artists and librarians (see: Community Notification). We have also secured support from POWarts and have a dedicated list of supporters from our last event that we will leverage as we begin outreach for our training sessions and the edit-a-thon in March.

Sustainability

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We expect that the project will continue after the grant ends. The IEG component of these two grants will allow us to build substantial organizational resources that will enable these events to continue. These resources will include:

  • Guides for organizers, and participants
  • A network of +Feminism ambassadors who will help organizers and facilitators
  • On wiki resources
  • An off wiki website that is a portal to the project
  • A robust mailing list for discussion amongst organizers

These are all the resources needed to organize events of this nature. We will build all of these so they can be used both by our group and satellite events, as well as reused by other gender gap campaigns and outreach. The plusFeminism.org will be available for other groups to create subdomains via (e.g. health.plusFeminism.org).

Measures of success

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Our measures of success are inextricably linked to the measures of the PEG grant. In addition to the measures listed there, we will consider the the IEG successful if:

  • At least 350 articles are created and/or improved at all locations combined
  • The materials and trainings are effective enough that women trained during the first three workshops take an active role in facilitating workshops during the editathon in NYC
  • At least 25 of the satellite locations run mini-training workshops based off our materials
  • We create a network of +Feminism ambassadors, with at least 80 ambassadors
  • At least 30 satellite events are organized via a +Feminism ambassador without the organizer having to go through the core Art+Feminism organizers. These include events on March 7/8, and events organized in the the subsequent months.
  • Please see the PEG grant for goals re: numbers of articles & editors

Get involved

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Participants

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Siân Evans (User:Siankevans) is an art librarian, who is the organizer of the Women and Art Special Interest Group of the Art Libraries Society of America. As an implementation manager at Artstor, she has extensive experience in outreach, training and advocacy of library-related software. She is actively involved in the library community, publishing on issues around open access, collaborative cataloging, and alternative access to special collections.

A multifarious art worker, Jacqueline Mabey (User:Failedprojects) studied art history at Wilfrid Laurier University, McGill University, and The University of British Columbia. She has worked: in the film industry, at alternative art spaces, and in curatorial positions across Canada; and in artist studios and commercial galleries in New York City. Since May 2013, Mabey has worked independently under the honorific, failed projects. She lives with a small dog next to a large park in Brooklyn.

Michael Mandiberg (User:Theredproject) is an artist and Associate Professor of Digital Media at the City University of New York (CUNY). An open source/Creative Commons activist, he has extensive experience collaboratively organizing projects and authoring books, including writing a collaborative book about collaboration. He has two decades of teaching experience, and has organized numerous workshops and public programs, including Wikipedia trainings and editathons. He has been editing Wikipedia for 7 years, and teaching with Wikipedia for 4 ; He was a 2011 Teaching Fellow, and his course pages are linked from his Userpage.

Dorothy Howard (User:OR drohowa) is a Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Metropolitan New York Library Council, archivist in training at the Jean-Noël Herlin Archive project, and writer. Dorothy facilitates GLAM-Wiki projects, trainings, and Edit-a-thons for libraries and archives in New York and has facilitated Wikimedia NYC Chapter and Wikimedia LGBT activities, along with being a session curator for WikiConference USA 2014. Her divergent interests also lie in open licensing, open-source encryption tools for journalists, valuating crowdsourced digital labor, LGBT rights, contemporary art ephemera archiving, and digital archiving.

  • Advisor Organize and facilitate activity in Chicago. JessicaParrisWestbrook (talk) 23:10, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
  • Volunteer I would love to assist in adding features to Meetup pages similar to what was done for the MoMA page BrillLyle (talk) 18:32, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Community Notification

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Please paste links below to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. Need notification tips?

On Wiki

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Off Wiki

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Endorsements

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Do you think this project should be selected for an Individual Engagement Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. (Other constructive feedback is welcome on the talk page of this proposal).

  •   Support I know Dorothy since the successful Art and Feminism edit-a-thon that ran in several cities. I have also worked with her during the Wiki Loves Pride edit-a-thon. Both these events brought several new articles to Wikipedia. I think that this IEG funded project will help attract more people, especially women's rights activists to Wikipedia, thereby increasing the diversity of participation on Wikipedia. I am endorsing this grant request. Additionally, I am willing to help the team members execute this project in my capacity as a volunteer. --Netha Hussain (talk) 21:08, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
  •   Support I love this project. I think it will be important to ensure that the editors who come to this with great excitement and passion re: art and feminism are also prepared to handle the cultural norms and processes of the Wikipedia community that may be initially off-putting for some newcomers, especially those who aren't socialized to be argumentative or aggressive.--Mssemantics (talk) 22:51, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
  •   Support I endorse the Art+Feminism project for a PEG grant. The event earlier this year in New York City was effective in raising the visibility of women artists and art historians on Wikipedia. It trained a new generation of women editors, thus empowering a marginalized constituency. The IEG grant will continue to move these efforts forward. Netherzone (talk) 20:57, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
  • Clear plan and goals to address major discrepancies. JessicaParrisWestbrook (talk) 23:09, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
  •   Support -- Since the initial Art+Feminism event last February, we have had three edit-a-thons in Minnesota. We have seen a high degree of interest from GLAM institutions in continuing these events. Regionally, these events have served as lead-ins to more formalized relationships with centers of culture and learning. While we have been successful in maintaining interest from a small group of committed editors, our efforts would be greatly complemented by the materials and organizational backbone that this grant seeks to create. gobonobo + c 12:09, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
  •   Support Given the success of this campaign thus far, I think it is worth investing in so that we can see how the program may grow and have greater impact. --Another Believer (talk) 14:54, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
  •   Support Portland, Oregon joined the Edit-a-Thon on February 1, 2014 with an event at Portland State University that attracted around 75 participants - almost all of them first-time Wikipedia editors, most of them women. This project is an important step towards narrowing the gender gap on Wikipedia, while also working to preserve and celebrate women's contributions to society and culture more broadly. ItalianscallionPDX (talk) 06:04, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
  •   Support Helping to organize and facilitate the Portland, Oregon Edit-a-than was an incredibly powerful and rewarding experience for me. Enabling a safe educational space for anyone to learn Wiki skills and have open dialogue about feminism in art and how this functions online is an incredibly rare and important opportunity. Everyone who attended our event would love to be involved again, and this network of people is a powerful tool. Having training materials would be a great resource for future events. Krystalsouth (talk) 17:39, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
  •   Support Creating movement resources is a key aspect that we all need to focus on. This project is very well conceptualized. Best wishes. --Visdaviva (talk) 12:07, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
  •   Support Great initiative, and in the Netherlands, the local version of the Art&Feminism editathon had far-reaching impact as well. I also agree on the importance of a non-wiki online presence. We had great results with Facebook (can I mention that website here?) Jane023 (talk) 09:24, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
  •   Support Really excellent project - and there is so much more work to be done! It is very well organized and easy to participate in! --User:BettyLondon, 11:09, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
  •   Support -- These efforts are great, but without systematically automating the structures, it puts a lot of pressure on organizers, so this project will create the template and facilitate engagement. BrillLyle (talk) 18:33, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
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