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

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Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months (December 2014-February 2015)

Summary

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The organizers of the 2014 Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathons sought funds to expand the success of last year's bootstrapped event by building out infrastructure, materials for organizers, training materials for facilitators, materials for +Feminism participants, and to build an Off-Wiki website, in addition to building a network of +Feminism regional ambassadors.

This IEG grant covers startup costs to build infrastructure for this group and others can build on for the future. A separate PEG grant covers operational costs for one year, including organizing around the 2015 Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thons held on International Women's Day weekend.

Methods and activities

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Timeline

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Pre-grant
December
  • Based off of the October Train-the-Trainer workshop (which will be run off of curriculum from February 2014 event), revised curriculum for December workshop. We create re-usable Art + Feminism Training Slides that can either be used in an open source .pdf format or in PowerPoint with a notes field. Click here to view these materials.
  • Initiated planning & outreach for the main March Art+Feminism Edit-a-thons, including listserv outreach, social media announcements, on wiki invitations to collaborate.
  • Art+Feminism Facebook (almost 2,000 followers).
  • Paid to boost the link to the website via Facebook advertising.
  • Began outreach to Art+Feminism 2014 satellite organizers to begin establishing network of +feminism ambassadors in each city who will lead organizing efforts.
  • Began to solicit satellite event details and feedback from their organizers, and share training materials and workflow suggestions
  • Began website work: purchased the domain name plusfeminism.org and created a landing page. Created the sub domain art.plusfeminism.org and built the website.
January
  • Continued outreach and satellite event support for March 2015 satellite events.
  • Initiated press outreach in collaboration with Wikimedia Foundation Communications Team and POWarts.
  • Based off of December Train-the-Trainers workshop, continued to craft curriculum, resources, and materials for February Train-the-Trainers workshop and distribution to satellites. We developed a Art + Feminism Beginner Training Video Series so that organizers can share this with local volunteers and interested colleagues. Click here to view these materials.
  • Re-vamped Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtandFeminism pages on Wikipedia.
February
  • Held ArtAndFeminism NYC Training Feb2015
  • Extensive outreach to local Wikipedians on behalf of satellite events
  • Begin work on creating handouts and protocols for organizing +Feminism Edit-a-thons
  • Finalized all +Feminism ambassador outreach and satellite event support for March event
  • Continued to craft handouts and protocols for organizing +Feminism editathons
  • Worked extensively with MoMA and POWarts to coordinate volunteers, food, childcare, equipment for the event at MoMA
March
  • We held the second annual Art and Feminism edit-a-thon. For a narrative description and list of satellite events, please see our Outcomes page.
  • We responded to numerous press requests, both for our event at MoMA and for the satellites

Midpoint outcomes

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The following learning materials, curated resources, and other media were developed within the scope of this IEG grant.

Procedural infrastructure / materials for organizers

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Training materials for facilitators

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Lesson Plans for in person Trainings

Slides

Translation of some of the main Art+Feminism pages into other languages

Videos

Materials for +Feminism participants

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Off Wiki +Feminism Website

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  • Purchased domain [1] and set up theme, design and basic information.
  • Installed, and customized Social Hashtags plugin [2], allowing us to pull in all Instagram and Twitter posts tagged with #ArtAndFeminism.
  • Began to organize training videos and other materials on website: [3]
  • Began to organize and curated bibliography of press on website: [4]

+Feminism ambassadors (re-usable network)

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Progress made in establishing a network of +Feminism regional ambassadors in each city who lead organizing efforts:

  • Sent e-mail to 2014 Art+Feminism organizers asking them to formally agree to be +Feminism regional ambassadors, and began to gather spreadsheet and list that will later "go public." Currently there are 54 signed on. This list hopes to include:
  • Experienced Wikipedians who can facilitate Gender Gap editathons & trainings
  • Librarians and others with access to facilities to hold editathons in
  • Professors, and other organizers who are both subject area experts, as well as conduits to bring attendees to the event
  • Train-the-trainers events held in New York to increase the expertise and community of +Feminism ambassadors.
  • Satellite events were encouraged to set up their own Train-the-Trainers events to begin building local, community, networks.

Train-the-Trainer Events

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Leading up the the March 7th and March 8th International Women's Day Edit-a-thons, Train-the-Trainer events were held in New York by the Art+Feminism Organizers at CUNY Graduate Center. These events were held to held build the knowledge, expertise, and community of the +Feminism network, as well as to test the training materials in-development so that they could be approved prior to the main March 2015 International Women's Day Art+Feminism Edit-a-thons.

Press Materials

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Changes to Outcomes

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Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

  • We decided to spend more design and development time on building training videos than outreach materials, because we found that we didn't have trouble getting people to events and it was more important to make sure they were properly trained. This was especially true for events that we were unable to find ambassadors for.
  • We employed a hosted Wordpress site for our off-wiki web presence instead of a Tumblr. We made this decision based on the more robust CMS and increased functionality.


Learning

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The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

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Process

  • Harassment & Safe Space issues: We need more mediation processes / information related to dealing with on-Wiki and off-Wiki harassment to bolster Safe-space resources for event organizers. This is both something that we need to provide for other organizers so they can act on situations, and also support we need from the WMF and/or a third party mediator, such as that proposed by the Harrassment reporting service idea.
  • Interaction with local chapters: Because we are a rhizomatic international group that doesn't follow many of the received wisdom of best practices on wiki (e.g. we organize off wiki, embrace n00bs, hold large events, and rely on people with externally validated subject expertise), we found that International Chapters (and some US chapters) had a hard time understanding our process, and working with us. This resulted in some conflict, and one cancelled event, but more frequently it resulted in an absence of a critical mass of Wikipedians at certain events. We need to interact better with Wikipedia Chapters in the US and International, and the Wikipedia community on learning materials and resources; these include Gender Gap stakeholder groups. Interestingly, we found that the more established national chapters (with more staffing, and more bureaucracy) were less likely to be able to interface with us and support the local organizers in their efforts.
  • Handholding: While the vast majority of the node organizers were super competent, a small handful required extensive handholding and micromanaging. We need to figure out better processes, either to assign them other past node organizers as mentors, or follow more of a sink or swim model. This was one of the key factors that lead to organizer overload.
  • Organizer overload: we found that it was a huge challenge to keep up with all the organizing. Potential routes forward range from the use of CRM software, and project management software, to increasing the core organizing group and decentering authority to a regional level. Overall, this was substantially more work than we budgeted for in our grant.
  • Intersectionality: Need to invite more into the core organizing group to ensure we're truly intersectional in our feminist practice.

Materials

  • Working across languages: Need to continue development of non-English materials (we currently have EN, ES, FR, NL) need to work with Wikipedia:Translation. In particular, we found we had very few non Roman Character Language participants.
  • Notability issues: Provide more detailed training information on notability for the satellite events.
  • Librarians without Wikipedians: Need to bolster training materials into a digestible structure so that librarians feel empowered to run events without the necessity of a Wikipedian's presence.
  • Ensuring that participants at events have access to scholarly resources: we attempted to collaborate with Wikipedia Library on research materials, but they were unable to support us with JStor access given our one-day process.

What is working well

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  • Lots of interest at a global level, particularly among arts institutions and libraries
  • Press coverage of the events has been very successful and helped spread public awareness of the Gender Gap.
  • Expanding the type of editors working on Wikipedia.
  • Our materials were widely used, and response was very positive
  • Many locations held train the trainers sessions

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Next steps and opportunities

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What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this IEG at the end of your project, please also mention this here.

Resources to Create

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  • Create and publish a public-facing list of +Feminism organizers to help offer regional support.
  • Finalize existing organizing and training materials
  • Design the visual look and feel of all posters, fliers, toolkits for organizing, facilitating and promoting events.
  • Design and implement an Art+Feminism Barnstar.

Renewal

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We are proposing a renewal of this IEG grant. The amount of work was greater than we expected, and we uncovered new areas where we need to bolster our work.

Future Goals - as part of the renewal

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  • Diversity Audit
  • Standardize process for gathering post event metrics for immediate reporting to press
  • Standardize process for identifying and supporting articles that might need more support post-event.
  • Reach out to national chapters, and build a line of communications
  • Improve scalability and make things more self sufficient.
    • Research and implement CRM and Project Management software
    • Decentralize, diversify and expand organizing committee
    • Refine protocols for communication amongst +Feminism ambassadors, including regional ambassadors in each city who lead organizing efforts.
    • Refine protocols re: handholding.
    • Move all materials on wiki (pdfs, ppt, vidoes, etc,) so anyone can edit
  • After Diversity Audit, shift the language in our materials to be more precise and explicit that it is rhizomatic and meant to be remixed, that they don't need to as for permission from us to run an event, or to change the focus they see fit. Specifically:
    • Clarify the collective ownership of the Tasks list, and that everyone is welcome to add to it
    • Include more information re: Harassment & Safe Space issues
    • Create a post event FAQ
    • Make sure we're more explicit in all of our materials about open access resources and that you can run an event without access to databases that exist behind pay walls.
    • Revise & streamline the HowTo page, to function as a clearinghouse for new organizers
    • Adapt & refine our current emails into sample emails for organizers to use to send to venues and collaborators.
    • Increase translation of materials, including non-roman character set languages
  • Reach out to other thematic gender gap groups and interested parties to share our materials and best practices.
  • Employ web developer to help expand the functionality of the website

Grantee reflection

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