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

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

This Individual Engagement Grant is renewed

renewal scope

timeline & progress

finances

midpoint report

final report

Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's 6-month project.

Part 1: The Project

Summary

During the month of March, 2016, over 2500 participants at more than 175 events around the world participated in Art+Feminism’s third annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, resulting in the creation of 2000 new pages and improvements to 1500 articles on Wikipedia. This represents a significant increase over the 2015 events, where approximately 1500 participants convened in 75 locations in 17 countries, creating and improving over 900 articles. As a group, our major achievements this year include:

• Significant and successful outreach to post-secondary institutions nationally and internationally
• A review of our materials and methods by a group of experience community organizers
• A UX/UI review of our online platforms
• The creation of a new website and updated materials in response to the above

By far our greatest success is the continued exponential growth of our project; the growth models forecast 325 events in 2017, with 3500 participants who will create between 5500-8000 articles. Below you can see a chart and graphs documenting our growth since 2014, as well as this projected growth for 2017.

We think that the Diversity Review and UX/UI Review are significant resources for the movement as a whole. What we've learned from them has been invaluable and, at turns, surprising. For example, we were deeply surprised to learn from the UX/UI Review that many people do not understand how to navigate our meet up page, missing edit-a-thons in their town as a result; thus, we've decided to follow the Review's suggestion of moving all event information off-Wiki to our new website, so as to break prohibitive information design barriers for new editors. We recognize our responsibility as movement leaders to be role models in our approach to bringing new editors in the Wikipedia community, who will continue to enrich it with their specific knowledges and skill sets.

Growth

Year	Locations	Participants	Articles
2014	31	600	200
2015	75	1500	900
2016	175	2500	3500
2017*	325	3500	6000

*projected based off of growth models

These charts and graphs show the current growth models for events, participants, and articles created, based off of 3 years of data. Year 0 is 2014, so next year is year 3. Locations (left) and articles (right) have grown exponentially, while participants (center) has grown linearly. This implies that we are moving towards a model with more smaller events, and that our our average participant's productivity is increasing exponentially each year. We are just now becoming aware of the scope of this increased productivity, and can only speculate as to what it could be attributed to, but some immediate possibilities include: better training material for before and during events, better organizer guidelines for how to hold events, building a cohort of experienced A+F Editors, and buy in from the larger Wikimedia community (e.g. Women in Red).

Methods and activities

The majority of the activities listed below took place after the event, so for a full list of outreach, training, and engagement please see our activities listed in our midpoint report.

Since the midpoint report we have:

• Concluded the Diversity Review, with our subcommittee.
• Made changes to our materials, per the Diversity Review.
• Concluded the UX/UI report
• Created a new website, per the UX/UI report.

We have also researched and begun the process of creating a Art+Feminism User Group, and applying for a Simple Annual Grant. Our hope with this change is to increase the sustainability of the project and further de-centralize it.

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

• Participation this year was far bigger than we expected! To get a sense of some of the amazing events, check out Commons:Category:ArtAndFeminism 2016
• This year, we did significant outreach internationally, and as a result were able to further decentralize and engage with the international Wikipedia community.
  • For example, the Paris event had 600 attendees, which exceeded the New York event!
  • Scheduling regular meeting with local Wikipedians, like Stuart Prior in the UK, was helpful in building out more European edit-a-thons.
• Prior to the event, we spent a lot of time and energy on outreach to universities and colleges.
  • We met our expectations for response from our cold-calls, but, more importantly, we built infrastructure to do it again.
  • In our Shared Google Drive, we saved all of our outreach research, so we have lists of librarians and Wikipedians around the world, that we can continue to build our outreach next year, and add to it.
  • We've learned how to better use Streak to personalize outreach.
• We implemented far better project management infrastructure.
  • Although we still use Google Drive heavily, we no longer find ourselves lost in Google Sheets.
  • Using Streak and Trello have revolutionized the way we've handled our organization process. For more information, see the Learning section below.
• As a result of these efforts, we now have a better sense of our community and where outreach should be directed
• For a detailed list of the outcomes specific to the event, see our Midpoint Outcomes.

Progress towards stated goals

Planned measure of success (include numeric target, if applicable)	Actual result	Explanation
Build lines of communication with at least 10 international chapters	goal met	We built lines of communication with Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Spain, Wikimedia Mexico, Wikimedia Egypt, Wikimedia South Africa, Wikimedia Tunisia, Wikimedia India, Wikimedia Portugal, Wikimedia Germany, and Wikimedia Switzerland. However, cold-calling these groups was unsuccessful; contact was usually made by them approaching us to let us know they were organizing an event.
Establish organizing committee including regional organizers and diversity subcommittee	goal met	You can learn more about our organizers and diversity subcommittee here.
Research, set up and train organizers on CRM to decentralize organizing process	goal met	The CRM and other project management tools were a game-change. Streak and trello were easy to use and made organizing large amounts of data significantly less difficult.
Complete and publish Diversity Subcommittee Evaluation	goal met	You can review the evaluation here.
Revise A+F materials to reflect Diversity Subcommittee Evaluation	goal met	You can review our updated organizer's kit here.
Increase outreach to geographic regions and institutions where we have not had much uptake	goal met	There were Art+Feminism events on every inhabited continent.

Think back to your overall project goals. Do you feel you achieved your goals? Why or why not?

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across all grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the "Global Metrics." We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" as often as necessary.

1. Next to each metric, list the actual numerical outcome achieved through this project.
2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for a research project which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. Number of active editors involved	623
2. Number of new editors	977
3. Number of individuals involved	approx. 2,500	Please see: 1) list of all users by event 2) list of all users alphabetically.
4. Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	589 images from 41 events	The majority of these images uploaded to the commons were of the events themselves, rather than of art or artists. As such, it may be useful proxy for measuring the community building aspect of the project. Roughly 1/4 of our events uploaded photos, which implies a higher level of engagement with the community.
5. Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	approx. 3,500	Please see: 1) list of work by event 2) list of new pages 2) list of improved pages 3) list of drafts
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	334,574,336 bytes	307,753,917 added, 26,820,419 subtracted. At 2,000 characters per page, that is approximately 165,000 pages of content...?

Learning question

Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

• We would say yes! Both because of the steady expansion of participation and because of our Indicator of Impact below.
• We also note the way that Art+Feminism editathons are amplifiers of the existing networks and projects: For their March 2016 online editathon, ~80 editors of Women in Red created/improved 841 pages, which is roughly 4 times the volume of edits, and 2 times the number of editors for their previous editations.

Indicators of impact

Do you see any indication that your project has had impact towards Wikimedia's strategic priorities? We've provided 3 options below for the strategic priorities that IEG projects are mostly likely to impact. Select one or more that you think are relevant and share any measures of success you have that point to this impact. You might also consider any other kinds of impact you had not anticipated when you planned this project.

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects? Our project has catalyzed others to organize in related areas. These groups/projects include: Just for the Record; Afrocrowd; Art Gallery of Ontario's Wiki Wednesday series; ReMatriate Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, and more. We have inspired others to create tools to explore the gender gap.

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

Project resources

Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

• Diversity Review: Alice Backer, founder of AfroCrowd, Sheetal Prajapati, Assistant Director, Learning and Artists Initiatives, Museum of Modern Art, and Marin Watts, Director of Operations and Communications, Trans Justice Fund completed an audit of all of our on and off wiki materials, from outreach materials, to web presence, to training materials. We are in the process of incorporating those changes into our materials and will continue to do so in 2016-2017. This audit was not only instrumental for us in thinking through being a truly inclusive project, but can also serve as a model for other Wikimedia groups interested in exploring diversity. As such, we've created a Learning Pattern [listed below under Learning] to help more Wikipedians think through issues of inclusivity within the Wikipedia community.
• UX/UI report: User Experience designer, Jennifer Brook conducted interviews with the core team, regional organizers, and attendees at the MoMA event, and produced a report and a site map that eventually lead to the redevelopment of our website.
• Art+Feminism Training Video Series: We updated the videos to reflect the development of the visual editor so that many of our new users who are not comfortable working in wikitext could take advantage of this new tool. Also, as per early recommendations from our Diversity Subcommitee, we updated our trainings and to make sure our examples were intersectional, including people of color and queer people in place of white women, so as not to perpetuate many of the issues of mainstream white feminism.
• Training sessions online: Click to view.
• Art + Feminism Training Slides: We updated the PowerPoints to reflect the development of the visual editor so that many of our new users who are not comfortable working in wikitext could take advantage of this new tool. Also, as per early recommendations from our Diversity Subcommitee, we updated our trainings and to make sure our examples were intersectional, including people of color and queer people in place of white women, so as not to perpetuate many of the issues of mainstream white feminism.
• Art+Feminism Organizer's Kit: Per early suggestions from the Diversity Subcommittee, we updated our Organizer's Kit to outline our "core values," which highlights our safe space policy and guidelines for horizontal community organizing. We also built this document out to be more robust, with more specific suggestions and guidelines for local organizers.

Learning

What worked well

Continuing to develop on our initial goals: As you can see in the project summary above, by far and away our greatest success was continuing to scale this project. This year we continued to build on the success of previous years, so in this section of the report we wanted to look back at our initial grant in which we listed the following successes during our initial Midpoint Report:

• 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
• We held very successful, highly attended online training sessions for organizers, which we recorded and have shared as a 100 minute screencast.
• Many locations held train the trainers sessions

Over the course of the past two years, we have continued to build upon these initial successes. Each point continues to be a priority and point of pride for the Art_Feminism organizing team. With every edit-a-thon, we've continued to generate press coverage on an international scale, we've continued to build on our training materials and are starting to collaborate with other Wikipedians building training materials to ensure that the work we create is broadly successful, and we've built out our train-the-trainer model to include online training sessions which were incredibly successful and well-received this year.

Building a Community: Our community continues to grow with each edit-a-thon, both bringing new editors into the Wikimedia community and generating goodwill to gender gap projects within the Wikimedia community. The community we're building is so diverse that we're only just coming to understand that it's really a series of likeminded communities. For the first time this year, we distributed a survey to all of our core organizers internationally. The responses gave us a lot of information about how people are finding out about us; the age, gender, and race of our community; the breakdown of new versus veteran editors; and more.

Expanding and Diversifying: As this will be our final IEG, we are including links to our previous learning patterns, which we have continued to build upon and update as we've learned during the course of this grant, as well as two new learning patterns.

• Hosting a multi-location gender gap edit-a-thon learning pattern: One of the greatest successes of this project has been our ability to scale up each year. Over the past three years, we've created more and more resources for local editors that can be remixed for any Wikipedia project. This learning pattern not only links to our training and organizer materials, but also highlights the nuts and bolt of community organizing.
• Creating a network of organizers: Art+Feminism is truly the product of a community and such a large scale project wouldn't be possible without some decentralization. This learning pattern details the process of creating relationships with organizers who are geographically dispersed.
• Project management for edit-a-thons: One of the biggest lessons of Art+Feminism has been to incorporate some basic project management practices into our work. Using project management software to organize our work has essentially enabled us to scale up and work with a larger group of organizers.
• Ensuring your wiki project is inclusive: During our last grant cycle, it became apparent to us that we were not truly intersectional in our organizational structure, outreach, community engagement, and training. We believe this is an issue that is systemic within the Wikipedia community, so we generated significant attention to organizing a Diversity Subcommittee and partnering with them throughout the course of our grant to create a Diversity Audit that would be useful to the Wikipedia community in general.
• Conducting user experience research: One of the most illuminating aspects of our grant work this year was hiring a UX consultant to do user experience research with us to help us determine how to better serve our community. We believe the findings of this report will be helpful to other user communities as well.

What didn’t work

• We were again ambitious, completing 12 months of work on a 6 month timeline and budget, requiring an extension of our grant. As a result of the extension, we were able to accomplish the website build and the beginning implementation of the diversity review recommendations. That said, we would like to plan better for next year so we are fully resourced. This is part of the reason that we plan to apply for an Annual Plan Grant, so we can better distribute funds across the course of the year, which is the amount of time it takes to plan and execute our work.
• MoMA Event:
  • We need to be more proactive about training volunteers to respond to editing questions because the experienced Wikipedians are spread too thin. We've improved this process in building out our Train-the-Trainer model but we really need to develop more confidence in our Trainers and will be looking to improve this in the coming year. The work we do here will also be highly beneficial from organizers in areas where they're unable to find local Wikipedians, as well as areas (like Paris) where they have large numbers of attendees.
  • We also think about streamlining the sign-in process so that organizing staff aren't spending too much time helping people get set up with accounts and sign in as they arrive throughout the day.
• Childcare:
  • We need to address the fact that many institutions don’t have legal/technical mechanisms to allow it, which makes it very difficult and frustrating for them to offer a basic human need. In the coming year, we'd like to spend more energy working towards creating guidelines people can follow and also writing FAQs about childcare issues so that, from the get go, organizers understand that although this is the ideal, it may not be possible at their institution.
  • This year we had an abundance of childcare funding applications, only a fraction of which were used. This ended up causing budgetary reallocation issues. Of course, some budgetary reallocation is to be expected, but we need to find a way to better predict and communicate the amount of funding ACTUALLY needed, versus requested, for childcare.
• Scaling up:
  • Although we've made leaps and bounds in terms of expanding our community and building out work to make our organizers more self-sufficient, we continued to experience difficulties implementing the nuts and bold outreach, inclusivity work without a project manager.
  • We need to move some of the responding to emails, doing outreach work to someone other than the core organizers.
  • One of our goals for the coming year will be to have the core organizing group be focused on higher-level thinking (like the issues we've outlined above) and have a project manager to handle the day-to-day issues of scheduling, communicating, updating our web presence, etc. We believe this will be key to Art+Feminism continuing to grow.
• We continue to struggle with truly decentralizing Art+Feminism into a community. Although we've made steps towards this in bringing regional organizers, we need to work towards connecting all of our users with each other, in order to make Art+Feminism a true online community.

Other recommendations

If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

Next steps and opportunities

Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

As we discussed above, we learned so much this year about the varied communities that make up this project. We are pursuing becoming a user group and applying for an annual grant. Our goals with this are threefold: to deliver year-round, consistent support to participants; to pursue a more decentralized organization structure; to create an structure that enables big picture thinking; and to engage in significant outreach to communities where there is not significant participation in the project.

• Continued Growth: The current growth model from the past 3 years (above) predicts exponential growth. This is a huge opportunity, but will require adequate support to meet the needs of the new events, organizers, and participants.
• Consistent support: We want to be able to be responsive and responsible to our communities year-round as opposed to rushed facilitation during a six-month crunch.
• Decentralization: We know we don’t have all the answers and we don’t want our experience and ideas to define the project. During the course of three international events, issues recur around child care, harassment, working collectively, and curriculum integration. We would like to create committees around these topics, working toward creating short guides about these issues that can be released in advance of the 2017 events. We are open to what shape this might take, and are really hoping to start a conversation.
• Regular communication: Strengthening our communities with more regular email communication to and between organizers. In additions to monthly emails with tips for organizing their edit-a-thons we're also starting a slack channel so that organizers can better communicate amongst themselves, sharing ideas and advice gained over the past few years.
• Expansive thinking: We recognize the need to hire an administrator/project manager to handle the day to day email communications. This will enable the lead co-organizers to not get "caught in the weeds", and to figure out ways to make the project more inclusive, more rhizomatic and more global.
• Targeted outreach: The Diversity Review is rich with insights into our materials and methods and engagement strategies for reaching out to underserved populations. Again, with someone to manage the day-to-day operations, we can meaningfully implement these recommendations.
• Project Sensitive Reporting: Like the WMF and the community at large, we continue to learn about what serves as a meaningful and measurable metric. We hope to work with the WMF Learning & Evaluation team to find qualitative and quantitative methods to report on community building and leadership building, which is a key (though difficult to measure) metric of our progress.
• Organizing and Reporting Methodology: We hope to continue to improve our organizing methods, which will hopefully reduce the significant reporting workload. We will implement recommendations from our UX/UI audit, which suggest further reducing the on-wiki organizing prior to participants arrival at events. And we hope to work with the WMF Learning & Evaluation team on new tools to streamline the organizing and reporting process.

instead will be focusing on trying to report on community building and leadership building, which we find to be a more more meaningful measure of our progress, though difficult to measure in other ways.

As movement leaders, it is essential that we be proactive instead of just reactive. Our goal is to expand our infrastructure to ensure that, ensuring the project's sustainability.

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

Actual spending

Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Expense	Approved amount	Actual funds spent	Difference
Lead Organizer labor	18,000 USD	18,000 USD	0
Organizing Committee member Honoraria	6,000 USD	6,000 USD	0
Web services and consulting	8,867 USD*	8,867 USD	0
Organizer travel to Wiki GLAM/Gender Gap conferences	2,000 USD	2,000 USD	0
Event Project Management	7425 USD*	7425 USD	0
Event Marketing	4,500 USD	4606.75 USD	(106.75 USD)
Food/Childcare MOMA	$3,450 USD	$3,100 USD	350 USD
Food/Childcare Node Events	5000 USD*	$4,993.06 USD	($6.94)
Computer rental for MoMA event	741.44 USD *	741.44 USD	0
Wikipedian Travel	0 USD*	0 USD	0
Total	56,510 USD (budget explanation here)	$55,733	$777 USD

Asterisk indicates approved change per budget amendment request

Remaining funds

Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

• Yes

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

• $777. We will work with WMDC to return these funds to the WMF.

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadminwikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

• Yes

Confirmation of project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

• Yes!

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

• Yes!

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being an IEGrantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the IEG experience? Please share it here!

The overwhelming response to this project is something we never anticipated. As individuals, this experience has put us in touch with so many amazing people, with whom it has been a pleasure and honor to work. And feedback from this community has caused us to reflect critically on the project, to identify its failings and oversights, giving a us a roadmap for the future. When we started this grant, the prospect of monthly meetings with representatives from the Wikimedia Foundation seemed excessive. What would be talk about?! But we can now say that the generosity and guidance of Siko Bouterse, Alex Wang, and Marti Johnson (amongst others) has been invaluable. We really can't thank you all enough! And we also really appreciate that you have listened to and taken seriously our feedback about things like metrics, the definition of active editor, etc.