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Grants:IEG/Women Scientists Workshop Development/Final

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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

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Summary

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In a few short sentences, give the main highlights of what happened with your project. Please include a few key outcomes or learnings from your project in bullet points, for readers who may not make it all the way through your report.

  • I've proven my hypothesis that holding repeat events can build a social, effective community of female editors creating content to address systemic bias. I held social editing workshops at Loyola 7 times over 3 months, with around 5-8 people (96% women) per session, and 7 women formed a core editing group that came to most sections. Together, we created 72 articles.
  • I used this knowledge and experience to create a kit for others to follow the same model.
  • With Wikimedia District of Columbia, I planned a session to train people from the US and Canada to use the kit in their institutions and communities. I successfully executed this project with Wikimedia DC and taught 12 attendees personalized techniques for executing projects in their existing communities.

Methods and activities

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What did you do in project?

Please list and describe the activities you've undertaken during this grant. Since you already told us about the setup and first 3 months of activities in your midpoint report, feel free to link back to those sections to give your readers the background, rather than repeating yourself here, and mostly focus on what's happened since your midpoint report in this section.

Outcomes and impact

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Outcomes

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What are the results of your project?

Please discuss the outcomes of your experiments or pilot, telling us what you created or changed (organized, built, grew, etc) as a result of your project.

Workshop training

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  • 4 men and 8 women attended the workshop training.
  • Comments on what they liked about the training: "I picked up a lot of 'soft knowledge' that you need to interact personally with people to get...you can't just read about it", "I enjoyed being able to get input from other users and administrators, collaborating and getting different perspectives", "Writing my first article…[and] coming up with a concept for a grant proposal" "Learning specific strategies for making it easier for newcomers to get started...sharing my knowledge and experience to help fellow editors."
  • Productive suggestions for improvement for future iterations of this valuable program: better logistics (which will be easily solved by planning more than a month in advance), schedule given in advance, tighter flow, and nametags. They also had suggestions for creating small groups/breakout sessions, which is something we have done at GLAM camp and will definitely include in the next facilitator training. We will compress future iterations into just two days, instead of 2.5 days. They will also start slightly later in the day!
  • 12/12 attendees thought the workshop format was productive and would recommend the workshop to other Wikipedians
  • Comments on what was most valuable: "A chance to interact with other systemic bias folks", "Honestly, I think participation in an event like this is very helpful to lend the participant an air of authority. When I make my pitch to academic institutions to lead Wikipedia workshops in the future, I can now claim that I'm qualified to teach because I've been through Workship Facilitator Training. I think that will make my pitch much stronger.", "The "how to" nuts and bolts of running a successful editathon from those who've done it previously, with tons of links for follow-up. Knowing that we'll have support for our editathon ideas.", "Meeting other Wikipedians, building a community of Wikipedia Workshop Facilitators, learning how to properly file grants and go through Wikipedia administrative policies"
  • Comments on diversity, etc. for future training sessions "This group was nice because it was diverse.", "good mix of interests and geography. The size was about right.", "The diversity here was incredible, and I think we have a good mix geographically and agewise, but we lacked racial diversity (100% white - that's a metric). I think a more formal application process where you can obtain metrics from applicants would be ideal.", "I agree with the focus on people associated with institutions/organizations that can aid their work on editathons. Reaching out more beyond college campuses would be exciting - other forms of community organizations!"
  • According to participants' ranks, the most useful session was on teaching techniques for working with participants, which included hands-on practice. The second-most useful was on grant-writing, which included creating ideas, coming up with impact statements, and working on metrics. People found resource workshop sessions too long and not useful, which is something we will modify in the future.

Loyola workshops

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  • The program was further refined throughout the second semester to support the kit writing.
  • Despite...technical difficulties, we made a Wikimetrics cohort and analysed the results of the workshop this way!
    • We created 72 new biographies of women scientists in the past year, and expanded even more! Average per user was 3.43 with a range of 0-22.
    • Almost 163 kB of text were added to English Wikipedia, with an average net addition of 7757 bytes per user. The lowest was 0, which was the only exception - an attendee only stayed for a short while and didn't finish her article - and the second-lowest was 226. The highest was 37785.
    • 379 total edits made by participants. The average number of edits was 18, with a range of 0-98.

Progress towards targets and goals

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Please use the below table to:

  1. List each of your original measures of success (your targets) from your project plan.
  2. List the actual outcome that was achieved.
  3. Explain how your outcome compares with the original target. Did you reach your targets? Why or why not?
Planned measure of success
(include numeric target, if applicable) 		Actual result Explanation
At least one other university group in Chicago commits to holding workshops in the fall 2014 semester Success! A group at the University of Chicago has planned workshops for their fall quarter 2014!
At least 8 women are trained to teach Wikipedia skills to others throughout the whole pilot 2 women at Loyola were trained in the basics This turns out to be more difficult when starting with new editors than teaching experienced editors to teach Wikipedia skills. Training attendees to eventually teach is important for programs' continuity, but one dedicated person is enough to continue a program. We already have continuity in place for our program and will continue to teach 1-2 particularly enthusiastic new editors each semester.
At least 15 people attend each event at Loyola We ended up having 5-7 women at each event. The bigger events turned out to be completely unmanageable for one person to teach, and people did not enjoy them as much. This learning was incorporated into the kit. 5-7 people (no more than 10!) is the perfect size for everyone to participate in one conversation and be able to be helped
At least 10 people attend more than one event at Loyola during second semester We had 9 people attend more than one.
At least 8 editors edit outside of an event throughout the pilot Only 1 editor was retained by this metric, which supports our hypothesis that regular events are necessary to keep people editing. 8 other editors attended multiple workshops and were productive, and they would not have done so without repeated workshops. The inviability of this type of retention as a metric has been incorporated into the learnings in the kit.
At least 5 editors are still active by the end of the grant period N/A See above for activity of editors in and out of workshops. This metric was kind of made moot.
An “out of the box” kit will be fully developed for people at other institutions to use, including promotional and instructional materials Success! The Systemic Bias Kit was successfully published at the end of the grant period.
Between all of the events, 15 articles will be brought to DYK and at least one important article will be brought to GA on the English Wikipedia. One article, en:Vivienne Cassie Cooper, was brought to DYK by a non-participant. It became abundantly clear very quickly that no one at the workshops was interested in navigating the bureaucratic DYK process. Every attendee I asked said that they preferred to work on more articles instead. I do not recommend this as a metric unless an event is made up of exclusively experienced Wikipedians.


Think back to your overall project goals. Do you feel you achieved your goals? Why or why not? I absolutely achieved my goals! The kit was written, designed, edited and published; a successful workshop series was held at Loyola, and the learnings from the kit were disseminated both on wiki and at a WMDC-sponsored event. Even though specific metrics were not met, they were experimental and we learned a lot about what metrics are valid for a workshop series and which ones are not. Our workshops were very successful in terms of event-to-event retention and editor productivity, which I believe to be more valuable metrics than the ones we began the project with. We will be using new metrics for analyzing this semester's workshops.

Indicators of impact

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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?

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?

A lot of this is discussed earlier but we made a large impact on participation and quality. With regards to participation, we created 9 returning editors who consistently attended events and created content. Two began to teach others how to edit and became involved in running the workshops, while also participating and creating content. We made an impact on quality by adding 72 articles on women scientists and expanding at least 8 more, thus reducing the systemic bias of the English Wikipedia against women in STEM fields. 2efv

Project resources

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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.


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 took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well

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What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? 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.

What didn’t work

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What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • There's a lot of information about what didn't work in the kit - big workshops, impersonal advertising, and scheduling issues are all discussed there.
  • In the facilitator training, we learned a lot about what to do the next time we run this training. More details will be/are in the PEG report for that, but it boils down to: shorter training (2 days as opposed to 2.5 days), a better mix of hands-on work, facilitated discussion, and lecture, and more lead time to organize it coherently.

Other recommendations

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

Next steps and opportunities

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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.

  • short videos to teach people who can't attend a facilitator training workshop
  • translate kit materials into other languages
  • seeding programs with community partners
  • continuing the program at LUC

I am requesting a renewal of the grant to develop these things with the time and attention that they deserve! See Grants:IEG/Women Scientists Workshop Development/Renewal

Part 2: The Grant

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Finances

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Actual spending

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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
Graphic design $250 0 -250
Printing materials $500 $14 -486
Project management $7000 $7000 0
Food & event supplies $980 $971.88 -$8.22
Volunteer merchandise $500 $335.30 -$164.80
Venue rental $250 $0 -$250
Total $9480 $8321.18 $1,158.82



Remaining funds

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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 - We did not use $1,158.82 for several reasons. We did not have to rent a venue because venues were obtained through other means. We also did not have to hire a graphic designer because VeryNice was kind enough to do it pro bono. We have not yet printed the booklets to be distributed physically, and we did not buy the full amount of merchandise.

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:

  • I'd like to "roll over" these funds for the renewal.

Documentation

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

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

  • Email sent!

Confirmation of project status

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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….ish. I met all my goals but I want to continue expanding.

Grantee reflection

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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! Being an IEGrantee has been an incredible experience. I was amazed at how much I was able to accomplish and found that having support from WMF led to much greater success of my project than I would have been able to attain on my own.


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