Grants:IEG/Women Scientists Workshop Development/Midpoint

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

This Individual Engagement Grant is renewed

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

The first draft of the kit was created, uploaded, and disseminated.
Success of the model was shown at Loyola - 45% retention rate this semester with 50 articles created.

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

The kit has been uploaded to Commons! (See below.) This will allow other groups to begin using the resources I have put together and for refinement of the material.
My focus during the first half has been working on refining the model during the pilot, and establishing firm learning patterns that are successful.
7 workshops were put on at Loyola, with remarkable consistency in attendance (7-8 participants at each).

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

20 unique participants this semester, 9 of whom came more than once. This proves that the model we have developed is successful, as the retention rate is much higher than other models.
The first draft of the kit has been posted on Commons at commons:File:Systemic bias workshop kit.pdf, and is available for comment by the community at large.
Feedback has been solicited from Wikipedians in various areas, and copies of the kit have been sent out to groups wishing to test it out. This will constitute the Alpha test.
Though several articles were nominated for deletion, only one was actually deleted.
50 articles were created and 21 articles were expanded.
One article (en:Vivienne Cassie Cooper) was nominated for Did You Know and was on the Main Page on February 23.

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Funds have been spent according to plan. The only major change I anticipate is not having to hire a venue for training, as interested parties are remote.

Learning

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

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

The main challenge has been in clarity within the kit. Going forward, it will be heavily refined in time for the beta test.

What is working well

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.

Grants:Learning patterns/Creating new articles

Next steps and opportunities

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.

Refining the kit
Setting up a beta test (to occur in the fall)
Obtaining feedback from many sources
Planning Loyola beta test
I do plan on applying for a renewal to administer the beta test.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an IEGrantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

I've been surprised at our learnings - I had always assumed that workshops/edit-a-thons/events had to be really big to be impactful, and that's just not true. I'm grateful to have had that opportunity! I've also made some great friends at our workshops, since they are such a great social environment.