Grants talk:IEG/Women Scientists Workshop Development

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for an Individual Engagement Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, $9480

Comments regarding this decision:
We're excited to see where this project goes, and look forward to learning along with you if this approach can have impact on the gender gap.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Questions? Contact us.

Support for small projects

Thanks for being bold about making a proposal to do a small project. I wish that more Wikipedians would be frank in saying that they wanted to start small at this level. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:03, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 22:41, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Sample schedule

Can you provide a short sample schedule and agenda for a given meeting? Please state how long an event would last, what would be covered, and how attendees would interact with Wikipedia, with information content, with the University, and with each other. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:03, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: Yes! Just to get one thing out of the way - the University's involvement as it stands will be providing us a space and letting us advertise in classes and with flyers and such. They're not sponsoring this in an official way - though that could potentially be an avenue for expansion. The event would begin with a 15-20 minute session on the basics of editing. I'm going to print up a bunch of cheatsheets for formatting since I don't want to mess with VE right now and spend most of the time talking about how to paraphrase properly. I will have students editing in sandboxes set up in either my personal userspace or the WikiProject Women Scientists space so that if there are issues they will get cleaned up before anything hits mainspace. Events would be 4-5 hours long with a drop-in model, anyone who didn't wish to attend the orientation could come whenever and people can stay as long as they like. I plan to collect a list of 5-10 women scientists from various fields for people to work on and collect resources ahead of time so that there is no issue of reliable sources (and so people don't waste time running all over the stacks and dealing with Loyola's sometimes-infuriating printer system). I'll set up tables for each scientist so there are only a couple people working on each article, minimizing edit conflicts both physical and virtual. Sorry if this is a bit disjointed, I'm running off to the lab - if you have follow-up questions or if I forgot something/didn't clarify well, just let me know and I'll take another crack. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 22:49, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Partners

Can you please list any potential or sought partnerships for this project? For example, could you get any support, promotion, or attendance through a library, student group, social organization, mailing list, or any other established outreach effort? Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:03, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

The partnership we have currently is obviously WISAM, with some support from the Math Club. I anticipate getting support from the reference department at the Loyola library and from similar groups at other institutions as I move past the pilot phase. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 05:05, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Impact

Can you expand just a little in the "measures of success" section? How will you measure the impact and efficacy of this proposal? Please provide 1-2 quantitative measurements that you might be able to collect which demonstrate the extent to which this program achieved good outreach. Also, make a guess at a success metric by saying something like "This proposal will at least result in X people doing something Y times". Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:03, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure what else I can quantify - I have a full breakdown of the success metrics under the "Measures of Success" tab. Is there something specific you want quantified? Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 05:11, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Ahh, I was looking at a previous version of this proposal. I like the metrics that you are reporting, but to clarify, can you change the way you are stating this information to make it clear which numbers you expect for a single event and which numbers you expect for the entire series? Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:16, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Will do momentarily. Sorry for the confusion! Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 00:43, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Boys policy

What will you do if boys show up? What will be the group's transgender policy? I ask because you say that a primary target for recruitment is an all-girls club. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:05, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Boys are totally welcome as long as they respect a friendly spaces policy! We'll be happy to take anyone who wants to write about women scientists. I'm aiming it at women because that's who I feel will be most interested, but I do expect a few guys to show up as well. As long as they're not being sexist or anything, that's awesome. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 05:07, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Forgot to answer your trans* folk question - all genders (trans, cis, nonbinary individuals) are totally welcome as long as they respect the friendly space policy. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 05:10, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Other Wikipedians

Will any other established Wikipedians in the Chicago area ever be able to give input in the conduct of these events? To what extent might it ever be possible to cross-advertise this event and any other Wikipedia events in the Chicago area? Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:06, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

I'd love input and/or help from other Chicago-area Wikipedians, I've worked with a few of them and Wikipedia Loves Libraries is coming up so that will be a great opportunity to talk a little bit more about this project. I definitely plan on giving a heads-up at WLL about these events; unfortunately, there are not many events in Chicago so my space for advertising may be limited. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 05:09, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, round 2 2013

This Individual Engagement Grant proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 2 review. Please feel free to ask questions here on the talk page and make changes to your proposal as discussions continue during this community comments period.

The committee's formal review for round 2 begins on 23 October 2013, and grants will be announced in December. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

Siko (WMF) (talk) 05:41, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Goals & measures of success

This proposal seems to align nicely with the overall strategic goals of the Wikimedia Foundation, but I am concerned about the goals. Forget about "combating systemic bias with quality content". First of all it would be great to just get more women editing without even discussing systemic bias, and second of all, you can't include DYK's and FA's as measures of quality content - did you read any of the Gibraltar DYK discussions? Those DYK, GA, etc. article awards are 100% community dependant and even if you are a main contributor and can personally guarantee those outcomes, that would be a major no-no and believe me when I say you don't want to go there. More realistic goals that are easier to measure are at least 20 women registered to edit on Wikipedia, and of those, at least 4 or 5 still active at the end of the project's grant period. There is absolutely no need to be overly ambitious and current expectations for edit-a-thons is zero contributions from newbies after one year post-event. What your biggest contribution should be, in my mind, is a well-founded and repeatable program that captures attendees' thoughts & expectations vs their overall impressions afterwards. Though your goal is focussed on getting more women to edit, having some men show up is perfectly fine, and could even be used to your advantage; i.e. it would be interesting to measure outcomes of cohorts of edit-a-thon groups that are all-female vs. mixed. Jane023 (talk) 15:00, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi Jane, thanks for your comments! First of all, I want to make clear that I would not be involved in any auditing of content and that would be entirely left up to the community. The reason that I included creation of quality content as a metric is that I am frustrated with editing programs focusing solely on content OR contributors, not trying to create both. I did try to follow the Gibraltar DYK fiasco and I think this project would not create similar controversy - I'm not being employed by a tourist board or trying to advertise (go buy more women scientists! Only available at your local university.) and I think the English Wikipedia community would be okay with a small group of nominations coming out of each workshop. They seem to be okay with GA and DYK noms from Education Program groups in general, which is more the model I am trying to follow.

As for the other metrics, I agree that having a more long-term measurement of retention is good and have added something similar. ("5 editors will still be active outside of workshops at the end of the grant period"). I think that's a fantastic idea, thank you!

I would be ridiculously interested in measuring the outcomes of an all-female vs. all-male group, but that sort of depends on who shows up to each workshop. I will be giving exit surveys to everyone who comes to a workshop, and if it turns out that one group is all female and another is mixed, I will definitely be analyzing the differences. Given Loyola's gender ratio (~65% female), it's not unheard of to have random campus events be all female regardless of marketing, though I do anticipate having mostly mixed groups that are majority female. Thanks again for your comments and suggestions! All the best, Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 01:51, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Well I have thought a lot about this too, and discussed it a lot with various contributors to outreach projects. What we need is a measure of the content created vs the need for that content, which is what you are trying to get at with your DYK measure. The "DYK etc." measure will not work though, because often articles are tweaked during the "DYK etc." process, thus reducing the effectiveness of the measurement. A better measurement is working with "red-link lists", but these are problematic because they are never complete (unless the list itself is a complete one, such "founders of Loyola" or something like that. What you do have in Wikipedia are lots of "hidden red links", which are terms not linked but referred to in various articles. If you can somehow let people identify terms that will generate more than ten links to their article if they later [[link them blue]], then you are approaching some form of quality content measurement that can be performed at article creation *and* is verifiable. Jane023 (talk) 07:46, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

That's very true, I guess I hadn't quite thought that through. WikiProject Women Scientists does have an an extensive redlink list that will probably be a starting point, though. I will definitely incorporate the "hidden link" idea - I will try to run some tests this week to see how redlinks score by that metric and see if it'll work for these workshops. I'm hosting our first workshop a week from Saturday so I will probably start with the articles from that list that have the most hidden red links. Watch this space for more data! :) I really really like this idea. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 00:17, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Oh and another thing we have discussed is introducing a game element (so pitching two cohorts against each other as teams) as a possible trigger to get people to contribute. Prizes can be a problem if you can't find sponsors, but sometimes sponsors for prizes can be remarkably easy to find if you get your project published in local media. If you could somehow try "cohorts with prizes" vs "cohorts without prizes", that would be very cool too. Jane023 (talk) 07:54, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

I like this too! My plan for the first workshops (October and November) is to have simple merchandise-based incentives and conduct exit surveys to see what kind of incentives would motivate attendees better. Then I'll compare the October/November groups against the January-April groups (with feedback-based incentives) to see which did better. I do plan on splitting the attendees into groups but will need to ponder how to get them competing against each other on something concrete that also produces good content. Any ideas? I am so grateful for all your feedback here. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 00:17, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Kits

What I find most interesting about this project is the idea of having an out-of-the-box kit as an outcome - several women have asked Sarah and myself about kits for throwing wikiparties, and I wonder if you can imagine the kits you develop being useful for non-university settings as well? If the Loyola workshops are successful, you may find the first 2 measures of success you've listed to be the most useful indicators of long-term scalability for this approach... Cheers, Siko (talk) 22:58, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi Siko, I definitely think that a kit could be applicable to a non-university setting, especially if that setting was institutional. And from what I'm envisioning, a little bit of tweaking could make it scalable to a lot of other kinds of social editing settings. And I agree with those metrics being the best for scalability - I'm interested to see how much and what kind of information is just right to encourage innovation but not leave people stranded with no solid model. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 00:50, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Community Notifications

Hi Emily,
As you know, the IEG committee will begin their review of round 2 proposals on 23 October 2013. To expedite proposal review, I'm looking over the community notifications section of each eligible application. Please provide a link to your post on the Gendergap mailing list This will help the committee follow up more easily. Thanks!
Best of luck! :)

Focus

The proposal appears to be focused on Wikipedia. Would you consider work at sister projects? Gryllida 01:23, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi Gryllida! For now we do plan to focus on Wikipedia but I do anticipate at least exploring other projects next semester! If you are involved in a sister project and want to help us figure out a good way to introduce it, let me know. I'd love to incorporate other projects. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 05:36, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Keilana, I'm not in Chicago, but possibly some of university academic staff might be interested in training the folks in journalism, photography, book writing or bringing them digital at the workshop? Gryllida 06:45, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

That would be great! I will try to reach out to the faculty here. I'm a science major so I'm not acquainted with those departments, but some of the other women involved are, so I'll look into it for sure! Thanks so much. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 21:17, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Perfect. Nothing better than local collaboration. :-)

--Gryllida 11:50, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Women Scientists Workshop Development

Scoring criteria (see the rubric for background)	Score 1=weakest 5=strongest
Potential for impact
(A) The project fits with the Wikimedia movement's strategic priorities	4
(B) The project has the potential to lead to significant online impact.	4
(C) The impact of the project can be sustained after the grant ends.	3
(D) The project has potential to be scaled or adapted for other languages or projects.	4
Ability to execute
(E) The project has demonstrated interest from a community it aims to serve.	3
(F) The project can be completed as scoped within 6 months with the requested funds.	4
(G) The budget is reasonable and an efficient use of funds.	4
(H) The individual(s) proposing the project have the required skills and experience needed to complete it.	4.5
Fostering innovation and learning
(I) The project has innovative potential to add new strategies and knowledge for solving important issues in the movement.	3.5
(J) The risk involved in the project's size and approach is appropriately balanced with its potential gain in terms of impact.	3.5
(K) The proposed measures of success are useful for evaluating whether or not the project was successful.	4
(L) The project supports or grows the diversity of the Wikimedia movement.	4
Comments from the committee: A follow-up of a successful programme with a slightly better focus on sustainability - this should work. We would expect to see costs go down over time if the approach is proven; the pilot costs are high.

Thank you for submitting this proposal. The committee is now deliberating based on these scoring results.

Funding decisions will be announced by December 16. — ΛΧΣ²¹ 00:24, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia DC

I am the president of Wikimedia District of Columbia, where Emily sits on the Board of Directors. I would like to confirm that this proposal would not conflict with her duties as a board member, and that Wikimedia DC is supportive of her work in Wikimedia outreach. harej (talk) 16:45, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for confirming, James. Siko (WMF) (talk) 23:32, 10 December 2013 (UTC)