Grants talk:PEG/Wikimedia Community Ireland/2015 Outreach

A decision has been made on this grant. Comments are still welcome on this page.

GAC members who support this request

1. you had performed quite a successful local WLM and I see no reason not to support this project rubin16 (talk) 10:16, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
2. - Violetova (talk) 16:05, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
3. The request is realistic and cost-effective given the various activities included.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 15:02, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
4. Quoting Kiril. --Dry Martini (talk) 10:14, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

GAC comments

Thanks for the submission. I appreciate the activity of the community in Ireland and clearly support this request but it seems like the measures of success section should be expanded to include new clearly defined measures that comply with your goals. My suggestion here is to try to quantify your goals and derive the measures of success from it. For instance, we would be interested to know how many articles will be created and expanded on Irish Women in History, how many articles will be created or created in the WikiProject Medicine or how many institutions you plan to clinch cooperation with. I can confirm that you're on the right track as the measures you already have in the request are well defined. So, please consider on expanding them. Best regards.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 08:10, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your encouragement and constructive comments! I have added specific metrics to several of the events and collated them in the measures of success section. Regards, Sameichel (talk) 15:24, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you!--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 14:54, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Women’s Museum of Ireland: I understand that you are planning for probably an edit-a-thon there and expand more articles on Irish Women. Could you put bring more light on the same? Like why only 10 participants? Is it because all the 10 participants will be employees of Women’s Museum of Ireland? What other things that the museum offer? There will be photos, manuscripts and so on. Are you considering all that this time or will it be pure edit-a-thon? -- ♪Karthik♫ ♪Nadar♫ 02:16, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. One of the main reasons we are reaching out to the Women's Museum of Ireland is because it is a small museum that is just starting out and they would be more amenable to forging a relationship with us (it also helps that 3 of the most active members of our working group are women). The goal of 10 participants is based on past women specific edit-a-thons who have hosted. The benefits we get from this relationship is access and support with reaching out to the wider historical community, specifically as it pertains to women in Irish history. For the museum, we offer much needed publicity. We will start with an edit-a-thon type event and then, depending on how successful it is, we will see how we can move forward. As a group we are beginning to realize that edit-a-thons, while useful, are probably not the best use of our time. Due to that we are beginning to explore other ways that we can reach out to the community by giving talks, hosting workshops and the like. We have already committed to an edit-a-thon with the Women's Museum and while we envision a long term relationship with them, the path we take is not yet determined. Sameichel (talk) 08:36, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

WMF comments

Thank you for this proposal. It's exciting to see so much more activity in the Irish community! We have a number of questions below and look forward to your response.

1. Education conferences: We're encouraged that members of the community are particularly interested in the education program and connecting with the education sector. What are the user groups longer term goals in terms of education? Will this conference be about general awareness building or will you be aiming to establish relationships with specific schools/teachers? Floor Koudijs, Program Manager for the Wikipedia Education Program, would be a good person to contact in terms of how to make the most of these opportunities.
2. Women's Museum of Ireland: It's great to see activity around International Women's Month and a potential partnership with a women's museum. We have found that one-off editathons don't have much impact in terms of content creation or editor recruitment/retention, so developing a longer-term relationship with the museum whereby you can host series of events or organize content release drives is definitely strategic. Since this is a one-off event, what type of follow-up plans do you have to make sure new editors remain engaged? What are your hopes for developing a relationship with the museum?
3. Do you have measures of success for your activities with the National Museum of Ireland?
4. Most of your activities are around editing events. One of the most important metrics to understand the longer-term impact of these events is retention rates. Please see our program resources for editathons, for more information on editathon metrics and tools for tracking metrics. Impacting retention demands having a follow-up strategy post event (as mentioned). This can be online (through mentorship, check-ins, etc), offline (editing skills workshops, editathon series, etc.), or preferably both.
5. The stickers seem quite expensive, double the price that we pay in the Wikimedia Shop. Are there cheaper options?
6. Do you have a plan for storing and tracking the equipment? We ask all groups to create an on-wiki tracking system so all community members know who has the equipment, for what purpose, and when it will be returned. Please see this example.

Please let us know if you have questions about the above. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 01:02, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your questions. I will try to answer them as succinctly as possible!

1. As a group we definitely have a long term interest in fostering relationships within the education community. A little bit of background: one of our members is on the staff at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) and another was a member of the team that developed the computing curriculum for Irish Secondary Schools. Unfortunately, technology in general is used sparingly in most Irish schools. Some of this is due to lack of funding but much of it is due to teachers feeling they can't teach “technology” because they don't have the basic skills. We feel that encouraging the use of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms would lower the barrier for entry into “technology” for many of these teachers. Speaking at conferences allows us to get this message out and start to build relationships with teacher groups, schools, and teachers themselves. For example, after we hosted an edit-a-thon/training event at NUIG last Fall the Journalism department contacted our group member about Wikinews, which we had mentioned during the training. They are now exploring how they can use Wikinews as part of the journalism program. So to answer your question, speaking at conferences is about raising awareness AND building relationships with schools.
2. As I mentioned in the comment above, the Women's Museum of Ireland is a small museum just starting out. It's also the first museum in Ireland dedicated to women's history. We agree that edit-a-thons are limited in their impact. Our long term goal with the Women's Museum is to help support and promote them. In return they will give the group access to the wider historical community as it pertains to the history of women. As with other edit-a-thons we have hosted we will encourage the participants to register on the project page and create talk pages so that we can keep in contact with them on those platforms. Though right now we only have one event planned with the museum we would like to continue our relationship with them. We are not sure as of yet what form that relationship will take.
3. The National Museum of Ireland (NMI) is a little more complicated than the Women's Museum. There are 4 museums under the NMI umbrella. We have been approached by curators in 2 of the museums requesting that we run events and we have already run 2 events at one NMI museum. In the long term we hope to have a strong presence in the NMI museums, possibly even culminating in a Wikipedian in Residence type position. While we have specific outcomes for the various events we are planning (number of participants, number of article, ect) our long term goal is to foster good will towards Wikimedia among the museum staff, which apart from the curators who reached out to us, is fairly conservative. While we recognize the limited value of edit-a-thon type events the staff at NMI museums are only comfortable with that level of engagement at the moment. We feel that running these events will open the door to other events and activities. As with the Women's museum, we plan to keep in contact with the participants through the project pages and their talk pages.
4. We recognize the limitations of edit-a-thons and have begun adjusting our outreach plan to accommodate that. As mentioned above we plan on keeping on contact with participants through project pages and talk pages. We have also began scheduling more social events where editors can get together over a drink and get to know each other “off line”. These events are part of our strategy to grow our volunteer base, which at the moment is very limited. We are also exploring reaching out to other organisations which already have a strong base and the same ethos as Wikimedia for co-sponsored events. In these cases, we would also have follow-up access through their mailing lists.
5. The quote for the stickers is for a 3X3 color sticker. We would like to have stickers with the User Group logo, which would be at that price. But we also plan on getting education and more generic stickers, which should be at a lower cost. We are using the same printer as with did for our WLM stickers and they are willing to give us a discount based on that past relationship. Though the stickers are cheaper at the Wikimedia Shop does that cost include shipping? Unfortunately we have found that due to the limited amount of vendors here the prices are a bit higher than in other places.
6. We have created a logbook on our group Meta page to track the equipment. It will be stored with one of our members in Dublin until needed. You can see the logbook here.

Please let me know if you need any further information. Cheers, Sameichel (talk) 10:08, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi Sameichel. Thank you for all the thoughtful responses. We are excited about the potential for strategic partnerships and community growth these activities suggest. We are happy to approve this request, but would still like you to include a measure of success around retention from your various editathons. You can use Wikimetrics to track users and set a goal of x% of participants who continue to contribute x months after the event. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:41, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Alex for the foundation's support and guidance. I have added some metrics the the Women's Museum and NUIG events. Just a note as to why they are different: We already have a strong relationship with NUIG with one of our group members located there and there is a lot of support for the movement. Therefore we expect to retain more active users. Our ability to retain users with the Women's Museum is less sure, hence the lower goal. Sameichel (talk) 11:57, 10 March 2015 (UTC)