Grants talk:Project/Rapid/TheCenterforCraftCreativity&Design/Women&Craft

Questions from WMF

Hello CraftCreativityDesign, thank you for your submission for this project and for your thoughtful preparation going into this event to expand knowledge on women in craft. We are pleased to see you have plans to engage your local community, and the art+feminism materials and outreach opportunities to get the word out about this event. We have a couple questions before we move forward with our decision.

1. In addition to Frankcjones, can you tell us of other local experienced Wikimedians who will help facilitate this editathon? It would be good to know who else would be involved, especially for the proposed number of participants you are expecting.
2. Are there local Wikimedians in Asheville who can help with the edit-a-thon, in the event that travel costs to bring your volunteer from Raleigh are not funded through this grant?
3. I see that you are offering prizes during this event. Can you elaborate on what kind of contests would be taking place? How will you be deciding their outcomes? How many prizes will you be offering for the contests, and what will the prizes be? This will give us an idea of how much would be appropriate to distribute.
4. Would you please describe the contributions CCCD is making for this event? For example, venue donations, staff time, anything else we should know about?

Looking forward to your responses! Cheers, Morgan Jue (WMF) (talk) 22:39, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Answers from The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design (CCCD)

Thank you for your thoughtful questions. I am very new to Wiki myself so please bare with me if the formatting of my answers is strange.

1. Frankcjones, will be our primary Wikimedian present during the event, we will also have an intern from the University of North Carolina, Asheville who has been learning how to edit using the Art+Feminism tutorials and by practicing for the pas several months. Two CCCD staff members (myself included) are also learning how to edit using the Art + Feminism tools.
2. When I started planning this event in October, 2016 the first step I took was to look for Wikimedians in Asheville; I looked for meet-up groups in the area, contacted the University of North Carolina, Asheville librarians, and reached out to UNC, Chapel Hill. I could not locate anyone in Asheville with the required expertise. In my conversation with UNC, Chapel Hill (who has planned several successful editathons) they recomended Frank Jones, so I reached out to him and he was very eager and happy to help.
3. In an effort to add a little excitement and competitive spirit to the event we plan to have three raffle contests throughout the four hour event. Every time someone adds a successful edit, improves a page, or starts a new page with at least some sourced content they will enter their name into the raffle. The raffle prizes will be $25 gift certificates (8 total) to local coffee shops and restaurants. We have a good relationship with our neighborhood cafes and restaurants and see this as a way to build community as well as support local businesses.
4. CCCD is providing the venue, the staff time of one project organizer who has been working on coordinating the event for six months, an additional staff member to assist during the event and an intern from UNCA. In addition CCCD has provided the staff time and resources to promote the event on social media, on CCCD website and in printed flyers.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions. Thank you! --CraftCreativityDesign (talk) 16:13, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Funding decision: Up to $1,246.82

CraftCreativityDesign, Thank you for your thoughtful responses and for providing more background on the preparation CCCD has taken to put this event together. Your grant is funded up to US$1246.82. We find the idea of a raffle interesting, as a way to encourage your approach for a welcoming environment for editing, and will fund this part of your application up to $100 (for four prizes) rather than the $200 requested. We usually reserve significant prize money for adjudicated editing competitions. We will be interested to see feedback and follow-up with the participants post-editathon, and encourage you to make a plan with your co-organizers/facilitators for supporting participants after the event. We have found that one-off editathons do not often result in retaining new editors without plans for continued engagement and online mentorship.

At $1,246, this grant is expensive for an edit-a-thon of this size and scope, but we do appreciate that CCCD is donating the venue space and the staff time of the event organizers. While we typically only fund expenses for local travel for volunteers, we recognize the difficulty in finding an experienced local volunteer to help facilitate this edit-a-thon and we appreciate the efforts you put in to involving more local Wikipedians with this event before you made the decision to budget for these travel expenses. However, this strategy will not be sustainable in the long term due to these significant travel costs. We trust Frankcjones’ expertise and guidance for this editathon, but hope his presence will galvanize local editors in your community to lead future events.

We will be in touch shortly with further details. Thank you for your work, and we look forward to learning the outcomes of this project in your grant report!

Cheers, Morgan Jue (WMF) (talk) 00:05, 18 February 2017 (UTC)