Grants talk:Project/Rapid/alexisclements/NewYorkAcademyofSciencesWomeninScienceEditathon

Questions

Please provide additional information:

• Will this be a single large editathon or single large editathon with satellites/nodes? In Project Plan section, answer #1 does not match answer #2
• Link to mailing list(s) where event will be publicized
• Specifics as to social media that will be used to engage editors during and after event
• How long will the event be? Is it a full day event?
• Event space was listed as being limited at last year's event. Will there be more space available this year?
• Please list and estimate the amount of costs for the in kind donations that will be provided by NYAS. This is helpful to contextualize the funding request.
• US$900 seems like a lot of money for food for one event. Please provide more information to support this amount (number of meals, if there is cake, etc.).

Thanks! -- Erika aka BrillLyle (talk) 19:15, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Additional item:

• Event was listed as closed to the public last year. If the 2016 event is also going to be closed, it might be more accurate to categorize the event not as a "regular" editathon but as an internal workshop and editathon specifically for NYAS. Typically events WM NYC supports are not closed in this manner unless they are at specific institutions for specific events and purposes -- and they are typically categorized and presented as such. To present this as a regular editathon but also close it to the general Wikipedia editing community is a topic of discussion that should be addressed. And how nodes / satellites would be part of this schema, as well. Thanks! -- Erika aka BrillLyle (talk) 18:21, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Comments from WMF

Hi alexisclements. Thank you for this grant request and all your efforts in organizing! It's great to see continued energy around this topic after last year's event. We have a number of questions similar to what BrillLyle asked above, so please do answer her. The only additional question we have is around number of participants -- 100 people seems like a large jump from last year's 15 participants. What information do you have to indicate the event will be that large? Will WM-NYC be able to help engage active Wikimedians to help facilitate and support during the event? Thanks, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:11, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Responses to Questions and Comments

In response to BrillLyle's questions (I will also add some of this information to the grant application itself, thanks for taking the time to lay out these questions, they are really helpful.):

• We will have one large editathon at our space in November. The plan is to invite a handful of other major institutions and universities to join us at the live event, but I will also mention the idea of them hosting their own satellite event during the month of November. The meetup page will also invite virtual participation, which I am imagining might take place on the day but also before and after, which is why the grant start/stop dates are for all of the month of November.

• I can't link to the mailing lists because they are the property of the Academy (i.e. our private database of customers). However you can learn more about our email newsletters here: www.nyas.org/subscribe.

• We plan to publicize the event across our social media channels. You can see a few examples of how we did it last year, which included the use of the hashtag #WomenSciWiki on Twitter.
  • Our social media channels include our primary Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. We will also use the feeds of our Global STEM Alliance (our K-12 science education programs): Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

• The live event will be 4 hours total, people will be able to come and go as they please. Virtual participation will be encouraged throughout the month of November.

• We will have space for 100 people to be present at any given time throughout the 4 hour event, which means we won't be placing any limits on participation or space while marketing the event.

• Will add estimated in-kind donation to the grant.

• The Academy has a contract with the caterer Restaurant Associates, which means any time we have events involving food in the space we have to use them to provide it and are not able to use food from outside to cater events. Given that, the $900 consists of coffee & tea service throughout the live event, as well as cookies throughout the event, plus the labor costs for the catering staff, and the rental and costs for all equipment/plates/cups/etc.

• Closed event last year vs. Public event this year:
  • Last year, because we had never done an event like this before and didn't have any grant funding to support it, we needed to keep the event small. That's the reason for the limitation on live event participation in 2015. This year, if we're able to get grant support to cover the direct costs involved in expanding the event, we will post this event publicly on our website, our social feeds, public event calendars, and market it as we do all of our other public-facing events, not placing any limits on who may attend the live event - non-Members/the general public will be welcome and encouraged to attend the live event and to participate virtually.

In response to Alex Wang (WMF)'s additional question:

• We debated internally whether to be ambitious with the number and shoot for it, given that this number also includes virtual participants, or aim for something more realistic and try to exceed it. Generally we agree that 100 is a high number. 50-60 live participants feels do-able given that we'll be able to market the event more widely and open it up to the general public, but want to be prepared to host more people than that and we were having a harder time estimating virtual participation. In addition, we're not sure about how the outreach to the other institutions in the NYC metro area will go - whether they would prefer to participate with us or host their own. Without having a confirmed date and funding, I haven't done any outreach because I don't want to get things moving and then have to pull the plug because we can't cover costs. That's not an absolute number in answer to your question, but hopefully gives you some insight into the logic behind the number we came up with. Given this discussion I am going to bump the number of participants down to 60 for now. I think the number of articles is still very realistic given this number, based on last year's results. But please let me know your thoughts/further questions about the above.

Hi alexisclements. Thank you for your quick and thoughtful responses to the above questions. We are happy to support this project and look forward to hearing how the event develops. The costs are still relatively high compared to similar events we fund, but we understand it is hard to get an accurate estimate on the number of people at this time. Hopefully, your experience with this larger, more open event will give you a good baseline for budgeting for future events. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 03:17, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Question about social media

Alexis, you said

We plan to publicize the event across our social media channels....

Will WMNYC also be able to publicize the event through our media channels?

DGG (talk) 23:31, 28 July 2016 (UTC) (WMNYC)