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Art+Feminism User Group/Planning/AnnualPlan2017-2018

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Introduction

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This plan explains the progress to date for the Art+Feminism initiative. For more detail regarding our specific strategies for growth and development, please see our strategic plan here. The main grant page is here.


Overview

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Over 4,000 participants at more than 225 events around the world participated in Art+Feminism’s fourth annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, which took place across the month of March around Women’s History Month. This global effort created or improved over 6,000 articles on Wikipedia, almost twice the output of the 2016 events. In total, since 2014, over 8,000 people at more than 500 events around the world have participated in Art+Feminism’s Edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of nearly 11,000 articles on Wikipedia. Some notable examples: Dorrit Black, Sara VanDerBeek, Joan Semmel, Judy Chicago, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lucy Lippard, Emily Stackhouse, and Mary Course. These events are primarily held in the month of March, though groups hold events throughout the year under our banner. Over the past our years our events have experienced steady growth, from 31 to 75 to 179 to 228 events a year. We continue to be inspired by all the dedicated folks who make room in their busy schedules to share skills and improve a collectively held resource like Wikipedia.

As we say in our statement of beliefs, "The steps to encouraging a woman to be heard and to be visible in her community are fraught with resistance and ridicule. Beginning this project, we knew that our role would not only be to empower women - we use the most expansive definition of that term - to edit online but to stand with them as they are challenged by those who do not see value in their voice and who do not see value in them. Art + Feminism is about making Wikipedia better, as a tool for open access to reliable information, but it doesn’t end there. It’s about dismantling systems of thought that ignore the presence and input of women in the room and diminish or erase entirely their place in history."

As we enter our fifth year of organizing we will continue to employ technology (like Slack) and provide supplemental training to make our organizers more independent; to continue the strategic outreach making the project more inclusive; and to continue to refine our materials (training, promotion, organization) to reflect the breadth and depth of our community. And we are beginning the process of becoming a non-profit (see Strategic Report for more information)

Art+Feminism International Editathons Goals

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  • Continue to organize the international Art+Feminism Editathons
  • Continue to build community as we train new editors, facilitators, and event organizers, and to support their increasing independence
  • Continue to improve organizational capacity
  • Continue to increase participant diversity

Activities

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Our main activity is our annual edit-a-thon, which takes place around the world. In conjunction with and support of this event, we organize other events, including: public programming on information activism; WikiData hackathon with Artsy; speaking on Wiki community panels about our work; training webinars on editing and collective organizing for volunteers and organizers, in English and Spanish; creating the Call to Action Art Commissioning Program, where each year, an artist will be selected to create a Creative Commons licensed artwork and Divya Mehra was selected for the inaugural commission; publishing a statement of beliefs; See below for a more detailed run-through of our metrics goals and our planned schedule for outreach, planning, and implementation.

Metrics Goals

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During our March 2017 campaign, 228 events took place in 37 countries on all six inhabited continents and online. At least 4,105 participants created or improved 6031 pages, and uploaded 1587 images to Wikimedia Commons. Detailed outcomes from 2017 are here. Our metrics goals for 2018 are as follows. These predictions are based off of our growth models.

Current growth models for Art+Feminism events, participants, and articles created, based off of 4 years of data. Year 0 is 2014.

Global Metrics

  • 4500 participants
  • 1200 newly registered users
  • 10,000 content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects.

Project Metrics

  • 275 Events
  • Greater than 50 percent repeat organizers

Metrics will be tracked in the shared google doc.

Calendar

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October - November

  • Outreach to previous node event organizers confirming the March 2018 editathon dates.
  • Begin planning with MoMA regarding public programming for 2018 (based on the success of our 2017 programming) & encourage our node events to similarly "think big" for the anniversary year.
  • Use Slack to encourage collaborative node working on specific issues that have come up in previous edit-a-thons, e.g. childcare, curriculum integration and selection of topics, and online and offline harassment.

December-January

  • Outreach to build interest for new events in 2018.
  • January is our biggest outreach and engagement month; see this past year's Midpoint report for more info.
  • Completion of APG Final Report.
  • Plan and hold training webinars on editing, conflict resolution, and grant writing for:
    • MoMA volunteers
    • Art+Feminism organizers
  • Review and update training materials as necessary.
  • Confirm details for public programs, technology, and break out sessions at MoMA.
  • Plan survey

February

  • February is a very busy month where we pull a lot of things together
    • Finalize planning with MoMA for public programming, use of space, break-out sessions, pedagogical strategies
    • Finalize details for all node events: confirm location, Wikipedian, training, reporting strategies, funding requests, etc.
    • Finalize online training sessions for new organizers

March

  • The edit-a-thon! March is the month where we hold our edit-a-thon and get to see all the edit-a-thons come together around the world.
  • Metrics: post-edit-a-thon, we spend most of March compiling the outcomes from our various events in order to report on the number of attendees, as well as articles created and updated.

April

  • Review successes and failures of the event.
  • Update website to reflect outcomes, press coverage, etc.

May-June

  • Begin planning 2019 event:
    • Settle date with MoMA
    • Confirm ambassador participation

July-September

  • Begin preparing outreach for 2019 event.

Target readership

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Art+Feminism events have taken place on all inhabited continents. These events have created or improved articles on a number of different language Wikipedias: Arabic, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Thai, Odia, Spanish, Nepalese, Esperanto, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Swedish, Catalan, Welsh, Dutch and more. The Art+Feminism community includes artists, art workers, activists, librarians, scholars, students, and Wikipedians. As our event archive shows, we have gained support from diverse communities, from activist spaces like Interference Archive, to major universities like University of Pittsburgh and MIT, to public libraries like Darien Public Library and National Library of Wales, as well as cultural institutions like Tate, London, and more. We've also seen support from within the Wikimedia community, from organizations like Wikimedia NYC and Women in Red, for example. Our events add a lot of content to the Commons and have led to spin off campaigns like AfroCrowd, For the Record, and more.

Fit with strategy

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Increasing Participation

  • We will continue to grow our reach in communities of marginalized people and abroad. For more on our focus, please see this section of our strategic plan.
  • Consistently, we run the largest Wikipedia edit-a-thon, which grows every year:
Year Locations Participants Articles
2014 31 600 200
2015 75 1500 900
2016 175 2500 3500
2017 228 2762 5881
2018 (projected) 275 4500 10000
  • Our work has welcomed new editors and organizers into the Wikipedia community and empowered them to collaborate with one another.
  • Inspired the founding of other projects, like AfroCROWD which stands as one of our community partners.

Improving quality

  • Participants at our events have created or improved nearly 11000 articles over the past four years - like Mary Corse and LaToya Ruby Frazier - in key areas of the gender gap.
  • Diversity Review and UX/UI Review can serve as models for all Wikipedia initiatives that aim to be more inclusive, thus improving the scope and reach of Wikipedia.

Resources

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Risks

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Burnout

The phenomenal success of Art+Feminism has been wonderful. However, it has created an incredible amount of work for the lead co-organizers to juggle with their already busy professional schedules. We've grown and done more with our Program Coordinator, but we've added more things - additional training, ancillary programs like the Call to Action art commission and the podcast - and so burnout is still a risk for all, especially with a grant cap that doesn't allow for much larger compensation.

Friendly Space Incidents

Although Art+Feminism has elicited an overall positive response the project has received some unwanted attention. For example, each year there have been reports of harassment at events; there have been incidents where individuals have not followed our materials and this has resulted in several articles for deletion; and the lead co-organizers have been targeted by active editors who don't like the way we do things. We have also encountered harassment and microaggressions at Wikimedia conferences. The labor of recording and reporting these incidents as well as providing sustained guidance to the foundation and community members also contributes to the above risk of burnout.

Growth

The project has exhibited steady, and at times exponential growth, as you can see in our growth model. This growth could become a burden. Alternatively, it is unclear when/how it will taper off. Many of the strategies listed above are meant to address this risk and make the project more sustainable.

McKensie has exceeded the original asks of her role as a project coordinator and project manager. In addition to the project coordination scope, she has also used the funding for her role to hone in on operational strategy, the application of anti-oppressive frameworks for community outreach in Black and brown communities and LGBTQ communities, and digital outreach.

Budget

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Please find a spreadsheet of our budget on this google doc.

Accounting Expenses

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As part of our strategic plan, we seek to build operational capacity as we transition to becoming an independent 501c3 organization. That necessitates certain expenses that were not in any of our previous budgets, as they were either not necessary, or were provided by WMDC as our fiscal sponsor. One of these costs is a 5% overhead fee to our new fiscal sponsor Qubit. Typical Fiscal sponsor fees range from 7% to 10%, so 5% represents a significant discount. We recognize that our accounting requirements are beyond the capacity of already busy Wikimedia groups, and do not wish to strain movement capacity any further. We feel that this is a small cost to bear in order to increase our efficiency and prepare us for becoming an independent 501c3 organization.

Shift in event funding to Rapid Grants

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As we forecast continued growth, increased organizational costs, and a budget cap of $100,000 USD, we are planning to have all node events seeking funding to apply for rapid grants. In addition to offloading some of the grant budget, and accounting responsibility, it also promotes overall A+F community and Wikimedia movement capacity by training and empowering dozens of organizers to apply for their own funding.

Rapid Grants review has a rolling deadline; we will be articulating a priority deadline of January 15th, and a final deadline of February 15th for the submission of these grants. We will work with the Rapid Grants team to establish a template for these grants. We will offer a "how to apply for an AF rapid grant" webinar for our organizers in early January, which we will record for reuse.

We will advise our nodes to apply for funding with the following structure: New nodes can apply for up to $100 in food/incidentals, and up to $150 for childcare (max established by $25hr x 6hours). This is based on $5 in food costs per person for an assumed average attendance of about 20 people, which is the median number for most new events. Events 5 hours or longer may increase food costs to $8 per person, or $160 total. We will encourage the Rapid Grants team to consider well articulated exceptions to these new node guidelines.

Existing nodes can apply for funding by projecting their attendance for this year based off of the headcount from last year x 1.25, which seems to be the average growth. Allocate $5 per person for events 4.5 hours and shorter, or $8 per person for events longer than 5 hours. Childcare funding guidelines are the same, scaled per event size (approximately one caregiver per 50 attendees).

Certain existing nodes will be asked to serve as the regional funding hub, in order to coordinate and centralize some of these smaller funding requests. Thus we will aim to have one request for the 6 small to medium sized events in Philadelphia, for example, or one request for the 3 events in the Ohio/Indiana/Michigan region.

All nodes can apply for well articulated programming plans that require additional funds. Priority will go to existing nodes, or new nodes with demonstrated organizational capacity.

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