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Art+Feminism User Group/Planning/AnnualPlan2019-2020

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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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  • Images from Art+Feminism events around the world
  • Editors at the 2019 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon at MoMA, New York
    Editors at the 2019 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon at MoMA, New York
  • Editors at the 2019 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon in Taiwan
    Editors at the 2019 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon in Taiwan
  • Editors at the 2019 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon at Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi
    Editors at the 2019 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon at Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi
  • Editors at the 2019 Women in Art Edit-a-thon in New Dehli
    Editors at the 2019 Women in Art Edit-a-thon in New Dehli
  • Editors at the 2019 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon in Ghana
    Editors at the 2019 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon in Ghana
  • Editors at the 2019 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon in La Paz
    Editors at the 2019 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon in La Paz

Over 4,000 people at three hundred events around the world have participated in Art+Feminism’s six annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, which took place across the months of March and April. This global effort created or improved nearly 25,000 articles on Wikipedia and added 2,000 images to Wikimedia Commons. The goal of the Edit-a-thon series is to bolster coverage of gender, feminism, and the arts on Wikipedia and our 2019 campaign focused on editing about non-binary topics. Since 2014, over 14,000 people at more than 1,100 events around the world have participated in our edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 58,000 articles on Wikipedia.

Highlights of the 2019 Edit-a-thon include content added to and pages created for notable figures including Anni Albers, Winifred Hall Allen, Archivo Histórico del movimiento de lesbianas feministas de México, Deanna Bowen, Tania Bruguera, Jade Nasogaluak Carpenter, Elizabeth Catlett, Sarah Charlesworth, Akwaeke Emezi, Feminatywum, Rita Gonzalez, Che Gossett, Barbara Hammer, Nobuko Tsuchiura, and Holly Lee.

At The Museum of Modern Art, the Edit-a-thon kicked off with a live-streamed conversation between writer and archivist Che Gossett; performance artist, writer, and educator Alok Vaid-Menon; and Simone Browne, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The discussion was moderated by Danielle A. Jackson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance, The Museum of Modern Art. Jackson framed the conversation by invoking Ralph Lemon and the concept of shakey elegance, the potential for beauty in the movements of trans bodies, queer bodies, and bodies of color to resist violence.

The Edit-a-thon also featured a Gallery Session on feminist art; a discussion of the forward-thinking teaching artists at MoMA via materials in the archives; a workshop on creating boundaries to combat implicit and explicit bias; and a teach-in on deleting and defending articles on Wikipedia. With the intention of making women artists and photographers of the African Diaspora more visible, The Black Lunch Table hosted their Wikimedia Photo Booth. Photographers Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Andrea Cauthen, and Kay Hickman took portraits of Abigail DeVille, Che Gossett and Derrick Adams, amongst others, for upload to Wikimedia Commons. Communal editing tables were hosted by AfroCROWD, an organization that increases awareness of free culture movements among people of African descent, and POWarts, which champions the professional lives of women in the art world. Across the street, New York Public Library’s 53rd Street Branch hosted Drag Queen Story Hour and offered a zine-making workshop, led by New York Tech Zine Fair.

The Art+Feminism project continued to expand around the world, with significant contributions to Armenian and Arabic language Wikipedia. Edit-a-thons took place at hundreds of institutions across the globe, including Institut Africain des Medias, Abidjan; Centro Cultural de España Juan de Salazar, Asunción; Sala Apolo, Barcelona; Kunstmuseum Basel; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Universidad del Valle, Cali; The Corning Museum of Glass; Hotel de ville de Pikine, Dakar; Albertinum, Dresden; University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff; Bibliothèque d'art et d'archéologie, Genève; The Menil Collection, Houston; M+, West Kowloon Cultural District and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Cornell University, Ithaca; Kathmandu Living Labs; hapaSpace, Kumasi; Laboratoria, Lima; Centro de Literaturas e Culturas Lusófonas e Europeias, Lisbon; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz; Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Indigenous Futures Cluster, Concordia University, Montreal; Lenbachhaus München; The Partition Museum, New Delhi; University of Nigeria, Nsukka; Gallery 101, Ottawa; La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris; NWU Gallery, Potchefstroom; Brown University, Providence; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; H-Farm, Roncade; Casa das Rosas, São Paulo; University of St. Andrews Womany Wonderland, Taipei City; Centro cultural de España en Tegucigalpa; Baexong Arts, Tokyo; Dar El Harka, Tunis; Umm al-Fahm Art Gallery; Fondazzjoni Kreattività, Valletta; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna; Mt. San Antonio College, Walnut; Eduard Isabekyan Gallery, Yerevan; Material, Zürich, and online with Women in Red.

As we enter our seventh year of organizing we will focus on strengthening and developing new and better platforms of support for our community of organizers, in order to make them increasingly self-sufficient and to increase organizer retention. At the same time, we will work on establishing efficient, sustainable, forward-looking operations appropriate to our new status as a non-profit organization. This includes measures such as the growth of our work team, the strengthening of the Regional Ambassador system and the inclusion of new members within the leadership collective.

Art+Feminism International Editathons Goals

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  • Refine and develop new strategies to strengthen the support we provide to our community of organizers around the globe.
    • We will cultivate even more our work with our current Regional Ambassadors.
    • Retain existing organizers: our goal is to have 50 percent of 2019 organizers return in 2020.
  • Building out the Regional Ambassador program to make it more successful in order to grow in the global south, the US and Europe.
  • Transition leadership from co-founders and build new leadership in our community.
    • Bring one new lead co-organizer.
    • Continue the process of Regional Ambassador's transition to positions of increasing leadership within the project.

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, as well as participate in research and publications.

In 2018-2019 we continue expanding awareness of our campaign and the gender gap on Wikipedia through our social media platforms. Our aim was to leverage digital opportunities to engage with BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of color) and LGBTQ communities that are beyond the reach of our institutional partners. We sought to accomplish this goal through a robust communications strategy built in collaboration with our 2019 Art+Feminism fellow, Keon Dillon. This year, we saw a more than 300% increase in community across Facebook (86% growth) and Instagram (311% growth). We made a major change to our communications and organizing strategy; launching the Gender and The Non-Binary campaign, which facilitated greater growth and engagement among our digital communities due to the use of our hashtags #artandfeminism, #noweditingaf, and #beyondthebinary. Through the consistent use of the hashtag and our focus on engaging our online communities in conversation around their experiences related to gender equity, gender identity, women's rights, trans rights as human rights, and intersectional feminism we were able to amplify our messaging and reach. More information about the campaign and its mission can be found in the campaign announcement written by our Director, McKensie Mack here.

The 2018-2019 cycle saw the return of our Facebook Live series, Office Hours, created to help organizers and new editors understand the steps to planning and hosting Art+Feminism edit-a-thons, using the Dashboard, and finding funding for events. We presented the series in Spanish and English with our Regional Ambassador for Latin America, Melissa Tamani, leading the Spanish tutorials. The series once again played a vital role in bridging some of the knowledge gaps we observed last year during the fourth cycle of our campaign. Lead co-organizer Michael Mandiberg lead a more private video conference addressed to our community of organizer's.

Our expanded network of Regional Ambassadors continued with the expansion of the campaign on a global level. This meant the expansion of ambassador led events in new regions including Armenia, the Ivory Coast, Brazil, and Chandigarh. e have once again been able to have key materials translated into Spanish, French and, for the first time, Portuguese. In addition, thanks to the work of Ambassadors, we have once again been able to have key materials translated into Spanish, French and, for the first time, Portuguese.

The set of activities with the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2019 included a Panel discussion moderated by Danielle A. Jackson, a curatorial assistant in MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance, featuring writer and archivist Che Gossett, performance artist, writer, and educator Alok Vaid-Menon, and Simone Browne, an associate professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.and three very popular break-out sessions,"Boundary Work: How to take care of yourself when dealing with racism and genderphobia on the internet," led by McKensie Mack; "The Deletion Process: Challenging and Defending Articles on Wikipedia," led by Michael Mandiberg; and "Mining the Feminist Archive: Tracing MoMA’s Hidden Histories of Women Teaching Artists," led by Sara Torres (63% of MoMA's survey respondents claimed they attended one or both of the breakout sessions). We also held a Gallery Session "Who Were the Modern Women Artists?" Led by Tamara Kostianovsky. There were two communal editing tables, hosted by AFROcrowd and POWarts. In addition, we hosted additional programming at NYPL: https://www.dragqueenstoryhour.org/ kid-friendly programming: Drag Queen Story Hour.] and Zine making with the New York Tech Zine Fair, led by Ritu Ghiya and Neta Bomani.

Metrics Goals

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By the midpoint of our 2019 campaign, over 285 events took place on all six inhabited continents and online. This is the same number of events as last year. At least 4200 participants created or improved 28000 content pages across all Wikimedia projects. We expect these numbers may increase slightly due to the volume of our Wikidata work at the end of the cycle.

Our metrics goals are to achieve the same amount of editing as this year, as we sustain the community's health. Unlike in past years, our metrics goals for 2020 are not predictions based off of our growth model as our focus is on stability.

Global Metrics

  • 4200 participants
  • 1400 newly registered users
  • 28,000 content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects.

Project Metrics

  • 285 Events
  • Greater than 50 percent repeat organizers.

Metrics will be tracked in the shared google doc.

Calendar

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September - October

  • Onboarding of new Executive Director and Project Administrator.
  • Onboarding of Lead Co-organizer, including Software Skills Training on Slack, Trello, and Streak.
  • Onboarding of Regional Ambassadors.
  • Email and Social media pledge campaign to previous node event organizers confirming the March 2020 editathon dates.

November

  • Onboarding of Communications Fellow.
  • Continued outreach to existing and new nodes.
  • Begin planning public programming around New York City event(s) to take place in March.
  • 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 2020.
  • January is our biggest outreach and engagement month.
  • Completion of APG Midpoint Report.
  • Plan and hold training webinars on editing, conflict resolution, and grant writing for:
    • MoMA volunteers
    • Art+Feminism organizers
  • Confirm details for public programs, technology, and break out sessions at MoMA.
  • Plan survey

February

  • February is a month full of activity where we implement all of our strategies from the previous year's cycle of preparation and planning.
    • Finalize event details with MoMA for public programming, use of space, break-out sessions, and 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 MoMA edit-a-thon and support organizers hosting March events globally.
  • 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 areas for improvement within our global campaign strategy and goals.
  • Update website to reflect outcomes, press coverage, etc.

May-June

  • Begin planning 2021 event:
    • Begin program with MoMA.
    • Confirm ambassador participation.
    • Attend annual campaign strategy retreat.

July-September

  • Begin preparing outreach for 2021 event.
  • Assign administrative duties to Regional Ambassadors.
  • Publish call for 2021 event pledges.

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 and our 2017, 2018, and 2019 Dashboards show, 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 catalyzed 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 285 3808 22319
2019 285 4200 28000
2020 (projected) 285 4200 28000
  • 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 60,000 articles over the past six 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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As we enter our sixth year of organizing, many of the risks to the project remain largely the same as last year.

Non-profit status challenges

In May 2019, our application to become a not-for-profit entity was approved by the IRS. This will be our first year operating as a non-profit, which will come with a learning curve, unforeseen challenges, and additional reporting responsibilities. Having a Board of Trustees is one of the greatest challenges as The Board will henceforth be in charge of delineating the main issues of the organization.

New leaderships challenges

During the 2019 cycle, our team of collaborators grew considerably, which implied dedicating numerous hours of work in the process of incorporation and training of these people. In the next cycle, we will continue to incorporate new people in key positions. We believe that this will again mean an increase in the workload of the leadership collective but we consider it necessary to continue with the process of transition of leadership from the group of co-founders to members of our community who have been in the project for a considerable amount of time.

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. In 2018-2019, despite the continued amazing efforts of our Director, McKensie Mack, the entire core organizing team experienced burn out, despite additional staffing. While we are hopeful that additional Regional Organizers and an additional Lead Organizer will ameliorate this situation, as our community grows, the core leadership team has been unable to step back in the ways that we have hoped. Further, working towards 501c3 status will continue to take a toll on the leadership collective in 2018-2019.

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 online and in person 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.

Budget

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

Node funding calculations

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Per last year, we will be primarily handling the reimbursements directly. A small number of our more developed and ambitious nodes may apply for Rapid Grants, under their new plan which prioritizes Art+Feminism rapid grants during the month of January. Our calculation of reimbursement for events will remain the same. We will advise our organizers to apply for funding with the following structure:

Organizers 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).

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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