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Grants:IEG/Art+Feminism Editathon training materials and network building/Renewal/Midpoint

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Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

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In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

For it’s third-annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Art+Feminism supported 2,500 participants in 175 events across 6 continents for a record-breaking year of editing and creating pages for women in the arts. We’re thrilled with this year’s results. We feel that they reflect our emphasis on intersectional feminisms, both in the content edited and the organizing efforts.” Approximately 2,000 new pages were created and 1,500 existing articles were improved on Wikipedia, a more than three-fold increase of last year’s events’ results.

Methods and activities

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How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.


Below you will find a list of our work so far, organized by the sections we created during our grant proposal.

Diversity Audit

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During the first half of our grant, we focused on getting our diversity audit up and running. We selected three participants, all of whom bring diverse perspectives on community engagement and/or Wikimedia related projects.

Work completed so far

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  • Outreach to potential participants
    • Wikipedians, leaders of other intersectional groups focused on edit-a-thons: Alice Backer, founder of AfroCrowd
    • Community activists focused on media and intersectionality: Sheetal Prajapati, Assistant Director, Learning and Artists Initiatives, Museum of Modern Art, Marin Watts, Director of Operations and Communications, Trans Justice Fund
    • More information on the committee members here.
  • Completed two meetings with the diversity subcommittee.
    • Provided committee with access to all of our training materials, press communications, website(s).

Further refinement of the reporting process

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Work completed so far

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  • Standardize process for gathering post-event metrics for immediate reporting to press
  • Standardize process for identifying and supporting articles that might need more support post-event.

Further outreach

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Work completed so far

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  • Reach out to national chapters, related Wiki projects, and the Wikipedia community in general to build better lines of communications
    • Worked directly with Stuart Prior of Wikimedia UK to establish the UK events, and Wikimedia Spain to establish events in Spain.
    • Conducted outreach to other major Wikimedia chapters, though not as successful as with UK and Spain.
  • Reach out to other thematic gender gap groups and interested parties to share our materials and best practices.
    • Women in Red held a Art+Feminism edit-a-thon, which took place through the month of March.
  • Improve scalability and make things more self sufficient.
    • Adopted Streak, a Gmail-plug-in that organizes your Gmail like a CRM
    • Adopted Trello, a free project management software
  • Decentralize, diversify and expand organizing committee
    • Brought regional ambassadors Stacey Allan, Amber Berson, and Richard Knipel. You can find out more about each of them here.
  • Expand and refine editing resources, particularly those that encourage for post-edit-a-thon retention
    • Created new videos to reflect changes since the Visual Editor

UX/UI/IA design review and implementation

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Work completed so far

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  • Hire an interaction designer to assess the User Experience, User Interface and Information Architecture (UX/UI/IA) of our Meetup page, and implement revisions to improve usability and legibility.

March 2016 Edit-a-thons (The Event!)

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Programs and Events Goals: goals to expand the 2015 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon by

  1. running four training events in Fall 2015/Winter 2016
  2. organizing one large NYC edit-a-thon on March 5, 2016 at The Museum of Modern Art
  3. coordinating many node edit-a-thons around the world in March, 2016
  4. targeted outreach to post-secondary institutions nationally and internationally

Work completed so far

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Midpoint outcomes

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What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

Over 2500 participants at more than 175 events around the world participated in Art+Feminism’s third annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, resulting in the creation of 2000 new pages and improvements to 1500 articles on Wikipedia. This represents a significant increase over the 2015 events, with more than double the number of participants and triple the number of articles created or improved.

Alongside the central event at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the 175+ events were held across every inhabited continent and in 30 countries at venues including: Ashesi University Brekuso, Accra; Tate Britain, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Gus Fisher Gallery, The University of Auckland; Archives Nationales, Paris; The Menil Collection, Houston; SCAD Hong Kong; Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Lima; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.

Highlights of the 2016 Edit-a-thon include new Wikipedia pages for Unity Bainbridge, Manon de Boer, Tina Charlie, Otelia Cromwell, Aurora Reyes Flores, Liz Magic Laser, Park McArthur, Elizabeth McIntosh (artist), Divya Mehra, Anne Pasternak, and Sara Greenberger Rafferty and improved articles for Megumi Igarashi, Julie Mehretu, Ana Mendieta, Wangechi Mutu, Lorraine O’Grady, Porpentine, Faith Ringgold, Martine Sims, Carrie Mae Weems, and Zitkala-Sa.

Diversity subcommittee

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As a direct result of the diversity subcommittee's recommendations, we held a panel Discussion with Orit Gat, Reina Gossett, and Jenna Wortham at the MoMA event. The panel was well attended (we ran out of capacity in the room), and according to a survey conducted by Art+Feminism and MoMA staff, it was also quite popular.

Further refinement of the reporting process

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Further outreach

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UX/UI/IA design review and implementation

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March 2016 Edit-a-thons (The Event!)

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Finances

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Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Expense Approved amount Actual funds spent Difference
Lead Organizer labor 18,000 USD 9,000 USD 9,000 USD∞
Organizing Committee member Honoraria 6,000 USD 2,000 USD 4,000 USD∞
Web services and consulting 7,010 USD 1250 USD 5760 USD∞
Organizer travel to Wiki GLAM/Gender Gap conferences 2,000 USD
Event Project Management 5,000 USD 2,500 USD 2,500 USD§§
Event Marketing 4,500 USD 3000 USD§
Food 8,800 USD 7,700 USD§ 1,100 USD
Childcare 2,000 USD 2,410 USD§ (410 USD)
Computer rental for MoMA event 2,200 USD 741.44 º
Wikipedian Travel 1,000 USD
Total 56,510 USD (budget explanation here)


Notes

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  • Items marked § - we are waiting for organizers to complete their reimbursement process for dollars already allocated
  • Items marked ∞ - were planned to spend during second half of grant
  • Items marked º - we were not able to spend in full because of lack of insurance, and thus the deposit required for use. We will describe in full for final report.

Learning

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The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

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What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • Scale: While we didn't scale up in New York as we expected (probably due to the fact that our event coincided with the Armory Fair, which is a major event in the NY art world), we experienced massive growth due to our outreach and word of mouth. While this is, of course, a major sign of success, it brings up the question: how might we handle this if we grow again next year?
  • Organizer labor/burnout: Despite increasing the budget items for organizer labor, we still worked many more hours than we accounted for in the grant, to the detriment of our other IRL obligations.
  • International Wikipedia chapters: as noted above, we had more success in the past in working with international Wikipedia chapters in the UK, Spain, and South America. However, we still do not have robust working relationship with very many chapters internationally, despite our outreach efforts.
  • Reporting: reporting continues to be very difficult for us, and a HUGE amount of work. We need better instructions for reporting attendance at events and a better protocol for events to track and report their own attendance and articles created/updated. It ended up being a lot of manual work for the core organizing team and some dedicated Wikipedians.
  • Push-back from Wikipedia community on articles going up for deletion after the event. We need a better policy for how to communicate the worth of our work.
  • Finances: we had far more requests for childcare funding than we expected!

What is working well

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What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

We learned a lot during this year's edit-a-thon. We created a Learning Pattern to describe one of our major successful changes, which was the use of project management software, but also wanted to bullet point a few more examples:

  • CRM: Using Streak was integral to our success this year and our ability to delegate outreach and communication work to our Regional Ambassadors. Caveat: CRMs are expensive and there aren't currently any good free options, so this is something you need to budget for.
  • Decentralization: the 600-person event in Paris was clearly a sign that non-central organizers are capable of holding large scale events. However, the central organizing committee was still overworked in terms of project management and node event organizing. This is something we need to resolve in the future either through distributing this labor across a larger group of organizers, or more likely by establishing one core project manager position.

Next steps and opportunities

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What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • Finalizing work with the Diversity Subcommittee.
  • Continuing the massive amount of outcomes work required
  • Continuing to handle the node event reimbursement process.

Grantee reflection

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We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an IEGrantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

We were thrilled with how many events took place this year! It felt like such a major sign of success that the project continues to grow, that people haven't lost interest. And it proves that if we have the capacity to do more outreach, the project will continue to grow!


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