Grants:PEG/Ada Initiative/Gender-gap admin training/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY Pending has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:PEG/Ada Initiative/Gender-gap admin training.

You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email grants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?: Yes

Is your project completed?: Yes

Activities and lessons learned

Activities

We taught one Ally Skills Workshop at Wikimania 2015 to 23 participants as a pilot program to test the concept of offering this workshop to Wikipedia administrators around the world. To prepare for the workshop, we read many different discussions on Wikipedia, including the details of decisions by the English ArbComm. We read blog posts and mailing list discussions by editors and administrators, as well as Wikipediocracy threads. We interviewed several editors in person. We spent many hours recruiting attendees for the workshop, using comment threads on Meta, people who supported the grant, and people involved in relevant WikiProjects, as well as our personal networks. We surveyed the participants after the workshop to learn how to improve the workshop; 11 people responded to the survey. The overall reaction to the workshop was enthusiastic, both in person and in our surveys.

We can't share the list of participants because some admins and editors threatened to harass any editor known to have attended the workshop.

Lessons learned

What worked well?

Overall, the participants liked the format that emphasized small group discussion and specific real-world examples. They enjoyed the facilitation style from the workshop leader. Here are some quotes from our post-workshop attendee survey question asking "What did you like about the workshop?"

"a) I liked that the workshop's main focus is to give participants time to practice in small groups the skills learned. b) I like that the sessions was specific to Wikipedia (or WMF) with good examples. c) I like that participants had the opportunity to work with a variety of people attending the workshop. d) I liked the short clear introduction with written materials to aid in working on examples in the small groups."

"The format, the presenter, the emphasis on what can be done. As a straight bloke I was a tad nervous that this might be just about making blokes feel uncomfortable but the emphasis was a practical on things we can do to address a series of problems, some of which were worse than I had appreciated."

"The examples, although relevant, were basic. That helped actually, because the emphasis was not about analyzing the Complex and Borderline situations, but instead cultivating an ease and confidence with Taking Action when it Needs Action." - Jake Orlowitz

"It was focused on specific and very difficult problems in the Wikimedia community."

"We tackle real life scenarios and everyone contributes to the discussion."

"The format, the content, the interactions, and, of course, the great speaker."

"Safe environment. Well structured format. Properly prepared. Professional facilitation. Valerie. [the instructor]"

"Experiential approach was great."

What didn't work?

While we spent a lot of time researching the scenarios and making both the scenarios and the responses concrete and specific, attendees still wanted MORE detail and specificity. Some workshop attendees had to be repeatedly asked to follow the workshop rules designed to stop one person from dominating the conversation. Some workshop attendees explicitly rejected the idea of listening to the instructor and the women in their discussion groups, and outright denied the women’s experiences. (The instruction intervened in these cases.) The attendees had a wide range of experience in editing and administering, so some people didn't know fairly common abbreviations and wanted more explanation, while others wanted more detail on obscure commands.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

We would include more introductory material - things like defining what "sexualization" is - since the audience for this workshop tends to have less background in feminist terminology than the audience the workshop was originally designed for. We would make the examples even more specific and add even more details to the procedures for solutions because Wikimedians are extremely process and detail-oriented. We would add more detail and explanations of actions that administrators can take, such as edit-protecting pages, reverting, deleting, suppressing, and reporting to checkuser, and seeking advice on turning these into one-stop wiki pages in the appropriate wiki. We would give more strict guidelines up front to participants on how much discussion time each participant should take - e.g., introductions should be no more than 30 seconds long, men especially should not take more than 1 minute of the discussion time. We will do a better job of explaining how the skills in the workshop lead to attracting more women to the Wikimedia community. If we taught the workshop outside the context of the American English-speaking culture, we would change the presentation and the topics to better suit the culture and language.

Learning patterns

We endorse the Safe Space Policy [1] and Planning Effective Conference Sessions [2] learning patterns.

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

Provide the original project goal here.: Increase awareness of how sexism impacts editing and administrative decisions on Wikimedia projects and give admins the tools to make better editing and administrative decisions and effectively advocate against bias caused by sexism.

We proposed a pilot program to train admins how to be more aware of how sexism impacts Wikimedia projects and specifically to better inform their decisions as admins. The training program would be the Ally Skills Workshop from the Ada Initiative and teach to up to 30 admins from around the world at Wikimania 2015.

Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 short paragraphs.: Overall, we feel we have achieved this goal due to the relatively high turnout (23 out of 30 estimated attendees) and the overwhelmingly positive feedback from our post-workshop survey. Respondents favored the real-world scenarios and interactive, small-group setting. A few comments from respondents regarding what they liked about the workshop:

“I liked the structure, especially the discussion section, where we could discuss how we would deal with a certain situation specific to Wikipedia. I also really liked that we were given definitions at the beginning.” - Paulina

“The format, the presenter, the emphasis on what can be done. As a straight bloke I was a tad nervous that this might be just about making blokes feel uncomfortable but the emphasis was a practical on things we can do to address a series of problems, some of which were worse than I had appreciated.” - anonymous

“The examples, although relevant, were basic. That helped actually, because the emphasis was not about analyzing the Complex and Borderline situations, but instead cultivating an ease and confidence with Taking Action when it Needs Action.” - Jake Orlowitz

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Project metrics	Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Attendance of up to 30 admins at Wikimania 2015’s Ally Skills workshop.	39 registered with an actual turnout of 23	Attendees were selected through a competitive open applications process; the response rate was very positive with 39 registered.
In post-survey results from attendees, for 80% to agree to the statement “AFTER the workshop, I know how to welcome women to my communities”.	100% agreed or strongly agreed	Compared to 64% of respondents (11 out of 23 attendees) who agreed or strongly agreed with this statement BEFORE they attended the workshop.
In post-survey results from attendees, for 80% of respondents to agree to the statement “AFTER the workshop, I can respond to actions unwelcoming to women in my communities”.	100% agreed or strongly agreed	Compared to 45% of respondents (11 out of 23 attendees) who agreed or strongly agreed with this statement BEFORE they attended the workshop.
In post-survey results from attendees, for 80% of respondents to agree to the statement “AFTER the workshop, I am confident in speaking up to support women.”	91% agreed or strongly agreed	Compared to 55% of respondents (11 out of 23 attendees) who agreed or strongly agreed with this statement BEFORE they attended the workshop.
In post-survey results from attendees, for 80% of respondents to agree to the statement “AFTER the workshop, I am aware of the challenges facing women in their communities”.	100% agreed or strongly agreed	Compared to 73% of respondents (11 out of 23 attendees) who agreed or strongly agreed with this statement BEFORE they attended the workshop.
In post-survey results from attendees, for 80% of respondents to agree to the statement “The workshop taught me new responses to unwelcoming actions in my communities”.	100% agreed or strongly agreed	11 out of 23 attendees responded to this statement
In post-survey results from attendees, for 80% of respondents to agree to the statement “The workshop taught me responses to avoid when responding to unwelcoming actions in my community”.	100% agreed or strongly agreed	11 out of 23 attendees responded to this statement
In post-survey results from attendees, for 80% of respondents to agree to the statement “The workshop gave me actionable examples of things I can do to make my community more welcoming to women”.	100% agreed or strongly agreed	11 out of 23 attendees responded to this statement
In post-survey results from attendees, for 80% of respondents to agree to the statement “I would recommend the workshop to others”.	100% agreed or strongly agreed	11 out of 23 attendees responded to this statement
In post-survey results from attendees, for 80% of respondents to agree to the statement “The workshop made me realize that I have a position of power to influence change”.	92% agreed or strongly agreed	11 out of 23 attendees responded to this statement

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the Global Metrics. We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" where necessary.

Next to each required metric, list the actual outcome achieved through this project.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for an edit-a-thon which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	0	not part of our direct goals
2. # of new editors	0	not part of our direct goals
3. # of individuals involved	0	not part of our direct goals
4a. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	0	not part of our direct goals
4b. # of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (Optional)	0	not part of our direct goals
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	0	not part of our direct goals
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	0	not part of our direct goals

Learning question: Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

This was not measured in this project.

Impact

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic priorities?

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

Based on the results of our post-workshop survey, we have improved the quality of Wikimedia project administration and moderation by training administrators on how sexism impacts discussion and editing on Wikimedia projects. Administrators found the workshop format memorable and enjoyable, and this workshop format could be used for other administrator training programs.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".: Yes

Expenses

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here.

Number	Category	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Actual cost per unit	Actual total	Budgeted total	Currency	Notes
1	Travel expenses	Airfare for workshop facilitator Valerie Aurora - Round-trip economy flight from San Francisco to Mexico City	1	N/A	N/A	$1160.03	$2,000	USD	$633.37 and $526.66 cost to change flight for early return due to illness
2	Administrative costs	The workshop fee	1	N/A	N/A	$7,000	$7,000	USD	The fee includes labor costs for creating the application form, screening applications, assisting with recruiting attendees, teaching the workshop, and analyzing the survey results after the workshop.

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): $9,000 USD

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if PEG is your only funding source): $9,000 USD

Total amount spent on this project: $8,160.03 USD

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project: $8,160.03 USD

Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.: No

Remaining funds

Remaining funds from this grant have been returned to WMF in the amount of US$839.97.

Are there any grant funds remaining?: Yes

Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)

$839.97 USD from unused travel expenses since WMF covered the hotel costs

If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.

Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.

Return unused funds