Grants:Simple/Applications/Black Lunch Table/2020/strategicplan

Introduction

Per our annual, staffing, and budget plans, Black Lunch Table’s strategic plan outlines our central mission and the vision we have for our organization’s future and our work with the Wikimedia Foundation.

About

The Black Lunch Table (BLT) is an ongoing collaboration founded by artists Jina Valentine and Heather Hart which intends to fill holes in the documentation of contemporary art history. Since 2005 the BLT has taken a variety of forms relating to this most recent iteration, which includes a Wikimedia project. Our Wikipedia initiative began in 2014 and has grown steadily since. In 2018 BLT hosted/collaborated on 39 edit-a-thons, trained 165 new editors, and over 1800 articles were edited.

Mission

BLT mobilizes the creation and improvement of a specific set of Wikimedia documents that pertain to the lives and works of Black artists. At each edit-a-thon, we provide a list of suggested artists to add or edit, with particular focus on Black artists who have worked within or are local to the host institution’s community and are currently under-documented on Wikipedia. Our project encourages people of color and women to join the Wikimedia movement while also asking white male editors to focus on gaps in coverage on Wikimedia.

Vision

As we continue to cultivate our relationship with the Wikipedia movement, seeking out ways we can innovate within it, and continue to grow our project sustainably, we are more committed than ever to the ways in which the work we do makes Black artists visible. Our project raises awareness about the importance of this work, particularly as it pertains to the often unrecorded history of Black visual artists.

In the past year, we had the great opportunity to think through our engagement with the platform in two distinct and informative ways, by contributing an essay to the forthcoming Wiki@20 anniversary book and hosting a Wikimedia Strategy Salon in Chicago, IL. The relationships that have developed out of these opportunities are significant to our conception of the project and planning for its future. We are at once examining our engagements with publics and content, our relationship with WMF, and the structures we hold internally so that all of our engagements prosper.

The Wiki@20 text was beneficial in formulating and formalizing the language we use to describe what our project does and what we imagine it will do. We also hope that this publication will emphasize and elucidate the importance of the movement and our work within it.

We describe the Black Lunch Table project as nomadic: we travel to spaces in order to connect with people who would normally not have the initiative or confidence to approach Wikipedia editing on their own and to introduce the focus of marginalized communities on Wikipedia to more experienced editors. By taking our project out to potential editors, we are able to witness the moment when historians, laymen and academics alike realize that Wikipedia is a useful, vetted, reliable resource and that editing is empowering, gratifying, and fun. To do this, our project creates space for editors that is focused on one-on-one attention in order to lessen the sense of intimidation felt by those new to the platform.

Physically meeting people where they are in order to extend an invitation to Wiki’s digital platform is a critical step in demystifying the process of becoming a contributor to Wikipedia and can more clearly illustrate the variety of ways that one can engage the platform. Our efforts serve to increase the ethnic and gender diversity among the editorship while also providing affirmation that these voices are welcome and critically necessary.

As we ask communities, that we are both a part of and outside of, to welcome our project, we are also cognizant of the position we hold as a representative for the Wikipedia community itself. One of the most important questions that were raised during our strategy salon, report here, was how do you come to trust an organization? The refrain from participants was that if we are to consider how an entity as large, and to some degree, as opaque, as Wikipedia can be engaged on a local level or with often excluded publics those who would be expected to participate need to know the Foundation’s true intentions. It is important as we move forward as a more established organization that we also engage in dialogue with the Foundation to think about how to demonstrate investment in marginalized communities and foster open dialogue, consistency, and access, thereby fostering trust.

Our WikiCommons Photo Initiative (that includes at its core, our pop-up photo studio) has become a highlight of our work. The primary objective of the photo initiative is to quite literally increase the visibility of Black visual artists on Wikimedia. The process is simple: we invite a local Black photographer to host a pop-up portrait studio at our edit-a-thon; we invite local artists on our Wiki list to have their photo taken; the photographer releases all portraits to WikiCommons for use (eventual, if the artist still lacks a page; or immediately if they have one) on the artists’ Wikipedia article. Thus far we have uploaded over 900 photos to the Commons, dozens of which have been incorporated into artists’ Wikipedia articles.

The photo initiative is an opportunity for everyone to contribute in a small but incredibly impactful way. This is one of the ways that we are contributing to the structural completeness of current and future articles. Those articles with photos and infoboxes appear in Google searches with a prominent Knowledge Graph, which informs folks about basic facts related to the subject and presents them as noteworthy and included in the ever-growing record of human knowledge.

In order to see the Black Lunch Table flourish in all forms, we must establish and maintain a committed and engaged team that supports and champions our vision as a nonprofit organization and a project with a niche in the Wiki universe. This includes team members that are skilled in data visualization and can imagine innovative ways to utilize WikiCode, as well as traditional professional supports like lawyers and accountants. Our organizational structure is important in as much as it supports our ability to more effectively host, train, and retain editors who are critical to the central work and mission of BLT, encourage people of color and women to join the Wikimedia movement and focus on the gaps in coverage, especially as it relates to Black artists.

This is a critical time for our project. The gains we made and the structural development we achieved over the course of the last year are significant. And the relationships we have begun with institutions, foundations, publics, editors, and Wikimedians are significant but developing them further (into something lasting) is contingent on receiving support to continue this work and take advantage of the unique opportunities within our reach.

Long term goals, programmatic objectives

Below are specific objectives for each of the three focus areas, nonprofit operations, team, and edit-a-thons. Our plan to enact them over time can be reviewed in our annual plan here.

Nonprofit Operations

As of June 2019, BLT’s application to become a 501c3 has been approved by the IRS. With this important strategic and administrative goal achieved our goals regarding nonprofit operations begin with the engagement of a strategist to help lead organizers craft a sustainable plan for the project’s future including a focus on the following items:

Developing a new board of advisors and expanding the board of directors

Organizational assessment and oversight

Enlist strategist within 1 month
Assessment within 2-3 months

Target and develop a plan for board directors/advisors/mentors/liaisons

Refine dream board list within 1 month
Following assessment, 2-3 months, invite identified board prospects

Expand bylaws

Rewrite bylaws with assistance from strategist and board in 6 months

Identify insurance

Select non profit insurance with help from strategist and board in 6 months

Strategize for future expansion including employee benefits and full-time employment

Map out expansion plan and timeline in writing with strategist and board in 12 months

Increase BLT partnerships with cultural and academic institutions

Strategize institutional engagements (Art museums, cultural centers, etc...)

Produce a strategic plan for institutional engagement after 6 months
Develop 2 new partnerships with cultural institutions after 12 months.

Strategize Community engagements (Boys & Girls Clubs, libraries, community centers, learning centers, etc)

Produce a strategic plan for community engagement after 6 months
Develop 2 new partnerships with community institutions after 12 months.

Strategize academic engagements (Higher Ed classrooms/centers/symposia, High schools, etc)

Produce a strategic plan for academic engagement after 6 months
Develop an academic integration lesson plan in 8 months
Develop 2 new partnerships with academic institutions after 12 months.

Eventual audience outcomes

Strategize what audience outcomes are desired in 4 months
Set 12 month audience outcome goals in 5 months

Linked-data relationships between ours and other archives

Write linked data relationship potential statement in 2 months
Identify appropriate institutions in 3 months
Outreach and pitch to 2 institutions with linked data potential in 6 months
Develop and beta test 2 new database relationship partners in 12 months

Increase organizational sponsors for BLT activities

Identify and target (fiscal, corporate, promotional) in 2 months
Develop long and short term project goals with the lead organizers in first 2 months
Develop a long-running strategic plan, including fundraising and budget advisement in first 2 months

Team

We want to develop a more efficient and effective team and a more thoughtful engagement strategy. We want to be able to fund the project and maintain a trained and competent team beyond temporary contract terms and temporary funding. In order to do this, we need to establish, hire, train a team to which the day to day operations can be moved away from the lead organizers so that they may focus on the longer-term fundraising and strategic plans for the project.

The core positions of the BLT Wikipedia team are the lead organizers, project managers, and regional proxies. For the upcoming year, we need to retain our project manager, hire and engage four regional Proxies, and shift the work that lead organizers are responsible for from day to day operations to larger strategic visioning. Our core team is also responsible for representing BLT at Wiki related events (WikiConference North America and Wikimania 2020) and be participants in the dialogue we wish to continue with the Foundation and other user groups in the Wiki community. We have added positions to our budget/grant request in order to support data visualization, innovative ways to utilize WikiCode, and professional support; these goals are realized by the inclusion of a coder/digital specialist, accountant, bookkeeper, strategist, and lawyer.

The lead organizers are responsible for setting and maintaining the vision of the project and are the intermediary between professionals and the BLT team. They work with the nonprofit strategist to implement fundraising campaigns, staffing, and strategic plans. They act as artistic directors and curators of the project’s vision.

The project manager is responsible for supporting and implementing the strategic vision set by the lead organizers and supporting and guiding the work of BLT’s regional proxies. They are a communicative and organizational intermediary between institutions and the BLT team. They are also responsible for more everyday activities such as metrics tracking, grant and budget maintenance, and generating best practice documents.

Regional proxies are Wikimedians based outside of the New York/northeast and Chicago/northern midwest areas. The regional proxies help BLT establish local connections within communities further afield from our project home regions. They are central to creating opportunities for new publics to be introduced to the project, trained as editors, and begin editing Wikipedia.

Increase stability of team

Retain effective team members

Rehire 3 team members who are on a budget-dependent hiatus in next month
Immediately renew contract with 3 team members in addition to accountant and lawyer
Over the next 12 months existing team members, strategist and Leads will successfully train or re-train all 10 core team members on their specific day to day operations.

Hire 4 new team members in the next 12 months in addition to contracting a non-profit strategist in first month

In first 2 months, with strategist, develop processes to sustain team members for more than 12 month cycles.
Interview, hire, train new team members.

Redistribute operations from Leads to team

Over the next 12 months, Leads should shift focus to strategy and vision.
Over the next 12 months improve all of our staffing, training, hiring systems as detailed above.
Over the next 12 months develop a process where each team member is operating more effectively, sustainably and the BLT project is becoming more stable overall.

The expectations and descriptions for the entire list of positions can be seen in our staffing plan HERE.

Edit-a-thons, editors, photobooths

Our need for crystallizing our organizational and structural operations is all in service of the content, editorship, and community we want to grow on Wikipedia. We focus on ‘thoughtful and sustainable engagement, and person-to-person attention.’ Although, we want to point out that much of our work goes beyond calculable metrics in numbers of people and events, we still wish to study our project in a way that we can communicate via the SMART method.

While making these internal adjustments, we expect to maintain and grow our edit-a-thons, collaborations, and initiatives including in the following ways:

Edit-a-thons and collaborations:

Increase access to training and participation in marginalized communities

Host 40 Wiki events over 12 months

4 of these will be international
4 of these will be hosted in de-centralized areas (outside major metropolitan art hubs)
At least 10 of these will be outside of the BLT home areas

Develop and initiate a survey and assessment protocol within 6 months

Calculate a more dynamic metrics system to assess and reflect our goals
Set goals based on a 10% increase in our numbers
Target new editors, training sessions, retention, returning editors, diverse demographic, in addition to more complex metrics

Adopt GLAM and Wiki Education into our initiative

Develop programs that include photography courses and students over 6 months
Host our WikiCommons Photo Initiative (a pop-up photo studio) 12 times over 12 months
Host 1 photo contest/challenge in our scope within 12 months
Develop task list and contests

Over the next 12 months develop ways to raise the quality of articles that exist in our master task list.
Include contests or games around structural completeness, interest-specific todo list for editors who want to focus on grammar, citation, infoboxes, wikidata, commons, etc
Develop a banner to identify an article that BLT contributed to in 3 months

Language

Oral histories

Work with coder to explore meta tags connecting Wikidata to our oral history database that is off-wiki over next 12 months
In the next 6 months, develop a sample of how Wikidata may connect to BLT archive.

Translation (interpretation)

We have hosted edit-a-thons in multilingual spaces and we intend to continue discussing the development of non-English language Wikis.
In the next 12 months, we will develop a more thoughtful approach to translating pages and multilingual presence on Wiki, centering interpretation and self-awareness.

BLT Portraits on WikiCommons

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