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

Report accepted

Dear Failedprojects, Theredproject and Siankevans,

Thank you for submitting this Midpoint Report. I'm accepting your report now, with the following comments:

• Hearty congratulations on your accomplishments to date. Given the success of your events in previous years, and the loss of one team member this year, a more than three-fold increase from last year is outstanding and speaks to your success in establishing strong partnerships both online and offline. It also speaks to the efficacy of the infrastructure you've built to support your own workflows and that of your node organizers. Well done!
• It's noteworthy that nearly half (47%) of your NYC participants had never edited before, and that 69% had never attended a Wikimedia event before. What more can you say about how A+F has succeeded at attracting new editors to Wikipedia? Any tips or suggestions you could pass on to other event organizers who want to do better outreach or offer better support for new editors?
  • Theredproject shared IRL about some of his thoughts on this theme and it would be welcome to have them captured in writing in a learning pattern. For example, I appreciated hearing Michael's perspective on privileging pedagogical skills over Wikipedian skills when selecting trainers and breaking instructions down into simple checklists for new organizers. I also appreciated comments over the phone from Failedprojects about specificity in understanding the needs of the target audience, and Siankevans's thoughts about empowering participants.
• It's great to hear that you have established workable standardized processes for gathering post-event metrics and for identifying and supporting articles that might need more support post-event. Will you provide documentation of these processes in your Final Report? Again, it would be particularly useful to have them documented in learning patterns, so that they are more discoverable for other grantees who might want to borrow from your practices.
• You report that you had double the participants and triple the number of articles created or improved. This sounds like your participants got more efficient at creating content. Do you have any ideas about why this might be so? Do you attribute this to participation from more experienced editors from Women in Red?
• Thank you for including the list of highlights of new articles created or improved. It's lovely to see the diversity of artists reflected there. On a housekeeping note: the Elizabeth McIntosh link goes to a disambiguation page
• More on a housekeeping note: when I clicked on the links throughout your report, I got a number of messages telling me, "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." I suggest you go through and click on all of them and make sure they go where you intend.
• Please share the returns from the surveys distributed by node organizers in your Final Report. I understand from our phone call today that your participation levels are below what you'd hoped. I'm still interested to hear what information was captured.
• The suite of resources produced by Art+Feminism is now significant enough that navigating all of it is challenging. This is a really important problem, since discoverability will determine how likely others are to make use of your incredible productivity and ingenuity with your outreach tools, event coordination support, data collection processes, workflow designs, etc, etc. We want to see others using and repurposing your work within and beyond Art+Feminism. As you work on developing a UI to help others make use of your products and processes, please consider the various layers of your audience: participants in events, organizers of node events and also potential lead organizers who may one day step in at your level to replicate your work in another sphere (or take over some of your work if/when you decide to pass the baton).
  • As discussed on the phone today, I hope you will pass along guidelines you've created for handling difficult situations. You mentioned you've developed a list of ready-made lines you give people so they know what to say if trouble arises (aka "This behavior isn't productive in this space"). This is useful to pass on!

Thank you again for all of your hard work on this project. It's amazing how much you've been able to accomplish with such a small team. I look forward to further planning with you to make sure your work is sustainably supported going forward.

Our grants administrator will be in touch regarding your next disbursement.

Best regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 22:59, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Marti (WMF) for your comments. We'll definitely incorporate your suggestions into our final report. As a side note, I've fixed the Elizabeth Macintosh link and I've checked the other links, they should be okay now! I'm still having trouble figuring out the format for linking from a grants page to a project or meetup page. If you have any insight, it would be greatly appreciated! --Siankevans (talk) 13:21, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Siankevans, thanks for fixing the links. I don't have specific pointers for linking to a project or meetup page, but you might see what you can learn here: en:Help:Interwiki_linking. --Marti (WMF) (talk) 16:15, 18 May 2016 (UTC)