Grants talk:PEG/Metro/Institutional Growth and Community Fellow/Report/Interim

Hi Dorothy. Thank you for this detailed interim report. We appreciate your extensive work with the NYC GLAM community, diligence in tracking metrics, and committment to sharing experiences and knowledge.

• As you consider the second half of the grant period, what are your goals for the instiutions you are currently working closely with (8) and those that you have met for potential partnerships (5)? You mention that "several insittutional partners who have been working with us...have now begun to present on Wikipedia to their own communities." What is your sense of the sustainability and independence of the GLAM-wiki projects you have initiatied after the grant period is over? How are you prioritizing your work with the partner institutions for the last three months?
• What progress has been made in terms of your goals for diversification?
• The metrics post-editathon (Guggenheim and BriarCliff Manor Public Library) are very impressive. Did you do any specific follow-up after the editathons?

Thanks, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 00:29, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi User:AWang (WMF). Thanks for your questions and comments. Responses are given in the same order as your bulleted questions:

• For institutions for which we’ve had staff trainings and some sustained engagement (which I would quantify as more than 2 meetings or events, and a demonstrated interest or effort to contribute to Wikipedia or host events), one of my main goals from the beginning of this project has been to belabor the importance of institutional Wikipedia:GLAM pages, and to emphasize that these institutions be documenting their editing and other events/engagement on their GLAM pages. In some cases, I have created GLAM pages for our members when they have begun Wikipedia projects but lacked the expertise to feel comfortable creating the GLAM pages, in other cases, a Wikipedian at an institution has created the GLAM page themselves. I have found both methods to be satisfactory. Using GLAM pages as a standard aspect of all projects for which I work closely has been one main way that I am able to track progress when working with many institutions simultaneously and I think is just generally advisable for any Wikipedian-in-Residence working with multiple institutions.

Beyond documentation goals, other goals are creating projects which operate independently of me and could feasibly continue without my support. While many GLAM projects which I have begun/supervised do rely on me as a sort of technical respondent and guide through Wikipedia’s rules pages for a few months as staff members learn editing structures and seek examples of best practices, I try to integrate training about how to navigate Wikipedia’s rules and guidelines pages into early discussions and trainings, to get people familiar with how to search for Wikipedia templates, rules, and procedures on their own, and/or to talk to other Wikipedia users when they are looking for help. Another goal of mine has been to match Wikipedians other than myself with institutions so that they rely on a network of Wikipedians for answers to Wikipedia questions, rather than always going to me. This has especially proven important as interest in the New York community has far exceeded what I would be reasonably able to manage myself.

My sense is that most, if not all of the Wikipedia GLAM projects I’ve started will continue in some capacity after I leave my residency. This is especially true I think because for at least several of them, we’ve been working together for almost a year now, which has proven to be plenty of time to identify a Wikipedia point-person within an institution (usually in library and archives), gather community support for their project (often in the form of publicizing it at METRO and on other platforms enough to make it obvious that the institution is deriving significant benefits from the engagement), and integrating them into a local network of GLAM-Wiki librarians and archivists, which offers professional development benefits, friendship and encouragement, event hosing opportunities, and tangible, statistically measurable benefits.

I am not necessarily changing the nature of my work now that there are three months left on the grant. For me, it is not yet clear if the ending of the grant will also mean that I end my Residency at METRO completely, or if it just means that I will go from three days a week to two days a week here at METRO come mid-January. I have both as an option, and am still deciding what is best for me. Regardless, I have told METRO and community members that even after my grant works, I will still be helping organizing Edit-a-thons and such with Wikimedia NYC at least to some extent, and will probably be available for some institutional consultation. One thing that I know I will do before I leave METRO is make sure each institution is matched with a Wikipedian that they can rely on for technical support or other community questions, and also that they are aware of all the more public channels where they can ask for assistance, such as the GLAM and Libraries mailing lists. This, I hope, has also been facilitated by my efforts to cross-pollinate local Wikipedia projects by hosting “networking” style events catered to multiple groups/populations of Wikipedians and those interested in Wikipedia, including my “One Year of Wikipedia at METRO” reception event, and my efforts to get our GLAM participants to come to Wikimedia NYC meetings.

• Diversification is hard to track, and it is especially problematic to start categorizing certain cultural institutions as “more diverse” or more representative of communities underrepresented on Wikipedia, than others. This is something that has become more and more apparent to me during the course of my residency. That said, in the past three months, I have made the effort to engage with smaller and more “niche” cultural institutions, libraries, and archives, and also institutions especially serving women and LGBT populations- which is a change for me as most of the first institutions with which I met with were larger and more global IE – The Whitney Library, the Guggenheim Library, the Frick Art Reference Library. So, some of the institutions I’ve met with and begun engaging with recently include the Broad Channel Historical Society (far Rockaway), Poet’s House, and New School for Social Research and City College, and upcoming: Media Masters All (a LGBTQ & Allied Youth Media Literacy organization), Pratt Library Students (SILS), and NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
• RE: Post Edit-a-thon metrics. Yes I do lots and lots of follow-up after Edit-a-thons… This includes running Wikimetrics on the day after an event, and sending an email to all participants with that data included, as well as a link to event pictures uploaded on Commons and links to some of the pages created or edited. I try to gamify these emails with some fun and good design, which is actually a LOT more crucial than most Wikipedians think. I also often send out individual emails to participants I’ve worked with offering them more specific links and encouragement and/or links to things we discussed together. Beyond that, I often post a “re-cap” to the METRO blogs, and do Twitter engagement the whole way through.

Thanks, and let me know if you have more feedback. OR drohowa (talk) 18:36, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, OR drohowa. We appreciate the effort you are making to ensure sustainability of the programs. It would be great if you documented how you follow-up after editathons, including example emails (or screenshots of how you gamify/design a good follow-up email). A Learning Pattern would be even better : ). Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Engagement

• I don't understand what level of engagement the institutions you are working with had. For instance, how many of their staff were trained and how many edits did they make?
• It's not clear to me why the uploads of commons:Commons:Józef Piłsudski Institute of America are mentioned here despite having happened one year before the start of this grant («approved by the Piłsudski Institute Board on July 14, 2013». At any rate, the usage of those files is negligible.

--Nemo 21:12, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi User:Nemo_bis. Even after conversations with Program Evaluation, it is still unclear to me whether, as my role as Wikipedian-in-Residence has been to work in an outreach, education, and organizing capacity, whether I should be 'claiming' the uploads of the institutions I work with as part of the results/successes of my grant, or no. It's hard to find precedent for grant recipients reporting on the institutional uploads of affiliates. I have been working with the Józef Piłsudski Institute of America since before this grant got started but we have put work into promoting these materials, putting the institution in touch with Wikipedians, and helping them explore possibilities of this content. Also, I don't think its appropriate to say the usage is negligible at this point, since the upload happened so recently. I also don't see it as my job as WIR to oversee every aspect of the institution's content donation as this grant is only providing me with one extra day at METRO, which means I have 2 days a week to serve as a community organizer with METRO, but mostly in an outreach and educational capacity, not as a concentrated project supervisor of any one project. Let me know if you have additional questions! OR drohowa (talk) 17:10, 26 February 2015 (UTC)