Grants talk:Project/Rapid/UG BR/Neuromathematics Edit-a-thons at USP/Report

Report is ready for review

Hello, AWang (WMF). The report for our two edit-a-thons is ready. Happy to provide more information, if needed. --Joalpe (talk) 15:07, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hi Joalpe, and thanks for your report on these two events focused on neuroscience and mathematics. Here are my comments / questions:

• Thanks for sharing the event pages for both the pt:Wikipédia:Neurociência_e_Matemática_III and pt:Wikipédia:Wikipédia:Neurociência_e_Matemática_IV programs.
• Great to hear you have journalists who are attending events. Regarding their attendance at the edit-a-thon, have they published any reports or articles that you can share with us? If not, what sort of questions did they ask you? Did they also talk with participants?
• I'm glad to hear you are making efforts to include leaders as participants in your events, such as the director of the Institute of Mathematics and the museum director. Getting institutional leaders to have firsthand experience with these events is valuable as it promotes good relations and helps sustain productive events such as these.
• In terms of participants in these events, are there many participants who are not affiliated with the university? Have you considered other local communities or organizations who might be interested or able to participate or lend assistance in these events?
• Regarding your remaining funds, I'm going to go ahead and approve this remaining amount for any mission-related work as it's minimal and I understand you would incur a bunch of fees in terms of trying to return it to the Wikimedia Foundation. I can't formally move the funds to the Simple APG, but if you were planning on holding a meetup, using the funds for food, or putting on a similar event like this, any of those kinds of expenses would be fine.

This report is formally approved. Thanks for your work, and hope to see more great programs like this one come from the user group. Good luck in your projects related to the Simple APG. :) I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:43, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

@I JethroBT (WMF): Thank your for encouraging words and thoughtful comments. This sequence of edit-a-thons has been a great process overall. I reply to your questions below:

• It is worth emphasizing we have relied on the P&E Dashboard to provide metrics on the impact of these events. This tool is very helpful for this kind of activity reports and should probably become a standard for reporting. In this context, pages on ptwiki for the event were mostly used for a go-to reference on Wikipedia for attendees and community members who were interested in what we were up to, not so much for reporting.
• When it comes to journalists, here are some things they wrote:

USP Acontece.

Jornal da USP.

As the third edit-a-thon happened after a talk with LiAnna Davis, who came with independent support we were able to secure, there were that focused on her visit on the local press:

NEXO.

Carta Capital.

LiAnna herself wrote a report on her visit, on which she refers to the edit-a-thon:

Wiki Edu blog

In general, journalists have still little information on why Wikipedia is a relevant project for opening knowledge and what community activities are. As we are holding these edit-a-thons in the most important university in Brazil it is an opportunity to attract communication professionals to learn first hand what the project is and what strategies for contributing exist. In general, journalists would mostly talk to program leaders, such as LiAnna Davis. There was no interview with participants. Questions were normally very basic, just trying to understand what we were doing, moved by curiosity.

• The participation of the director of the Institute of Mathematics and other scholars who came to the event is strongly associated to my being a university professor. Hopefully as the user group gets to be more well-known academic credentials will become less important for this kind of connection.
• Almost all participants in the edit-a-thons are somehow associated to the university. We have held edit-a-thons in other universities as well, such as a sequence of edit-a-thons called Woman and Media. The challenge we face for edit-a-thons is that individual computers are not necessarily available in other areas and people do not normally own computers. At this time, universities appear to be the best place for this kind of event.
• Thanks for your decision on remaining funds, which we will use for our activities, and for approving this report. Nite. --Joalpe (talk) 02:16, 30 August 2017 (UTC)