Wikimedia New York City/Annual plan/2018-2019

Annual Plan 2018–2019

The Wikimedia NYC Strategic Plan 2018–2020 classifies Wikimedia NYC programs into four principal program areas, each of which encompasses a range of programs that share similar goals or methodologies:

• Chapter Membership and Community
• Partnerships
• Outreach and Education
• Content Contributions

This Annual Plan for the 2018–2019 fiscal year, which covers the period starting July 1, 2018 and ending June 30, 2019, defines the specific programs that are to be executed within each of these program areas. The measures of success for each program area are defined by the Strategic Plan, and include Wikimedia Foundation global impact metrics and additional Wikimedia NYC–defined program objectives.

Programs

Chapter Membership & Community

Wikimedia NYC exists because of its members, the communities they represent, and the communities they contribute to. In order to further the activities of the Chapter, Wikimedia NYC must first build a networked membership with stronger connections to the Board and each other. This requires systems and infrastructure to support and grow the membership, including effective means of identifying, reporting, and addressing harassment within the Wikimedia NYC community.

Wikimedia NYC is a leader in public facing events, including edit-a-thons, lectures, course workshops, and its monthly salon and skill-share. While most of these events provide a fun and welcoming environment, there are inevitably moments of discord. Sometimes these are minor disagreements that can be adequately addressed by chapter leadership. At other times, the Wikimedia NYC members have been subject to harassment and abuse. In addition to the impact this has on an individual member, it threatens the long term health of the Chapter as members and institutional partners disengage from the Chapter in order to avoid interactions that threaten their personal and emotional safety.

Wikimedia NYC wrote the friendly space policy now in use by the Wikimedia Foundation and the larger Wikimedia movement. However, in order to identify and address harassment and abuse, the Chapter requires a more robust policy, as well as training and support from an external expert. Therefore, in the 2018–2019 fiscal year, Wikimedia NYC will continue its leadership in this area and hire a Support and Safety lead to establish a model for reporting, identifying, documenting, and addressing harassment issues in the Wikimedia community that does not happen on a Wikimedia project. The consultant will revise the existing friendly-space policy, develop and deliver training specific to the Wikimedia NYC community, deliver a workflow for documenting and tracking harassment. The consultant will also release a report and training materials that may be utilized by peer chapters and usergroups in North America, with an eye to adaptations for global use. In developing and sharing this toolkit, Wikimedia NYC will contribute to more inclusive Wikimedia movement, and a more welcoming space to new and existing member of the Chapter.

In order to assess the success of these early initiatives, Wikimedia NYC aims to increase its membership by 15% in the 2018–2019 fiscal year.

Partnerships

The partnerships program area provides support for programming and content contributions in collaboration with institutional partners. While most partners include GLAM, the Chapter regularly collaborates with a range of organizations that share its values, such as the Internet Society, the Swedish Consulate at the United Nations, and, most recently, New York Public Radio. These partnerships are central to Wikimedia NYC’s long term strategy, and, in the coming year, the Chapter aims to better define its engagement with existing partnerships, and to seek a broader range of new ones.

In the 2018-2019 fiscal year, Wikimedia NYC will develop a partnerships strategy based on a survey of existing partnerships. What does the institution gain from the partnership? What are we doing well? What can be done better? How might Wikimedia NYC grow to support those needs? Whether partners needs more training, opportunities to connect with one another, or financial resources, Wikimedia NYC looks to its community in order to define infrastructural needs.

While Wikimedia NYC boasts a wide range of partnerships, most are located in Manhattan, just one of New York City’s five boroughs. This means that most Wikimedia NYC events aren’t as accessible to people that live and work in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. These boroughs boast a great range of linguistic and ethnic diversity, and it’s imperative that Wikimedia NYC expand its reach beyond Manhattan’s borders, into local communities, their institutions, and the knowledge they hold. Therefore, in the 2018-2019 fiscal year, Wikimedia NYC will hold at least one event in each of the five boroughs in order to reach at least 100 New Yorkers.

Content Contributions

This program area focuses on Chapter activities that generate content for Wikimedia projects in the form of text, media, and data. This content may be contributed as a result of an institutional partnership or a public facing event.

Entering the tenth year of edit-a-thons conducted by the Chapter, content contributions by this method are core to its activities. As the Wikimedia Movement sets “Knowledge Equity” as one of its goals, Wikimedia NYC aims to continue its leadership in this area by contributing content that has been historically underrepresented and systematically removed from the record.

During the 2018–2019 fiscal year, Wikimedia NYC will hold at least three edit-a-thons that focus on content related to the LGBT+ community. While the Chapter has collaborated with the the LGBT+ User Group since 2014, this has been limited to the annual Wiki Loves Pride campaign in June. The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising will be in 2019, presenting a unique opportunity to queer Wikipedia. As the Chapter’s early efforts to address content gaps led to projects such as AfroCROWD and Art + Feminism, so too we hope that increased programming focused on LGBT+ issues will generate more momentum in the larger Wikimedia Movement.

In addition to hosting thematic events, Wikimedia NYC aims to host five edit-a-thons on projects other than the English Wikipedia in the 2018–2019 fiscal year. As part of its commitment to the peoples of New York (many of whom do not speak English at home) and through its partnership with the AfroCROWD User Group, Wikimedia NYC will hold at least two edit-a-thons on Wikipedia in languages other than English. In addition, it will host at least three edit-a-thons on non-encyclopedic projects such as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

Operations

Wikimedia NYC operations have grown over the last three years, and will continue to do so moving forward. This year also marks a new relationship between Wikimedia NYC and its partners at AfroCROWD, who have formed a separate user group under the fiscal sponsorship of the Chapter. In order to meet these needs, Wikimedia NYC will contract an external accounting company that specializes in working with non-profits of this size.

In order to advance the Outreach and Education program area defined in the Wikimedia NYC Strategic Plan 2018 - 2020, Wikimedia NYC will focus on building its communications infrastructure in the 2018-2019 fiscal year so it is better positioned to communicate its work within and beyond the Wikimedia Community.

As a first step to meeting its goals, Wikimedia NYC will improve its web presence, which includes Wikipedia meetup pages, meta, and its external website at nyc.wikimedia.org. This content must be current and discoverable to each of its audiences—Wikipedians, Wikimedians, Wikimedia NYC members and partners, as well as the wider public. During the 2018–2019 fiscal year, Wikimedia NYC will complete an inventory of its web presence, and redevelop each of these sites with its respective audiences in mind.

In addition, Wikimedia NYC will hire a Communications Manager to relay its work via social media channels and outlets such as the newsletter This Month in GLAM. Wikimedia NYC hopes to further the collective aims of the Wikimedia movement through communicating its experiments, its successes, and its failures as a local node in this global movement.