Art+Feminism User Group/Reporting/FinalReport2016-2017

This is the final report for the Art+Feminism 2016-2017 SAPG grant. A note on our approach to this report: we have tried to present high level summaries of the activities here, and link to more detailed reports on each topic.

Summary

For our fourth-annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Art+Feminism supported over 3,500 participants in over 225 events across 6 continents for a record-breaking year of editing and creating pages for women in the arts. We are heartened by the efforts of Art + Feminism participants in 42 countries and we are especially inspired by the ways organizers emphasized intersectional feminisms, both in the content edited and the organizing efforts. Nearly 6500 pages were created or improved on Wikipedia, almost twice the output of 2016 events.

We could not have achieved any of these goals without the addition to our team of a Program Coordinator dedicating on average 24 hours/week to organization, strategy and goal setting. This brings the total number of lead co-organizers to four: Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, McKensie Mack, and Michael Mandiberg.

Activities

Art+Feminism edit-a-thon in Lima, Peru

Art+Feminism edit-a-thon in Accra, Ghana

In 2017, over 3,500 participants at more than 225 events around the world participated in Art+Feminism’s fourth annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, which took place across the month of March around Women’s History Month. This global effort created or improved over 6,000 articles on Wikipedia, almost twice the output of the 2016 events. In total, since 2014, over 8,000 people at more than 500 events around the world have participated in Art+Feminism’s Edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of nearly 11,000 articles on Wikipedia. Some notable examples: Dorrit Black, Sara VanDerBeek, Joan Semmel, Judy Chicago, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lucy Lippard, Emily Stackhouse, and Mary Course. These events are primarily held in the month of March, though groups hold events throughout the year under our banner. Over the past our years our events have experienced steady growth, from 31 to 75 to 179 to 228 events a year. We continue to be inspired by all the dedicated folks who make room in their busy schedules to share skills and improve a collectively held resource like Wikipedia.

As we say in our statement of beliefs, "The steps to encouraging a woman to be heard and to be visible in her community are fraught with resistance and ridicule. Beginning this project, we knew that our role would not only be to empower women - we use the most expansive definition of that term - to edit online but to stand with them as they are challenged by those who do not see value in their voice and who do not see value in them. Art + Feminism is about making Wikipedia better, as a tool for open access to reliable information, but it doesn’t end there. It’s about dismantling systems of thought that ignore the presence and input of women in the room and diminish or erase entirely their place in history."

Art+Feminism edit-a-thon, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Program Coordinator

We hired McKensie Mack as our program coordinator. We have documented the process in the section midpoint report linked to as the main article covering this topic. We also wrote a hiring learning pattern linked in our resources below.

Metrics

During our March 2017 campaign, 228 events took place in 37 countries on all six inhabited continents and online. At least 4,105 participants created or improved 6031 pages, and uploaded 1587 images to Wikimedia Commons. Detailed outcomes from 2017 are here. You can see a graph of our growth model over the past four years. Our metrics spreadsheet is here.

Current growth models for Art+Feminism events, participants, and articles created, based off of 4 years of data. Year 0 is 2014.

Program and Events Dashboard

We transitioned from meetup pages to the Program and Events Dashboard. Ours was the first large campaign to do this, and this was effectively a stress test of the system. There's a lot of potential in this tool and approach, especially in terms of reduction of organizer workload when it comes to gathering data, but there were lots of challenges moving all of our organizers off of a not so great platform that they had finally understood (Meetup pages) onto a new platform that they didn't fully understand and that didn't have everything they needed. We published an extensive report midpoint report (above) which the dashboard team responded to, and will implement improvements and suggestions where possible.

Finances

We had a challenge getting financial reporting from our fiscal sponsor, which we noted in our our Midpoint Report. In the end, we received an irregular ledger of transactions. The main irregularity was that $2,481.42 in transactions were listed as "Transactions Not Allocated"; this was never completely explained to us, other than that we were told it would not be deducted from our grant. To the best of our abilities we competed a report here which indicates that we spent $87617.10, and breaks it down by category. This is a significant underspend, due to the fact that we were unable to get a clear accounting of how much had been spent in time to allocate correctly.

Media, Presentations and Resources

Press

We garnered some more press, which you can see here.

Presentations and Conference Attendance

• We presented and held a Birds of a Feather meetup for the User Group at Wikimania 2017.
• We attended WikiWomenCamp 2017
• A representative attended Wikimedia Conference 2017, Berlin.

Material Resources

We have created a number of valuable resources, including:

• Diversity Audit
• UX/UI Review
• Organizer's Kit in English and Spanish and mobile versions
• Hiring learning pattern
• Hosting a multi site edit-a-thon learning pattern
• Creating a network of organizers learning pattern
• Ensuring your wiki project is inclusive learning pattern
• Conducting user experience research learning pattern
• Training Videos
• Logos and marks
• Brand Guide
• Beginner and intermediate training powerpoints
• How to organize an edit-a-thon lecture
• Wikidata Hackathon findings
• Call to Action Art Commission
• Art + Feminism Podcast

Next steps and opportunities

• Exploring opportunities to expand the growth of our community among educators and activists.
• Developing and implementing strategies for investing in intersectional communities of new and experienced editors.
• Revitalizing our training materials and streamlining our organizer communications for the 2018 A+F cycle.
• Continuing to handle the node event reimbursement process.
• McKensie authored a Strategic Planning Document that we are reviewing and working on implementing.
• Transitioning to a new fiscal sponsor for the 2017-2018 grant period.

Grantee reflection

We are proud of the growth of our campaign this year. It's a major sign of sustainability that the project continues to grow as it has, and we're ready to continue to develop our community of organizers, editors, and allies globally. With the hiring of our Program Coordinator, we have increased capacity to do even more outreach in West Africa and Latin America and in communities of trans women, queer women, and women of color.