Art+Feminism User Group/Reporting/FinalReport2017-2018
This is the final report for the Art+Feminism 2017-2018 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 edit
For our fifth-annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Art+Feminism supported 4,000 people at more than 315 events around the world for a record-breaking year of editing and creating pages for women in the arts. This global effort created or improved nearly 22,000 articles on Wikipedia, almost four times the output of the 2017 events.
Activities edit
Over 4,000 people at more than 315 events around the world participated in Art+Feminism’s fifth annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, which took place during the months of March and April. This global effort created or improved nearly 22,000 articles on Wikipedia, almost four times the output of the 2017 events. The goal of the Art+Feminism campaign is to bolster coverage of feminism, gender, and the arts on Wikipedia — as a response to the encyclopedia’s well-known content gaps.
Highlights of the 2018 Edit-a-thon include content added to and pages created for notable figures including Christina Battle, Alexandra Bell, Torkwase Dyson, Silvia Federici, Dara Friedman, Juliana Huxtable, Gertrude Jekyll, Chō Kōran, Griselda Pollock, Annie Pootoogook, Collier Schorr, Tschabalala Self, Roberta Smith, Nobuko Tsuchiura, and Sam Vernon. In 2017-2018 we shifted our priorities towards social media, online engagement and Wikidata. This past year, our social platforms have doubled with a combined 200% increase in community across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook; we started an Instagram page which is now home to 1K+ followers. We implemented a video series on Facebook Live called Office Hours, seven (7) 30 minute live videos created to help organizers and new editors understand the steps to planning and hosting Art+Feminism edit-a-thons, using the Dashboard, and finding funding for events. We presented the series in Spanish and English with our Regional Ambassador for Latin America, Melissa Tamani, leading the Spanish tutorials and our Regional Ambassador for West Africa, Mohammad Abdulai Sadat, leading the tutorials for organizers and editors in West Africa. We made quick guides to organizing and editing in Spanish and English. We also wrote a full Wikidata Work Plan, which you can find summarized here.
During the MoMA editathon, we also organized a panel discussion moderated by design researcher and artist Caroline Sinders, featuring Sydette Harry, Editor, Mozilla Foundation, and Editor-at-Large, Coral Project; Sarah Jaffe, Reporting Fellow, the Nation Institute, and author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt; and Salome Asega, artist and two very popular break-out sessions in the afternoon, lead by McKensie Mack and Shelly Eversly that touched on implicit bias and teaching with Wikipedia (65% of MoMA's survey respondents said they attended one or both of the breakout sessions).
Metrics edit
During our 2018 campaign, we exceeded all of our metrics goals: over 315 events took place on all six inhabited continents and online. At least 3800 participants created or improved over 43,000 content pages (22,500 articles, 18,000 wikidata items, over 2,500 images to Wikimedia Commons). Remarkable, less than 1% of all articles were deleted. 2040 participants were new users, and 65% of our 2017 organizers returned to hold events with us in 2018. Detailed outcomes from 2018 are on this wiki page and on our WMF Google Sheet. Our metrics goals for 2019 are predictions based off of our model which you can view in this google sheet.
Pledge Campaign edit
We held a pledge campaign in winter 2017-2018, to encourage people to pledge to hold events in March/April 2018. Our hope was that this would encourage organizers to plan ahead, and it would also help us identify a set of experienced event organizers who we would have to spend less time tracking. We were happy to see that 138 organizers pledge, of whom 110 held events (80%). We also had a external facing pledge campaign focused on social media and directing people to a google form to give us information and pledge. We had 112 people respond via this Google form, and were quite honestly shocked that 76 of them actually held events!!! That is a 67% success rate. We plan on using both of these mechanism for the coming year.
Program and Events Dashboard edit
We continued to use the Program and Events Dashboard this year. Sage Ross continued to support us on this, and completed several significant improvements. We found it to work well for us, as many of our organizers already knew how to use it, and after one year we were better equipped to train the remaining folks. We experienced challenges, due to ACTRIAL, which we described in the midpoint report here.
Finances edit
Our 2017-2018 Spending Report can be found here. We learned a few major lessons this year.
At the start of the grant term, we were occupied with completing our financial review for the 2016-2017 grant cycle due to the challenges we experienced last year with our then fiscal partner. Last year we had a considerable underspend because we did not know how much remaining spend we had and were quite careful not to spend over our budget.
This year we overspent our budget by $435.70. We anticipated having a remaining spend of at least $1000, but were incorrect because of an unforseen accounting snafu: We did not know that a $3000 payment which had been sent to one of our lead co-organizers was returned to PayPal and then rather than being returned to the main bank account, that balance was used as a remaining PayPal balance by our current fiscal sponsor to compensate two of our contractors. This led to an accounting discrepancy which led us to believe that we had had more money than we actually did.
Our actionable changes for next year include:
- The critical importance of using a 1:1 strategy for returning payments to our bank account before those funds are spent.
- We're addressing this issue by now using QuickBooks for all of our accounting and Creative Business, an accounting firm, who will conduct two major audits on our behalf at the mid-term period of our grant cycle and again at its completion.
- We are going to impose a June 1st deadline to complete all non-recurring payments, giving us a 2 month period to resolve any remaining discrepancies, and reallocations.
With these strategies now being implemented, we're confident moving forward that we still stay within budget.
Media, Presentations and Resources edit
Press edit
We garnered some more press, which you can see here.
Presentations and Conference Attendance edit
- Two representatives attended Wikimedia Conference 2018, Berlin
- A representative co-facilitated Decolonize The Internet.
- Two representatives attended Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town
- Two representatives presented at Research Data Access and Preservation Summit.
- A representative presented at Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium
- A representative presented at This Site Is Under Revolution
- A representative presented at IMAGINEPEACE Forum at the Gardiner Museum, Toronto
- A representative presented at Conférence 934: How do digital media shape the image of women?, Consulate General of France in New York
Material Resources edit
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
- Quick guides to organizing and editing in Spanish and English
- Wikidata Work Plan
Next steps and opportunities edit
- Exploring opportunities to sustain the growth of our community among educators, artists, art workers, librarians, and activists in English and Spanish.
- Developing and implementing strategies for investing in intersectional communities of new and experienced editors.
- Developing advanced training materials and guides for our global team of Regional Ambassadors.
- Developing and implementing strategic plan for the 2018-2019 campaign cycle.
- Training new Regional Ambassadors and on-boarding Community Fellow and Communications Fellow.
- Completing next steps for 501c3 formation.
Grantee reflection edit
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. We're excited to continue that growth by bringing on new regional facilitators and an additional lead co-organizer, thereby making the project more decentralized. Our hope is that this will decrease the amount of burnout experienced by the lead co-organizers. We're excited to see how this project continues to change, particularly under the expanded leadership of McKensie Mack. McKensie quickly made themselves invaluable, revitalizing our core leadership group with new ideas and insights into existing processes. They’ve facilitated the growth of the project in Latinx countries and fundamentally changed the scope of the project. In advance of becoming a non-profit, the choice of Director was clear.
We are also deeply grateful for the continuing support of the Wikimedia Foundation, and for the wisdom and guidance of Senior Program Officer Winifred Olliff.