Grants:IEG/Motivational and educational video to introduce Wikimedia/Midpoint

Note: this project is now inactive. Please see the final report for information about the status of the project.

Midpoint report 1 from May 9, 2016

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

Video overview of the project, presented in February 2016

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

Background work done included reading research and listening to presentations about the Teahouse on English Wikipedia, discussions on the Research mailing list about editor retention, studying a number of existing sources of information that are designed for new editors, and studying Mozilla's onboarding techniques.
My experience producing the video for English Wikipedia's milestone of file million articles was helpful.
I watched some of the videos that were produced for Art + Feminism on Youtube. These videos show the use of Wikimarkup rather than VisualEditor.

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

The main output at this point has been the Script outline, which is fairly detailed and takes input from many people into consideration.

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Per my agreement when I set up the grant, there is a single disbursement instead of two disbursements. The only costs to this point are my labor costs. So far I have counted 59.33 hours toward this project, which in dollar terms is $1779.90. I excluded from these sums the time that I spent re-arranging the scheduling of the project.

After I receive the single disbursement, there will be a few software and equipment purchases that I will make with some of the funds, as described on the grant main page.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

Unanticipated scheduling challenges have been the biggest difficulty.
There is a large amount of information that is directly related or one step removed from this project, and the Wikimedia environment is always in motion. Keeping myself informed about changes is an ongoing challenge and requires me to keep up with information in newsletters and on mailing lists.

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Grants:Learning patterns/Track project hours in Google Calendar

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this IEG at the end of your project, please also mention this here.

As described in the timeline page, the next chunk of work will involve using the script outline as a basis to develop the full script.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an IEGrantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

Victor, Marti and Janice are all nice to work with and I have appreciated their emotional support.
Victor and Marti have lots of good ideas.