Grants:IdeaLab/Gender, Laws and Wikipedia

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Gender, Laws and Wikipedia

Provide visibility to Wikipedia as an organisation committed to understanding & supporting gender issues by expanding Wikipedia's repository of legal knowledge to contain gendered issues and creating safe space for conversation about change.

idea creator• Chinmayisk

community organizer• Chinmayisk

advisor• Willowbl00

volunteer• Prateekbaliya• Manojcsm

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created on20:37, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

Women constitute less than 20% of Wikipedia's editors. Lack of diversity among editors in Wikipedia means lack of diversity both in article creation and scope. To create a complete repository of the world's knowledge, it is therefore important to increase the level of participation of women (and other historically underrepresented groups) contributing to Wikipedia. In order to do this, displaying strong support for gender equality on Wikipedia is vital. Bringing global attention to issues of violence, with a focus on active change, continues down the path to changing Wikipedia's culture of gender discrimination. We propose to do this by using existing infrastructure, through expanding Wikipedia's repository of legal knowledge to contain gendered issues as well as copyright, checking offline flagging of gender issues against that knowledge, and providing safe space for conversation about change.

What is your solution?

Create a mobile application to help people identify abuse in their country; to talk about the legal, ethical, and cultural aspects of that abuse; and to take action towards equality and justice. This is based on being able to check against legal information contributed to Wikipedia. This program will catalog laws and norms in various places in the world framed on Wikipedia's existing documentation on copyright. On top of that, the mobile application will contain a way for people to flag abuse in the real world, as checked against the legal repository on Wikipedia. Similar to Wikipedian's fight for copyleft and Creative Commons, discussions about the gaps between what is legal and what is ethical will emerge. This will provide visibility to Wikipedia as an organisation committed to understanding and supporting gender issues.

This proposal focuses on building the mobile application and its surrounding social structure to encourage contributing and editing legal information to Wikipedia with a focus on gender-based rights, laws, and issues. This happens through contributions to gendered legal issues, the building or implementation of an existing tool to compare offline reports to legal understandings, by training people to use that application, and by making the information generated available to others. Conversations for those supporting and participating in these efforts will occur in a safe, dedicated space.

Goals

Initiative to get contributors and editors on gender legal frameworks, in a similar vein to what copyright looks like on Wikipedia.
Creation or implementation of an offline reporting tool, which will be checked against the Wikipedia legal framework.
Hosting offline events to train new users on the purpose of and interaction with the tool.
Information users provide will be fed into the larger dataset.
Mentorship of Wikipedia contributors focused on this project, to provide protective covering in a harmful environment, until the environment changes.
Ongoing conversational space for improvement of project and its results

Get Involved

Participants

Community organizer I would like to connect organisations working with gender issues and documentation of laws to this project Chinmayisk (talk) 13:43, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
Advisor Program design, outreach, moral support Willowbl00 (talk) 16:41, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
Volunteer Contribute Prateekbaliya (talk) 12:45, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
Volunteer I work with a organization which works on gender based issues and I would love to take this forward. Manojcsm (talk) 06:52, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
Volunteer Future developer, eternal feminist. haleyparty (talk) 09:54, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Endorsements

Chinmayi and I met during FOSSASIA 2015 in Singapore, and I and another Wikipedian were discussing about how this would look like. So far, I think this is solid on paper, and I'm excited to see this work in practice, if we give it a shot. --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 14:23, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
It's a good initiative. I would like to take this forward. Manojcsm (talk) 06:49, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
There is a lot of public discussion about gender related issues happening across the world and especially in India. This will be a good way to hook such discussion groups with Wikipedia to improve its content and authenticity. The FOSS licensed app can also be tweaked to try a similar outreach strategy for various issues and engage special interest groups. I am curious to see the outcome and learning from this initiative. Ravi (talk) 16:14, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
An area that both deserves expanding and could help increase our base - especially in regards to the gender gap. Varnent (talk)^(COI) 01:20, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Project plan

Activities

Phase 1 : Development and feedback

Estimated time frame : 4 months

This involves developing the application in phases and involving user feedback in the process.

The application development will follow agile and lean principles, hence it will reuse anything that is already available for the purpose of this project.

The application development will occur in phases. Starting with retrieving the present condition of legal information, then creating safe spaces for conversation of action and then editing the information to report atrocities and document laws.

This application will be developed and released under a suitable open source license.

This application will be first developed in English and stubs would be created for internationalisation in other languages.

Phase 2 : Training and Outreach

Estimated Time frame : 5 months

In this phase, we will reach out to larger communities to use our application and provide feedback. This will also involve collection of the following data points:

Atrocities of gender based violence, comparing between "legal" or "normalized"
Track how conversations on Wikipedia differ on these collections of legal issues versus copyright legal issues
Usage of safe space for discussion

These events will be conducted around the world in collaboration with various communities.

Events for Training and Outreach Events

Each of these events will follow a particular template and would have the following :

Atleast 60 percent non male participants (To encourage the likelihood of safe space).
A tool introduction.
Explicit editing and cleaning up sessions
Discussions around incidents of Atrocities and flagging them against the laws
Reconnect with 5 top most active groups for continuous engagement.

Phase 3 : Analysis and Conclusion

Estimate Time frame : 2 months

This period will be used to analyse safe spaces and to report on their usage. It will also provide data to analyse the conversations and the change in editorial numbers

Cleaning up of data to ensure usability and access by other interested parties

Budget

Item	Detail	Breakup	Cost
Design and development of the application	2 developers and a designer unless some one can volunteer	At rate of $835 pm for each person	10,000 USD
Stipend for researcher	for 5 months		2000 USD
Outreach	Designing training modules and conducting external events	Designing training modules - 30 hrs effort at the cost of 30$ , 25 events cost approx 160$ per event	5000 USD
Renumeration for Advisor			1500 USD
Stipend for Community outreach			1500 USD

Community engagement

As provided in the details of the activity we would have continuos community engagement. The following would be some of the ways we would be engaging with the communities.

Collaborating with various communities around the world to conduct events and take action.
Collecting feedback on the project from various communities.
Involving wikimedia and communities in conversations.

Sustainability

At the end of the whole project, documents and training modules usable by organisations to continue collecting and analysing the data will be curated. We will automate the data analysis module for frequent assessment. We would be concentrating on building sustainable communities around it to take the project beyond the time period of the grants.

Measures of success

Increase in editoral number as a result of the events and other outreach. (We expect to add atleast 20 new editors)
Increase in articles related to legal knowledge containing gendered issues. ( We expect to cover legal articles in 4 countries atleast)
Evaluation of safespaces to bring in more diversity
Project of wikipedia as a supporter to gender issues
Coverage of prominent online and offline media for each of our events and the application.

Impact

Along with the benefits for wikimedia community .The project would also have the following real word impact . It will help create a repository which would

help people decide which action to take in their situation -- to file charges, to push for reform, or something else;
shed light to a wider audience about lack of support for women (and the very real, but fewer, men) dealing with these issues.
surface patterns of interaction around abuse, to better inform detection and response in the online space as well.

Project team

Chinmayisk - works with gender rights based communities and humanitarian technology making. I bring in the contacts to these communities and the experience of developing technology

Willowbl00 - focuses on humanitarian and disaster response with frontline communities at the core of project design and implementation. I have experience in the North America, Europe, East Africa, and South America in topics such as codesign, citizen reporting, FLOSS development, and community engagement.