Grants talk:PEG/User:Nattes à chat/Let's fill the gender gap Workshops/Report/Interim
Hi Nattes à chat and Gabrielle Marie WMCH. Thank you for this detailed interim report and apologies for the delay in review. We really appreciate the time and effort you've put into organizing the project and detailing your activities and learning so far. It sounds like the basic model you're using is going well and you've made a few improvements for the 2016 events. We are looking forward to your final report to learn more. In the meantime, we have a few comments below.
- We often encourage workshop organizers to create a plan for online engagement and mentorship between editing events. It's great to hear that giving participants homework between sessions has improved their level of activity. What type of homework do you give and how do you follow-up?
- With LaMèreveille we have set up a kind of monitoring habit of reviewing the contribution of all participants every week and sending out individual messages to those who did not seem to contribute to ask how we could help. So being available between workshops and precisely at the moment when the participants receive the first feedbacks from the community is somehow important.
Concerning homework, it was designed to push them into the collaborative process. We first asked them to post something to another participant to teach them how to communicate between them, and then to post some questions on the FAQ, and to choose a subject. Then after the second workshop they were asked to write the introduction of the article, the third one being devoted to sourcing. After this stage home work was basically asking them to write and publish for the 4th workshop, in able to have time to receive feedback from the community and help them if the remarks are a little harsh or misunderstood (a introduction to the world of flickering banners!) We also posted a summary of the first two courses for them to get back to . We did not provide written documents as we were sometimes asked to by some participants, but went the extra mile to take time to explain and send links to people personally.
- Thanks for listing all of the media coverage -- it's nice to see all of the press you've gotten!
- This came out as a good surprise, and was something we had not planned at all!
- It's interesting to read that requiring people to complete an article in order to receive a certificate from the University of Geneva helped with motivation. We'll definitely be sharing this with other grantees.
I think it gives credibility to the whole thing. We also asked participants in the last workshop to present their articles and tell about their experience: this proves to be always very rewarding and fruitful as some of them might have found solutions to some problems others are still facing.
- We've found that that many workshop organizers also struggle with tailoring the event to people that learn at different speeds. That's why it's so important to have at least a few workshop facilitators and/or experienced Wikimedians attending who can help support individuals.
- Well we had to do without advanced wikipedians at the start, although we did get some involved in the end! Anthere send us a nice person who took time to read the articles that were published and was really appreciated in the second workshop. I have had to travel to Paris quite a lot to meet the community, and lately have been engaging with swiss germans. This actually led LaMèreveille & me to take part in the Wikimooc adventure. I gained experience from participating to a Django girl event tailored to teach women to code in Python
- We realize this is a very late response, but we are able to increase the budget by 100 CHF. Please let me know if this is still necessary and we can send the additional funds.
- I will let you know, but I think we have worked out another solution!
Thank you again for all your hard work! Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
- And thanks to you and you team for your support! --Nattes à chat (talk) 20:26, 14 June 2016 (UTC)