Grants:PEG/Metro/Institutional Growth and Community Fellow/Report

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Report accepted
This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2014-15 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
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Project status[edit]

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?
YES
Is your project completed?
YES

Activities[edit]

Engaging Institutions[edit]

Meetings / Consultations with Institutions[edit]

NYC Meetups[edit]

Organized:

Editing Events[edit]

Edit-a-thons[edit]

Editing Trainings / Presentations[edit]

Curricula / Documents Created[edit]

Webcasts[edit]

3-Part METRO Wikipedia Webinar Series: Program manager coordinated and hosted this 3-part series.

  1. Youtube Webcast: Wikipedia and Education. November 24, 2014. Helaine Blumenthal, Alex Stinson, Ann Matsuuchi, Andrew Lih. METRO listing.
  2. Youtube Webcast: Wikipedia and Medicine. December 08, 2014. James Heilman, Sydney Poore, Lane Rasberry, Carl Fredrik Sjöland. METRO listing.
  3. Youtube Webcast: Reference and Citation on Wikipedia and the Library. January 12, 2015. Andy Mabbett, Jake Orlowitz, Ed Saperia, Max Klein. METRO listing.

Conference Attendance[edit]

Media[edit]

Wikimedia Blog[edit]

Wikipedia Signpost[edit]

“This Month in GLAM” Newsletter[edit]

  1. July 2014
  2. September 2014.
  3. December 2014.
  4. January 2015.

GLAM-Outs[edit]

Off-Wikipedia[edit]

Press for the #BlackLivesMatter Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Saturday February 7th[edit]

Media/blogging out this project by institutional partners[edit]

Images[edit]

Social Media[edit]

Events planned during grant hours, but scheduled after the completion of the grant date[edit]

Lessons learned[edit]

What worked well?
This Residency has been all about building community through targeted outreach and one-on-one support, from the beginning, and that is definitely one of the reasons why it has been so successful. It has also been unique in the scale of which outreach is happening, with METRO's membership reaching around 280 member institutions.
What didn't work?
The working hours of the day did not prove enough to reasonably support all of the interest there is around Wikipedia in GLAMs in the New York area.
The project had also hoped to specifically encourage institutions we work with to consider changing their image copyright policies to Creative Commons Zero licenses. This aspect seemed to require additional time, meetings, and expertise that might be best supported if this project was extended as this types of partnership seems to require much additionaltime, investment, and support than a general Wikipedia meeting, training, event, or consultation.
What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?
This project would have been improved if it could be expanded to a full-time staff person at METRO or a similar organization. I would also recommend that someone in a similar role hold the equivalent of monthly Wikipedia and libraries meetings "special interest group" meetings, a sort of "train-the-trainer" event, but with the opportunity for presentations and discussions to further create local communities that can build off one-another's efforts.

Learning patterns[edit]

Outcomes and impact[edit]

Outcomes[edit]

Provide the original project goal here.
Goals for the fellowship include:
  • Build on Metro's existing work with New York institutions to develop a local Wikipedia community through Metro's Wikipedian-in-Residence fellowship.
  • Engage in organizing sustainable GLAM-Wiki projects at New York libraries, archives, and museums to help recruit new, scholarly editors and encourage large scale content donations.
  • Identify topics and partners to engage; organize Edit-a-thons, workshops, and presentations to kickstart interest in Wikimedia for the purpose of recruiting new editors, further institutional educational missions, and create learning communities interested in Wikipedia and free culture.
  • Encourage institutions to adopt Wikipedian-in-Residence programs at New York GLAMs and encourage institutions to adopt Wikipedians-in-Residence using case studies for the purpose of creating longstanding commitments within institutions and expanding the depth of Wikipedia's relationship with these institutions.
  • Increase media coverage and public awareness of New York GLAM-Wiki activity to promote free culture and foster growth in diversity of editors.
  • Expand relationships with related regional Open Access and Open Data groups to increase collaboration and volunteer support.
  • Strong documentation of all projects and events for future knowledge and replication, including testing of Wikimedia Analytics and other analytics tools.
Tangible Goals
  • Hold at least 6-8 meetings with non-METRO members to discuss potentials for Wikipedia partnership.
  • Hold at least 4 Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons in the course of the 6 month grant period
  • Help create at least 2 glam-wiki projects that will continue after the grant finishes.
Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 short paragraphs.
This project achieved its goal in the tangible sense of having planned organized, and offered institutional support for a significant among of meetings and Edit-a-thons in the New York area, and in the process trained and educated thought-leaders and institutional staff at New York’s library, archives, and information about Wikipedia and GLAM-Wiki.
Another aspect of this project was the maintenance and use of Wikipedia:GLAM/METRO as a base of documentation for resources that participants could refer to, the creation of many presentations, and much writing, interviews, and other forms of documentation which will outlive this project.

Progress towards targets and goals[edit]

Project metrics

Project metrics Target outcome Achieved outcome Explanation
Hold at least 6-8 meetings with potential institutional partners to discuss opportunities for Wikipedia partnership Held 9 official consultations, and many more more casual coffee and conversation meetings.
  • New York Public Library Labs, (regarding the RAMP Editor and importing collections into Wikipedia). (01/22/15).
  • Stevens Institute of Technology Library. (call on opportunities for engagement) (02/19/15).
  • New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, (Edit-a-thon planning. (12/11/14).
  • The Center for the Book. (12/04/14).
  • Poets House, Library, (on opportunities for engagement) (11/03/14).
  • Smithsonian Institutions, (SI Globe), (regarding Wiki Loves Pride and contributing LGBT Collections Info). (09/22/14).
  • Metropolitan Museum Digital Assets, (regarding opportunities for partnership). (07/29/14).
  • Pratt Manhattan, Pratt SILS, SILSSA, (regarding planning an Edit-a-thon). (07/28/14).
  • Broad Channel Historical Society (archivist). (07/21/14).
Hold at least 4 Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons in the course of the 6 month grant period 5 Edit-a-thons held in the course of 6 month grant period
Help create at least 2 glam-wiki projects that will continue after the grant finishes 8 METRO GLAM Institutions started or heavily worked with:


Global Metrics[edit]

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Notes on the where the data is coming from:

The link below a rough list of people who either (1) attended an Edit-a-thon training or (2) are a METRO member and participate in the current GLAM project of a METRO member, during the Grants:PEG/Metro/Institutional Growth and Community Fellow PEG Grant period of 14 July through 8 February, 2015. Participants in Edit-a-thons and events organized by METRO's Wikipedian-in-Residence prior to 14 July are not included in this list.

Comments:

This project presents a significant difficulty in reporting metrics as the project in the end had a focus on training as many librarians, archivists, institutional staff as possible, spreading the word, and hosting events, but sought to empower people to go out and edit themselves. For that reason these global metrics might not represent well this project, as the "micro-projects" that occurred as a result of this project took on a life of their own and gathered new editors via additional engagement at their institution after I had finished my consultation, training, or meeting. These "micro-projects" worked fairly autonomously and in collaboration with METRO's WiR in the sense that the WiR offered technical support for questions that arose through email or on-Wiki, and help at initial or follow-up trainings. But it might not make sense to claim their results as part of this project. Additionally, because this project sought to make other micro-projects run autonomously, Usernames might not have been gathered for all subsequent useraccounts that were adopted by project participants after interacting with METRO's WiR, resulting in a potentially significant miscalculation of these reported global metrics. One final difficulty in metrics gathering is that many local Edit-a-thon attendees are experienced editors and Wikimedia NYC members. It is unclear from the current Wikimetrics documentation how I include / exclude experienced editors from my metrics as these contributors are often highly involved in Edit-a-thons, but also do much work outside of the Edit-a-thons so I don't necessarily think their 'survival' and other editing statistics should be included as part of the success of their project, as they probably would do what they do regardless if this project was active or not, though that is purely speculative as well.
Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 59/130 Based on this list of Wikipedia:GLAM/METRO/PEGGrant/Users|users, more info above at, "Notes on the where the data is coming from."
2. # of new editors 33 Wikimetrics says 33 but I am 100% there are more than that. I need to check my data gathering methods with the metrics team and can update this report when that happens...
3. # of individuals involved 150 This includes the event attendees, as well as my project supervisors at METRO, and those who we consulted with or talked to for this project, but who may or may not have gone onto editing although we did not collect their Usernames.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages Not Applicable / But if I MUST = 1923 This project did not specifically focus on this aspect of contributing to Wikipedia, as it was focused on outreach and participation. However, an initial run of the GLAMorous tool for the Commons Category:Metropolitan New York Library Council with a category depth of 3 finds that 1923 exist in this category and its subcategories.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects Number of articles for Edit-a-thons ONLY: 52 (22 created, 30 improved) Computing Number of articles created by all the various institutional partners is too much of a task and I would argue out of the scope of this project as those projects are seen as autonomous. I choose not to use Wikimetrics for this because many experienced editors attend our events but also edit a lot on their own, so using the tool would skew the data because it would include edits they did that were wholly not part of this project. So, I choose instead to count the number of new articles produced solely from our Edit-a-thons:

Note also that I do not include my own edits outside of what I contributed to relevant articles at Edit-a-thons.

6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects 123387 edits made, 6,836,224 sum bytes, 11,720,856 absolute sum bytes. Using Wikimetrics
Learning question
Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

One way to show success is to show the level of enthusiasm expressed by our partners. There was significant media / blogging out the METRO Wikipedia initiative by our institutional partners, showing the thriving community that appreciated the type of work this grant supported:


Impact[edit]

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic priorities?

Wikipedia’s mission includes the notion of empowerment of people to share content under free licenses or in the public domain. This project contributed to this mission by spreading the world about opportunities for partnership with Wikipedia among New York's most well-known cultural institutions and getting the local information and archives communities interested in the types of questions / lessons that Wikipedia presents. Empowerment was part of our project design in that trainings were held and educational materials developed to help interested parties take control of their own interest and continue learning after this project is over.
Wikipedia’s strategic priorities include creating partnerships to target offline populations. From the beginning this project has focused on considering diversity in the multiple senses of that word:
  • Institutional diversity: small and large-scale institutions;
  • Institutions which represents multiple sectors;
  • Institutions which represent minority cultural, racial, class, community, artistic perspectives and practices;
  • Public libraries and offering public events rather than private events.

How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

This project was successful at increasing the awareness about opportunities for partnership among librarians and archivists. Information professionals are, as GLAM participants already know, very good Wikipedia collaborators. With the Webcast series, the interview series METRO did, the news and blog posts and archived Wikipedia:GLAM/METRO project and resources pages with METRO, this project will continue to remain a resource for other library consortiums interested in a similiar project, and librarians and archivists interested in Wikipedia. In this way, it has built a foundation for stronger partnerships between the library, archives, and information science communities and the Wikimedia communities.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures[edit]

This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation[edit]

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".
YES

Expenses[edit]

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here.
Number Category Item description Unit Number of units Actual cost per unit Actual total Budgeted total Currency Notes
1 Transportation (Not used - $0.00) $120.00 USD Not used
2 Food Lights snacks and coffee for Edit-a-thons $243.21 $300.00 USD Distributed at 3 Edit-a-thons:
  1. Librarians@Pratt Edit-a-thon. Pratt Manhattan, Pratt MLIS. (11/01/14). [$75.27]
  2. Gugg-a-thon at the Guggenheim Museum (01/07/14). [$100.00]
  3. #Black Lives Matter Wikipedia Edit-a-thon (02/07/14). [$68.94]
3 Digital Camera Cannon digital camera with video for photographing events and other things to be added to Wikimedia Commons. $600.00 $600.00 USD Camera will be donated to future Wikimedia NYC and lent out to community members to use at related Wikipedia/ free culture events.
4 Printing Costs Not used (Not used - $0.00) $200.00 USD Not used
5 Project Manager Compensation Staff compensation $5,850.00 $5,850.00 USD NY adjusted for standard of pay for a project administrator at $25/hr -(1 day a week in the office, 9 hours a day, 6 months, 26 weeks total) (9 hours x 26 weeks =234 hours total) (234 hours x $25/hr = 5850). Paid in 2 installments.

SEE INSTRUCTIONS AT Grants:Index/Create financial report.

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission)
$7,070.00
Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if PEG is your only funding source)
$7,070.00
Total amount spent on this project
$6,693.21
Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project
$6,693.21
Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.
N/A

Remaining funds[edit]

Remaining funds from this grant have been returned to WMF in the amount of US$320.27.
Are there any grant funds remaining?
Answer YES or NO.
YES
Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)
If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.
Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.
Unused funds will be returned to the Wikimedia Foundation via check.