Art+Feminism User Group/Reporting/Meta2018

The Art+Feminism User Group was recognized as a Wikimedia user group in September 2017. This report outlines the accomplishments and activities organized by the group between September 2017 and September 2018.

This report is essentially a summary of three other more detailed reports:

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 unforeseen 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 included:

Using a 1:1 strategy for returning payments to our bank account before those funds are spent.
We're addressed this issue by using QuickBooks for all of our accounting and Creative Business, an accounting firm, who conducted two major audits on our behalf at the mid-term period of our grant cycle and again at its completion.
We imposed a June 1st deadline to complete all non-recurring payments, giving us a 2 month period to resolve any remaining discrepancies and reallocations.

Activities[edit]

International Editathon[edit]

In 2018, over 4,000 people at more than 285 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. In total, since 2014, over 12,000 people at more than 700 events around the world have participated in Art+Feminism’s Edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of nearly 17,000 articles on Wikipedia. Some notable examples of content added to and pages created for notable figures include 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. These events are primarily held in the month of March, though groups hold events throughout the year under our banner. Over the past our years our events have experienced steady growth, from 31 to 75 to 179 to 228 events a year. We continue to be inspired by all the dedicated folks who make room in their busy schedules to share skills and improve a collectively held resource like Wikipedia.

As we say in our statement of beliefs, "The steps to encouraging a woman to be heard and to be visible in her community are fraught with resistance and ridicule. Beginning this project, we knew that our role would not only be to empower women - we use the most expansive definition of that term - to edit online but to stand with them as they are challenged by those who do not see value in their voice and who do not see value in them. Art + Feminism is about making Wikipedia better, as a tool for open access to reliable information, but it doesn’t end there. It’s about dismantling systems of thought that ignore the presence and input of women in the room and diminish or erase entirely their place in history."

Metrics[edit]

During our 2018 campaign, over 285 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). Detailed outcomes from 2019 are here. You can see a graph of our growth model over the past four years.

Current growth models for Art+Feminism events, participants, and articles created, based off of 4 years of data. Year 0 is 2014.

Program and Events Dashboard[edit]

We continue using the Program and Events Dashboard. We found that our second year of using the Dashboard ran smoother than the first year. This was in part due to the organizational capacity built last year (training materials, repeat organizers with experience, etc), and also due to an extensive set of improvements that Sage Ross and Maudite completed. Several key improvements included: the ability to request new accounts via the dashboard interface and automatically add them to that program; both program specific queues and one centralized queue where we could approve accounts that were requested; and a much more sophisticated and publicly accessible alerts queue that was specific to our campaign.

Program Coordinator[edit]

McKensie Mack was appointed Director on July, 2018.

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: