Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Attendance at SPNHC Conference 2023 (ID: 22061116)/Final Report
Report Status: Accepted
Due date: 2023-08-02T00:00:00Z
Funding program: Rapid Fund, Wikimedia Community Fund
Report type: Final
This is an automatically generated Meta-Wiki page. The page was copied from Fluxx, the grantmaking web service of Wikimedia Foundation where the user has submitted their midpoint report. Please do not make any changes to this page because all changes will be removed after the next update. Use the discussion page for your feedback. The page was created by CR-FluxxBot.General information[edit]
- Title of Proposal: Attendance at SPNHC Conference 2023
- Username of Applicant: Ambrosia10
- Name of Organization: N/A
- Amount awarded: 4210.39
- Amount spent: 3912.29 USD, 6459.55 NZD
Part 1 Understanding your work[edit]
1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented
I attended the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) 2023 conference and while there delivered two papers. The first was titled "Reuse in the Wiki world empowers engagement with Natural History Collections" and the second was titled "Names, dames and campaigns: a botanical case study in digitally narrowing the gaps". The aim of these presentations were to encourage members of the SPNHC community to engage more with Wikimedia projects and to give them examples from within their community on how to go about this. By attending the conference I was able to strengthen my current relationships within this community and also to establish new connections giving attendees a point of contact should they wish to engage with the Wiki ecosystem. Finally by attending the conference I had the opportunity to learn more about the current state of the community, particularly their efforts in narrowing the digital distance between physical collections and research as well as efforts to highlight hidden diversity within Natural History Collections. I also learned more about the progress being made with digital extended specimen concept and efforts by such organisations as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the European Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DISSCO) to empower Natural History Collection institutions to practically implement this concept.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals? Please describe these strategies and approaches.
Prior to the conference I wrote posts on twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn & Mastodon explaining I had funding & was to attend SPNHC2023 in person. This raised awareness amongst those attending SPNHC2023 that they would have the opportunity to see my presentations, learn more about how Natural History Collection (NHC) folk have engaged with the Wiki ecosystem & plan to meet me to discuss in person any current or proposed engagement with the Wiki ecosystem. These social media posts inspired two meeting appointments prior to me leaving for the conference. At the conference I attended two GBIF workshops increasing my own knowledge on the digital extended specimen concept, the Darwin Core data standard being used to support the creation of digital extended specimens, GBIFs proposed model for using Darwin Core to assist Natural history collections to contribute data to digital extended specimens & where Wikidata in particular may have a role to play to assist NHCs to undertake this work. I presented two presentations to the attendees and thus exposed attendees to the different ways multiple NHCs are engaging with various Wiki projects. I also advocated for openly licensing of NHC data and images. I was able to give attendees information on a case study using Wikidata to link and raise the visibility of a historically marginalised group (women) who have contributed to Natural History Collections. I attended as many sessions as possible & undertook multiple conversations with attendees.
3. Please use this space to upload media and other files that help tell your story and impact.
Field to type in URLs.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%40siobhanleachman%20%23SPNHC2023&src=typed_query https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8002369 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8002345 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ambrosia10/SPNHC2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Wellington/Meetup_10_June_2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Aotearoa_New_Zealand_Online/38
4. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.
| A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups | Agree |
| B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community | Not applicable to your fund |
| C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups | Agree |
| D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives | Not applicable to your fund |
| E. Encourage the retention of editors | Not applicable to your fund |
| F. Encourage the retention of organizers | Not applicable to your fund |
5. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?
While at the conference I was able to meet Adania Flemming the cofounder of the US based group "Black in Natural History Museums" and Miranda Lowe from the Natural History Museum, London who is the co author of "Nature Read in Black and White: decolonial approaches to interpreting natural history collections" a seminal work in guiding natural history institutions to decolonise their collections. Both these women attended my presentation "Names, dames and campaigns: a botanical case study in digitally narrowing the gaps" & recognised that the Wikidata workflow used in that project to highlight underrepresented women's contributions was equally application to other marginalised groups. Prior to the conference & currently I am collaborating with Adania to create a course-based undergraduate research experience (cure) using a similar workflow to that given in the above presentation. My attendance at this conference enabled Adania and I to meet for the first time in person and to strengthen this collaborative relationship. I also offered to assist Miranda Lowe with any efforts she may want to undertake with any Wiki Projects to highlight marginalised groups. As a result of meeting these two women in person I feel more able to support them with any engagement with Wiki projects they may undertake and have reassured them that they should feel able to reach out to me for any assistance that may be needed.
Part 2: Your main learning[edit]
6. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?
I attended as many presentations as was possible physically during the conference and caught up on the multiple other presentations all held at the same time via the virtual platform after the conference finished. I had multiple conversations with attendees regarding engagement with Wiki projects ranging from creating a Wikidata item for an attendee, supporting attendees as wiki editors, answering questions and assisting in solving editing issues, receiving comments about how the institution the attendee was employed by were intending to undertake projects engaging with Wiki projects, most commonly with Wikidata with the intention to add and extract data about collectors of specimens. Where such comments were made I offered my help. I had conversations with NHC folk on the difficulty in undertaking work to rectify the historic bias that exists in collection data. I attended a presentation by Jack Ashby titled "Being honest about our collections’ origins – researching the colonial histories of Australian zoology" on the research work he is undertaking to decolonise natural history collections and received useful tips on how this work might be being implemented by a wikimedian. I also learnt more the current state of SPNHC community digitisation projects, the progress of their digital infrastructure (for example DISSCO) and efforts of the community to empower the creation of digital extended specimens.
7. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?This can include both positive and negative situations. What did you learn from those experiences?
I was happily surprised to learn how many of the attendees of the conference were aware of Wikidata and also the number of presentations that mentioned Wikidata specifically as an identifier in their presentation or showed the reuse of Wikidata items in their slides. This is a massive change in the community over the last five years as when I presented on Wiki to this community in 2018 very few of the attendees were aware of Wikidata. I am convinced that this upswing in knowledge is as a result of the website and attribution tool that is Bionomia Tracker which is now being used by multiple natural history institutions to disambiguate people and attribute specimens to them.
8. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?
It was eye opening how prevalent the use of the Bionomia Tracker is in the Natural History Collections community and the flow on effects of the use of this platform is the need to up-skill in Wikidata editing, both in person and in bulk. I'm definitely going to bear this in mind when teaching natural history folk about Wikidata and use Bionomia as my "go to" example in order to show the benefit of enriching Wikidata with natural history person data.
9. Documentation of resources: Use this space to upload any documents that would be useful to share with others (e.g. communications material, training material, presentations).
Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
https://zenodo.org/record/8002369 https://zenodo.org/record/8002345 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ambrosia10/SPNHC2023
Part 3: Metrics[edit]
10a. Open Metrics reporting
In your application, you defined some open metrics and targets (goals). You will see a table like the one below with your metric in the title and the target you set in your proposal automatically filled in. Use the tables to report the result. Use the comments column to describe any aspects of this result that you find relevant. If the results were different from the initial target (goals) then you can explain why and what you learned from this. You can also provide any qualitative analysis regarding these results. In the last column please describe the tools and methodology used to collect this data and any difficulties you might have had.
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deliver conference presentation | Successfully deliver my presentation and openly licence and publish the script and slides of my presentation. | N/A | 2 | I not only successfully delivered my original Wiki presentation and openly licensed and published the script and slides of my presentation in Zenodo (thus generating a DOI) I was also able to deliver a second presentation which highlighted a Wikidata workflow to increasing the visibility of an underrepresented group - historic female beings and female botanists, & botanical collectors after whom flowering plant genera were named. The presentation slides and script of this second presentation was also openly licensed and published in Zenodo. | Counted number of presentations given |
| Engagement discussions | Engage in at least 5 conversations with attendees about current or potential opportunities to engage with Wikimedia Projects | 5 | 10 | I had multiple conversations with attendees about current or potential opportunities to engage with Wikimedia Projects. I have counted the main conversations I had which are further outlined in my conference report see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ambrosia10/SPNHC2023. | I noted down conversations i had during the conference and later wrote up a report on them. |
| Report on Conference & publicise to Wiki community | Report back on the conference to my local wiki community as well as to Wikidata:WikiProject Biodiversity. Publicise my conference report with any interested Wiki folk. | N/A | 10 | I have completed a verbal report back to the Wikipedia Wellington Meetup 10 June 2023 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Wellington/Meetup_10_June_2023
I intend to complete a verbal report back to the Aotearoa New Zealand Virtual Wiki meetup see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Aotearoa_New_Zealand_Online/38 I have drafted a section in the New Zealand portion of the June GLAMwiki newsletter on the conference. I tweeted the google doc version of the report with the #SPNHC2023 hashtag - https://twitter.com/SiobhanLeachman/status/1668040576267321345 I posted a Facebook message to the WikiProject New Zealand page a link to the google doc version of my conference report see https://www.facebook.com/groups/833075710196955/permalink/2355169011320943/ I also posted a Facebook message to the Wikidata Community see https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikidataCommunity/permalink/3545454662406352/ I created a post on the New Zealand WikiProject linking to the Wikipedia user subpage report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_Zealand_Wikipedians%27_notice_board I created a Mastodon message with the google doc version of the report https://mastodon.nz/@siobhan_leachman/109609685564092878 I added a Telegram message to the WikiProject Biodiversity group giving a link to the Wikipedia user subpage report I posted on LinkedIn the google document version of the conference report. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7073805368207831040/ |
Counted number of methods I've used to reach out to the wider Wiki community and report back to them on the SPNHC2023 conference. |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
10b. Core Metrics reporting
In your application, you defined targets for some core metrics and targets (goals). You will see a table like the one below with each core metric in the title and the target you set in your proposal automatically filled in. Use the tables to report the result. Use the comments column to describe any aspects of this result that you find relevant. If the results were different from the initial target (goals) then you can explain why and what you learned from this. You can also provide any qualitative analysis regarding these results. In the last column please describe the tools and methodology used to collect this data and any difficulties you might have had. Note: a table will appear for each Wikimedia project content contribution you defined in your proposal.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 200 | The above is a "guestimate" as I presented in person two presentations each to a room of approximately 50 - 100 in person participants. However there were also virtual attendees of the conference but unfortunately I do not know the exact number who were present online during each of my presentations. All up there were approximately 500 conference participants both virtual and in person. Also both presentations were recorded and are being made available to conference attendees exclusively for 6 months before the recordings will be made available publicly. The slides and scripts of both my presentations have been made available under an open license on Zenodo. | I looked around the room when presenting and guessed the number of attendees. I also guessed the number who attended online and came up with a conservative estimate about the number of individuals who have seen the presentations. | ||
| Number of editors | Not applicable | ||||
| Number of organizers | Not applicable |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | Not applicable | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
12. Did you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results? This could include things like a lack of time or resources, or the expertise in your team to collect this data. It could also include difficulties with particular data collection tools.
No
12a. State what difficulties you had.
N/A
12b. How do you hope to overcome these challenges in the future? Do you have any recommendations for the Foundation to support you in addressing these challenges?
N/A
13. Use this space to upload any documents and provide links to any tools you have used that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, program and event dashboard link, project page on Meta).
Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
N/A
14. Have you shared these results with other Wikimedian communities (either affiliates, user groups, volunteers, etc., different to yours)? This can include things such as data and direct outcomes, lessons you have learned, or information on how to run or recreate your programs.
Yes
14a. If yes or partially, please describe how you have already shared them and if you would like to do more sharing, and if so how.
I have shared the report I have written in numerous forums, social media platforms as well as the WikiProject New Zealand talk page. I have reported back in person to the Wellington Wiki Meetup and will do the same again at the Aotearoa New Zealand Wiki virtual meetup.
Part 4: Financial reporting and compliance[edit]
15. & 14a. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
6459.55 NZD
16. Please state the total amount spent in USD.
3912.29 USD
17. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.
17a. Upload a financial report file.
17b. Please provide a link to your financial reporting document.
N/A
As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
17c. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.
I added a second workshop at a cost of US$50
18. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?
Yes
18a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.
The amount of underspend was NZD $236.57 when converting the US dollars spent into $NZD as at the 4th of June and subtracting that figure from the amount originally deposited into my account in $NZD. This underspend was as a result of not spending as much as anticipated for my meal allowance.
18b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?
B. Propose to use them to partially or fully fund a new/future grant request with PO approval
18c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.
I am anticipating applying to Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand for funds to attend the Biodiversity Data Standards TDWG 2023 conference to be held in Hobart in 9th - 13 October 2023. https://www.tdwg.org/conferences/2023/ This is a biodiversity data standards conference that is aligned with my Wikidata work. See my detailed conference report outlining my anticipated follow up actions as a result of attending the SPNHC 2023 conference. I hope to obtain permission from the Wikimedia Foundation to spend the unspent portion of this grant to partially pay for that conference registration fee.
19. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?
Yes
20. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
Yes
21. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
Yes
22. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.
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