Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/APG/2016 Supplemental Info

Wikimedia New York City (WM NYC) Annual Plan Grants (APG) – 2016 Supplemental information

Overview

The following information is supplemental information to the WM NYC APG – 2016, and is meant to provide more detailed background on the grant. The information originated in the form of separate Project and Event Grants (PEG) grants that have been consolidated here in support of the main APG.

Operational plan

Note: The operational plan includes the Metrics reporting position (see below)

Program 1: 2016 Meetups – further details

The supplemental information contained here is a more detailed overview of the Program 1: 2016 Meetups contained on the APG page

Goal

In 2016, participants of Wikimedia NYC will meet in partner spaces and have routine friendly meetings.

Activities

• In 2015, Wikimedia New York City hosted more than 50 meetups. It plans to do the same in 2016. The 2015 level of activity is 4-6 times the level of activity in 2012 and the interest and organization needs to be sustained.
• In 2016 WM NYC will celebrate Wikipedia Day for the sixth time. Each year since 2013, this 8-hour, one-day event has been attended by more than 100 people who participate in multiple conference tracks. See "all-day conference" for past events.
• Increase safety and consistency of meetups. We need nonprofit insurance. We need a consistent meetup location and cannot continue to organize this amount of meetups without paying for a regular meetup venue for at least 10 meetings in the year. We need support at meetups, including food and childcare.
• Video documentation of outcomes for projects in NYC. On five occasions, we will hire videographers to document the NYC-area event which have the most supported volunteer projects with the most impact. This follows a history of other volunteer-produced video content.

Target readership

Wikimedia New York City has the most diverse language participant base of any Wikimedia chapter.

• See Demographics of New York − Languages.

Fit with strategy

This grant most directly supports the strategic priorities of increasing participation and increasing quality.

• Increasing Participation
  • 500 different people participated in local in-person 2015 events; expecting same in 2016
  • 1000 different people participated in remote or online 2015; expecting same in 2016
  • The existence of routine chapter activities encourages other local projects and Wikimedia engagement.
    • Several Wikipedians-in-Residence in NYC
    • At least 15 instances of Wikipedia Education Program in New York in 2015 - same expected in 2016
    • Local institutional requests from GLAM institutions, nonprofits, media organizations, companies, and schools are beyond any capacity to fulfill. Still - nice to have our choice of partners.
  • In 2016, with the help of Grants:PEG/Wikimedia New York City/metrics and reporting staff, we will track and report the numbers of new editors.
• Improving quality
  • WM NYC has actively recruited and retained GLAM professionals to the WM NYC board. These professionals regularly attend and organize edit-a-thons during which they assist other editors in locating and citing reliable sources.
  • The majority of events organized by WM NYC in 2015 were collaborative efforts of WM NYC and active interest groups who worked together with us on identifying articles for improvement during events. Examples include:
    • Partnering with the New York Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library on topics including women in jazz and African-American history
    • Working with professionals at the Museum of Modern Art as well as independent artists on female/feminist, African-American, Asian-American, and Latin American artists.
    • Working with the Guggenheim and the Center for Architecture at the South Street Seaport on women in architecture

Measures of success

• For our events we seek to provide metrics described in Grants: Learning Patterns − Calculating Global Metrics including:
  • Event page attendees list, capturing new username signups
  • Sign-up sheet attendees list
  • Event media published to Wikimedia Commons categories
  • Outcomes, including new articles, articles improved, GLAM templates
• Repeat partner events at prestigious GLAM institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Public Library, New York Public Library, among many others
  • The number of partner requests for events has exceeded the ability of WM NYC to partner with the many local institutions who have expressed interest in Wikipedia editathons; the grant would allow for support of more partnership events with existing partnership and would allow for outreach and response with potential future partners
• Peaceful community base

Resources

See WM NYC Event Archive for the list of public WM NYC event links for 2004 to the present. user:Pharos is connected with most of these, and all of these are called successful by WM NYC chapter participants.

During 2015, Babycastles is an equal partner to Wikimedia NYC in managing Wikimedia meetups. Babycastles is a nonprofit organization which promotes nonprofit activism and meetups in New York City by providing events space and events organization in a highly attractive location in New York City and at the modest prices. Throughout 2015 they helped organize Wikipedia meetups monthly WikiWednesday salon and skill-shares as part of their own nonprofit mission. In 2016, WM NYC requests funding from the WMF so that Babycastles can be funded at the local nonprofit rate to continue to provide the meetup space that local community participants need.

As well as space for public meetups, Babycastles are including regular weekday use of their co-working space, for Wikimedia NYC members and part-time staff working on projects.

Additionally, Babycastles is a center for like-minded activism in expanding diversity in technology on a grassroots budget, and assists Wikimedia NYC in outreach to the arts community. Babycastles staff have expertise in contemporary digital media and are assisting local Wikimedia participants in video creation for Wikimedia projects.

Risks

This grant is requested to mitigate and reduce risk. There is nothing proposed here that increases risk beyond what the chapter will do anyway.

Liability insurance is requested because the chapter hosts most of its events in venues that may not have sufficient liability insurance, or in venues that explicitly cover the venue only. In any case, liability insurance is generally considered prudent. Included with liability insurance is Directors and Officers liability insurance to protect the management of the chapter, as well as the chapter itself from liability claims.

Paying for venue is necessary. The chapter meets regularly in an art gallery which has donated space since the end of 2014, and it would be nice to pay them to maintain the generous relationship. In New York using this space for a little pay is lower cost than continually seeking free space because time is money in New York and participation in events requires stability in hosting in a convenient location. Paying the venue could bring benefits like covering wires on floor, quarterly restroom cleaning, electrical tape to cover live wires, etc.

Providing childcare makes for safe spaces for parents who request it. Since the chapter currently has no liability insurance, the costs for separately insured childcare is significantly higher.

Providing public transit passes makes event attendance more accessible to youth and students as well as anyone who might benefit from having them.

Wikipedia Day is a time for the local community to come together in a location which hosts us and sync everyone with the support they need to engage as they like. Having a local community makes everyone more secure and maintaining social connections prevents problems from forming.

Budget

Please provide a detailed breakdown of project expenses according to the instructions here. See Budget Guidelines. Grantees are subject to line-item scrutiny of expenses. Changes to the approved budget beyond 10% in any category must be approved in advance.

Project budget table

1. Nonprofit insurance - 2000
   1. Liability and D&O, which is standard
   2. This is a standard expense for nonprofits in the area - Nonprofit Quarterly and Blue Avocado advise this
   3. We are considering getting this from the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York
2. Meetup space payment - 5000
   1. WM NYC meets at Babycastles, which is among the least expensive meeting venues in NYC that meets the chapter's location needs. Their rate is $500 per event, and we will meet there 10 times in 2016. In 2015 they hosted us for an entire year under the presumption that the Wikimedia community had no money, and now to maintain the good relationship we should pay them.
   2. Babycastles are including regular weekday use of their co-working space along with the public meetups. Their regular rate is $200 / person / month, but they are offering its free use broadly to our community.
   3. Another paid option which was considered is Civic Hall. EFF, Internet Society, OpenStreetMap, Open Knowledge, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Creative Commons have partnered with this venue, and it is a tech hub. It is considerably more expensive and offers much more professionalism, in comparison to Babycastles which offers space, location, and an atmosphere without paid staff. WM NYC seeks a price point and venue for grassroots community volunteer organization.
3. Routine meeting expenses - 4000
   1. 20 meetings
   2. $4000 Meals for meetups - 200*20 (range is 170 for pizza or 230 for sandwiches), assuming 30 people in a meetup (range 25-35)
   3. 10 of these meetings will be in our regular venue and the venue cost is described above. The other 10 meetings could be anywhere in the area as volunteers request.
   4. Some of these meetups may be coffee and snacks only, particularly when the meeting is fewer than 2 hours.
4. Support available on request - 2000
   1. $1000 5 trips, $200 each for bus travel and hostel to or from NYC for purpose of Wikimedia event participation. Nearby cities ~4 hours away are Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
   2. $800 Child care - 4 hours, 40/hour event rate with Metropolitan Sitters, so $160 for 3 hour event. We are unsure of demand so want funding for 5 instances of this as pilot. 160*5=800
   3. $200 Public transportation passes - $10 each for 20, $9 passes. Fare is 2.75 so this is 3 trips, but some people pay more than 1 fare to get to meeting. This is the correct amount of fare to offer to people who need ride support to attend events.
5. Wikipedia Day, an event for 150 people - 3000
   1. All day conference in Manhattan
   2. At Wikimedia New York City/Finances, Wikipedia Day cost $2,322 in 2013 and $1109 in 2015 but in both cases there was in-kind donation of venue and staffing
   3. This is WM NYC's 7th year hosting this event, following Wikipedia Day 2015, (2014 was WikiConference USA), 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010
   4. Expenses for 2016 Wikipedia Day at NYU
      1. $400 for 2 required venue "student hosts", $20/hour for 9-7 (10 hours), so 2*20*10=$400
      2. $600 for venue rental, including staff not paid hourly like security and cleanup
      3. $2000 for food, coffee for ~120 attendees
      4. An event of this size in region could not be presented for a lower cost
6. Video documentation proposal to have 5 video creation days in 2016 - 6000
   1. Videos have been popular for NYC events. See 60 Minutes (which required a lot of volunteer input), Wikipedia Day 2013, MoMA March 2015, Brooklyn Public Library 2015, Columbia School of Public Health. Demand continues for profiling more projects.
   2. Plan is to make 1 video for AfroCROWD, 1 for Art + Feminism, 1 for typical WM NYC events, 1 for chapter participants, and 1 for institutional partners
   3. 1200 / video day, which is market rate for video in NYC, so 5*1200=6000
   4. NYC is the world center of video, being the home of US network TV, the site of most Hollywood filming, and a huge amount of events documentation on video
   5. NYC offers the world's least expensive high quality video
   6. There is a desire throughout the Wikimedia community to produce more video content. In this plan, volunteers provide idea, content, scripting, rehearsal, and everything presented in the video. The money only funds equipment rental, technical capture of the video, and especially - the technical process of editing. No video will be made without volunteer hours contributed being several times more than the hired technical support.

2016 Metrics reporting

Goal

Wikimedia NYC seeks support to complete the reporting process for over 50 events from 2015, and what is a projected to be an equal number (50+ or more) of events for 2016. While WM NYC is one of the most active chapters, it is out of compliance with WMF reporting requirements associated with WMF funding, thus preventing this chapter from supporting further growth. This support is critical to maintaining the chapter's future activities and health. WM NYC has attendee lists for all events. WM NYC will report these metrics to the WMF, and our institutional partners. Additionally, with the help of volunteers, WM NYC has updated their Meetup Wikipedia space to be more comprehensive and capture existing metadata for the chapter in a more organized and methodical way. The stage has been established to capture the metadata, but further support in the form of this grant is required to do this concentrated effort properly.

Plan

Activities

• Effectively capturing current and historical WM NYC metadata
• Metrics reporting for Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/AfroCrowd|AfroCROWD
• Metrics reporting for Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism|Art+Feminism
• Metrics reporting for Wikimedia meetups
  • First priority is WM NYC events
  • If further time and resources are available, run metrics on other meetings in US and beyond
• Metrics reporting documentation and metrics reporting best practices
• Increase community conversation about metrics reporting
• Create metrics reporting templates for providing metrics reporting to institutional partners

Impact

Target readership

• The Wikimedia Foundation
  • The WMF has requirements and report expectations which need to be met as part of the chapter's agreement and in order to fulfill requirements of grants and funding
• Institutional Partners
  • Metrics reporting is broadly useful to institutional stakeholders. Established organizations expect to see impact reports of the potential for Wikimedia outreach before they can commit to invest in Wikimedia development
  • Attractive metrics reports which meet the needs of institutional partners is a prerequisite of collaboration, and would increase engagement significantly
  • Through AfroCROWD Project, outreach to many African diaspora related language centers that abound in the New York City area
• Wikimedia Community Contributors
  • Highly active Wikimedia community contributors need impact reports to guide policy decisions on infrastructure development which would support project and initiative work
• Third-Party Researchers
  • Third-party researchers continually demand more data as a base from which to do research and would provide metadata to open data movements
  • Potential collaboration with open data efforts like BetaNYC, and other entities that work in the open data movement located in New York City, a tech center
• Other Wikimedia chapters
  • Benefits of creating metrics and reporting structure could be skill-shared with other Wikimedia chapters, increasing engagement and easing the burden on organizers for tools and organization

Fit with strategy

• Having a precedent with better metrics reporting and infrastructure is the base for institutional partnerships and establishing relationships with organizational partners
• The stated strategic priorities
  • Increasing reach, participation, and quality
• Peership
  • A major deficiency of the Wikimedia community is a difficulty with peership with other organizations as a media and outreach partner. The core of the problem with establishing relationships is the inability of the Wikimedia community to meet the needs that other media partners offer.
  • Wikipedia's major competition in communication includes Facebook, Twitter, organization's own websites, blogs, and other traditional media outlets. Institutional partners seek media value from these others because they all offered a defined business proposition - "post to Facebook, and the dashboard will give you a report of the audience reached". Wikimedia projects offer no equivalent value, despite being a much more effective media partner than all alternatives.
  • With only a modest attempt at providing media reporting, the Wikimedia community can begin to have conversations with institutional partners about collaboration. It is a huge oversight at global metrics and calculating global metrics that there is no attempt to match the WMF demand for certain metrics to the potential for re-using reports to the WMF to meet the needs of institutional partners and to compete with in the media marketplace with the value offered by media competitors including Facebook, Twitter, and others.
• Complementary engagement
  • Another way to express the match with strategy is to say that companies like Facebook have created a media business sector in providing metrics to organizations which engage their platform. Wikipedia can compete directly with Facebook without compromising community values if only the WMF-demanded metrics report could be complemented with a little reporting that had relevance to stakeholders outside the WMF
  • This grant seeks to compile metrics and publish them in a way that would be attractive to, for example, the New York City advertising industry, the tech sector, as well as other active industries and sectors where WM NYC is based

Measures of success

General measures

The typical risk of WMF funding is that the event is presumed to be risky and the reporting is presumed to be trivial. In the case of this grant request, the events are mostly done - there are at least 40 events which are completed but do not have metrics.

For the WMF to acknowledge an event to have existed, it has to be reported. One perspective of this proposal is that with staff support, about 40 events will suddenly come into existence, because they can suddenly be reported. Beyond the events already done, WM NYC will likely oversee more than 60 events in 2016, and there needs to be a plan in place to process the metrics from those events. Since the majority of WMF events grants support single events, this single grant is likely to have a much larger impact than usual: it will result in no fewer than 100 event reports being created. Furthermore, if they are centrally created, then each report will be more compatible with the others and the data from each will be easier to aggregated. The entire process of metrics generation would be easier to discuss if centralized, because when data processing is crowdsourced the quality of each report varies more widely because there is no one anywhere who has standardized their event management process.

Another measure of success is increased community respect and engagement around the metrics reporting process.

Specific project metrics

Project metrics would include:

• Providing compliance with past reportage that is overdue
• Creation of metrics and reporting infrastructure
• Event metrics and reporting of metadata
  • Current and future events
  • Historic events
• Event metrics would include
  • Number of attendees
  • Number of new editors
    • Number of edits by new editors over time
    • Length of engagement of new editors
  • Number of edits / outcome reportage
• Chapter reportage data
  • Membership numbers
  • Mailing list
  • Invite list

Resources

This grant proposes to hire a staff person to run metrics. The major resource which makes WM NYC ideal to oversee this kind of staff position is that there are a large number of stakeholders in New York City needing this service. Also, a staff person running metrics and reportage would support the exponential number of events the WM NYC chapter has been supporting. Without a staff person capturing metadata, these efforts are severely curtailed and the future effectiveness and engagement is deeply minimized.

• Art+Feminism is based in NYC and will coordinate at least 125 international meetups in 2016. All of these need metrics reports.
• AfroCROWD is based in NYC and will oversee at least 25 meetups in 2016. All of these need metrics reports.
• Excluding the AfroCROWD and Art+Feminism meetups, Wikimedia NYC will oversee at least 20 meetups in 2016. All of these need metrics reports.
• Additional outreach with institutional partners will be much easier to meet with less burden on the volunteer leadership of the chapter with the support of the metrics and reporting as an infrastructure.

It is proposed that when a staff person is hired, the person will be overseen by three representative stakeholders coordinating projects from each of Art+Feminism, AfroCROWD, and WM NYC. WM NYC will manage the staff person running metrics, but a driving factor behind the hire is to relieve the administrative burden from other stakeholders while also making reporting for all of these projects have compatibility and effectiveness among their data.

Risks

The major risk of this grant that it might make WM NYC the target of antagonism and hostility for having paid staff. The source of this hostility is belief in the following myths:

1. Myth: It is easy to compile good event reports with good metrics.

   Fact: The Wikimetrics tool is not intuitive, and does not always work. As a result, few people produce good event reports, with quality data and analysis.

2. Myth: Lots of Wikimedia volunteers love compiling metrics reports.

   Fact: Wikimedia discussion pages on metrics reporting almost exclusively have participation by paid staff and it has been this way for years. There is no precedent of any Wikimedia volunteer compiling large numbers of metrics reports. Beyond Wikimedia projects, media products provided by Twitter and Facebook are comparable and likewise in that sector, only paid staff have interest in metrics and statistics reporting.

3. Myth: Compiling metrics reports is quick.

   Fact: An experienced user of Wikimetrics can do an event for 20 people in about 10 minutes. A narrative to complement the data would take another 30 minutes to write, but that requires communication with someone who hosted the event. For someone without familiarity with Wikimetrics (and only ~20-30 people in the world do have good experience) it takes much much longer - probably 1 to 2 hours a report for the current quality... assuming Wikimetrics is cooperating.

4. Myth: Wikimetrics reports are useful as they are.

   Fact: There needs to be a lot more community participation in the reporting process to make Wikimetrics reports valid. They are dubious now because of their low quality and the lack of community participation in the process of producing them.

5. Myth: Wikimetrics reports give the data that the Wikimedia community and institutional partners need.

   Fact: Wikimetrics is a radical break from traditional reporting in the communications industry and does not provide metrics with are compatible with the usual reported data in the communications sector. The data is interesting but needs community validation and to be connected with other data to have relevance.

Secondary Risks: Failure to generate the promised return with the funded assigned. This risk is mitigated because WM NYC would be giving weekly pay for weekly labor, and the idea would be that the person serving in the metrics reporting role would do valuable work even in their first day of working even without training. The person in the role would need to run metrics and compile event narratives immediately. If the hired person failed to do reports, then they would no longer be paid. Every week they would be expected to return reports to the stakeholders.

Other Risks: The reports might not be good. This risk is mitigated because having any precedent at all for event reporting would be useful, because hardly any precedent exists. Also, there are enough stakeholders to guide the development of reports to promise more quality than if this were an individual's project.

Budget

Project budget table

Metrics staff

• 10 hours/week * 52 weeks = 520 hours in 2016, * $60/hour (typical local price a university to administer the hire of a graduate student doing statistics work) = 31,200
• $1,200 travel and training for staff
• Administration of this person done by volunteers

Total cost of project

32,400