I reviewed some of the proposals that have been submitted for funding from the aspects of concrete goals. I have a background in United States Human Service charities as an Operations Manager and database administrator. One of the most challenging activities for an agency is to identify goals in a manner that is meaningful to all constituents and can be tracked. If a goal cannot be defined with an action statement and specific target numbers and the result that proves the target numbers, then the goal language must be modified and/or the result that proves the goal changed. At the time of goal identification the tracking methods should be determined and reviewed for feasibility.
A goal should be so clearly written that anyone who is a member of the organization understands how to collect the data that proves the goal. A common failing is creating goals that sound really impressive but are so vague that the people responsible for doing the work and collecting the data don't know which activity proves the goal and what form or question or whatever, they have to do to get the information back to the Main Office. (And "don't they understand that I am very busy and who reads this, and oh lord, what did I do last time I filled out this form and ...")
For example: Efforts will be made to increase the participation of women and other minorities in monthly workshops by 30%. This goal will be verified by sign-in sheets that ask for gender and (ethnicity, cultural group or whatever concrete statistic defines the goal).
From an operations standpoint the sign-in sheets should be sent to the Main
office after every workshop, the results tabulated and reported to the appropriate constituents. At minimum, the board and the sponsoring group should receive feedback on goals on a quarterly basis. This keeps the goals in front of everybody and lets everyone know what progress is being is being towards achieving those goals while there is still time to improve their methods.
The most effective grants I worked with tied achievable goals to monetary rewards. If quarterly goals weren't met, future financial allocations were jeopardized and indeed, in cases of egregious inactivity, programs lost funding mid-fiscal year.
The preceeding goal language was created in a vacuum without consultation with any constituents in the space of approx. one hour and is to be used only as an example.
Organizations tend to use too many words to describe what they are trying to accomplish. Grant language must be straight-forward and easily understood. If the average user/volunteer/staff member doesn't understand the goals at first reading then further refining is of the highest importance
Please let me know if there is anything I can do to be of service.
Regards,
Nora (Norawashere)
Hello Nora,
One of the key roles of the FDC is focusing the Wikimedia movement on developing sound measurable goals that match the mission of the movement, and to then have the organizations use a evaluation process that is hearty but not too burdensome for volunteers who are likely to be heavily involved with projects.
The Wikimedia movement as a whole is in an infancy stage of figuring out how organizations can achieve the right balance between time spend on administrative and bureaucratic activities and the time spent creating content for the various Wikimedia Foundation projects.
In my opinion every organization in the movement, small or large, can benefit from the type of comments that you shared in your email. I encourage you and other interested people to push up your sleeves and help the organizations develop meaningful measurable goals around the topic of the gender gap (or anything else.)
It would be really useful for a group of interested people to review the organization various activities and make suggestions about how goals related to increasing the diversity of the movement can be added.
If you or anyone else is interested, I will help you figure out the best way to accomplish this task. The Wikimedia Foundation had staff dedicated to assisting the movement with the general evaluations of projects and programs. But their numbers are few and the task is large!!! Plus the involvement of volunteers is an important ethos of the movement. So the involvement of volunteers is key to getting this done in a meaningful and timely way.
Regards, Sydney
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 22, 2013, at 13:38, "trueself56 ." trueself54@gmail.com wrote:
I reviewed some of the proposals that have been submitted for funding from the aspects of concrete goals. I have a background in United States Human Service charities as an Operations Manager and database administrator. One of the most challenging activities for an agency is to identify goals in a manner that is meaningful to all constituents and can be tracked. If a goal cannot be defined with an action statement and specific target numbers and the result that proves the target numbers, then the goal language must be modified and/or the result that proves the goal changed. At the time of goal identification the tracking methods should be determined and reviewed for feasibility.
A goal should be so clearly written that anyone who is a member of the organization understands how to collect the data that proves the goal. A common failing is creating goals that sound really impressive but are so vague that the people responsible for doing the work and collecting the data don't know which activity proves the goal and what form or question or whatever, they have to do to get the information back to the Main Office. (And "don't they understand that I am very busy and who reads this, and oh lord, what did I do last time I filled out this form and ...")
For example: Efforts will be made to increase the participation of women and other minorities in monthly workshops by 30%. This goal will be verified by sign-in sheets that ask for gender and (ethnicity, cultural group or whatever concrete statistic defines the goal).
From an operations standpoint the sign-in sheets should be sent to the Main office after every workshop, the results tabulated and reported to the appropriate constituents. At minimum, the board and the sponsoring group should receive feedback on goals on a quarterly basis. This keeps the goals in front of everybody and lets everyone know what progress is being is being towards achieving those goals while there is still time to improve their methods.
The most effective grants I worked with tied achievable goals to monetary rewards. If quarterly goals weren't met, future financial allocations were jeopardized and indeed, in cases of egregious inactivity, programs lost funding mid-fiscal year.
The preceeding goal language was created in a vacuum without consultation with any constituents in the space of approx. one hour and is to be used only as an example.
Organizations tend to use too many words to describe what they are trying to accomplish. Grant language must be straight-forward and easily understood. If the average user/volunteer/staff member doesn't understand the goals at first reading then further refining is of the highest importance
Please let me know if there is anything I can do to be of service.
Regards,
Nora (Norawashere) _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Sydney, I love your definition of measurement standards as an "evaluation process that is hearty but not too burdensome for volunteers"! I think the most basic problem that I, Nora, and most people have in comprehending the extent of the gendergap problem is that we tend to assume that there are a few measurements already in place, and there are not. It is very difficult to make estimations that can be used for budgeting and tracking purposes that are not related to hard numbers such as "30%". Our problem is that we don't even have a proper "null-line" where we can say "this is where we are starting from".
Because I tend to edit in a niche corner of Wikipedia projects concerning Dutch painters of the 17th-century, I am familiar with all of the problematic gendergap areas related to this niche. If you look at this category:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Painters_by_nationality
Only 151 categories are listed and fewer countries represented, with most of the entries for those countries with higher internet access rates in the general population. There are lots of painters left to categorize! Within this work-in-progress, user "Ser Amantio di Nicolao" decided to help track women painters by setting up the following subcategory back in February:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_painters_by_nationality
You will see the following subcategories (working down the alphabet, exhaustion for Ser Amantio di Nicolao apparently kicked in at "I" for Italy): American women painters (484 P) Australian women painters (58 P) Austrian women painters (13 P) British women painters (3 C, 118 P) Canadian women painters (84 P) Dutch women painters (59 P) French women painters (94 P) German women painters (8 P) Italian women painters (53 P)
I think it would be great to have an overview of female painters across the world and across centuries, but how can we expand such efforts so that more people contribute and more people become aware of this small effort? I decided to add in the women in my dataset, but it's not a priority for me, and never will be. That said, I only started to add women into this category, because I noticed it was there. You can't just go and create empty categories, nor can you create categories for one or two items, so it's a lot of work to add the categories for other countries. Who is ever going to do this? Is it valuable? Would we ever want to pay for it? Recently we had a "kerfuffle" about women novelists being ghettoized - such categories should not remove painters from their main category, but be a tracking category only.
Coming back to the subject of estimations for work planned, it's always a useful experience to state 10 things on Monday that you are 100% positive you will get done by Saturday (because you already have them planned). Each Saturday revisit the list and score (1) for done and (0) for not done. If you do this each week for 10 weeks, add up your score and be prepared to eat humble pie.
In answer to the question of who decides what goals we need to establish -- well, that answer is "we do!"; and the answer to the question of who decides what estimates we need to make of work we want to do -- same thing.
Nora, your tracking idea sounds great when you say "From an operations standpoint the sign-in sheets should be sent to the Main office after every workshop, the results tabulated and reported to the appropriate constituents. At minimum, the board and the sponsoring group should receive feedback on goals on a quarterly basis." Unfortunately, this will not work in our volunteer context, because no one is going to volunteer to do this tabulation and send the reports. Categories are a great way of showing a snapshot of work-in-progress, but they don't roll up and are not automatically created. Somehow though, this is the type of dashboard that we need, with the extra stipulation that we want a dashboard that doesn't require a lot of volunteer tweaking. That is very hard to achieve on Wikipedia. Hopefully WikiData will become the answer, but any and all suggestions are welcome!
Jane
2013/10/22, Sydney sydney.poore@gmail.com:
Hello Nora,
One of the key roles of the FDC is focusing the Wikimedia movement on developing sound measurable goals that match the mission of the movement, and to then have the organizations use a evaluation process that is hearty but not too burdensome for volunteers who are likely to be heavily involved with projects.
The Wikimedia movement as a whole is in an infancy stage of figuring out how organizations can achieve the right balance between time spend on administrative and bureaucratic activities and the time spent creating content for the various Wikimedia Foundation projects.
In my opinion every organization in the movement, small or large, can benefit from the type of comments that you shared in your email. I encourage you and other interested people to push up your sleeves and help the organizations develop meaningful measurable goals around the topic of the gender gap (or anything else.)
It would be really useful for a group of interested people to review the organization various activities and make suggestions about how goals related to increasing the diversity of the movement can be added.
If you or anyone else is interested, I will help you figure out the best way to accomplish this task. The Wikimedia Foundation had staff dedicated to assisting the movement with the general evaluations of projects and programs. But their numbers are few and the task is large!!! Plus the involvement of volunteers is an important ethos of the movement. So the involvement of volunteers is key to getting this done in a meaningful and timely way.
Regards, Sydney
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 22, 2013, at 13:38, "trueself56 ." trueself54@gmail.com wrote:
I reviewed some of the proposals that have been submitted for funding from the aspects of concrete goals. I have a background in United States Human Service charities as an Operations Manager and database administrator. One of the most challenging activities for an agency is to identify goals in a manner that is meaningful to all constituents and can be tracked. If a goal cannot be defined with an action statement and specific target numbers and the result that proves the target numbers, then the goal language must be modified and/or the result that proves the goal changed. At the time of goal identification the tracking methods should be determined and reviewed for feasibility.
A goal should be so clearly written that anyone who is a member of the organization understands how to collect the data that proves the goal. A common failing is creating goals that sound really impressive but are so vague that the people responsible for doing the work and collecting the data don't know which activity proves the goal and what form or question or whatever, they have to do to get the information back to the Main Office. (And "don't they understand that I am very busy and who reads this, and oh lord, what did I do last time I filled out this form and ...")
For example: Efforts will be made to increase the participation of women and other minorities in monthly workshops by 30%. This goal will be verified by sign-in sheets that ask for gender and (ethnicity, cultural group or whatever concrete statistic defines the goal).
From an operations standpoint the sign-in sheets should be sent to the Main office after every workshop, the results tabulated and reported to the appropriate constituents. At minimum, the board and the sponsoring group should receive feedback on goals on a quarterly basis. This keeps the goals in front of everybody and lets everyone know what progress is being is being towards achieving those goals while there is still time to improve their methods.
The most effective grants I worked with tied achievable goals to monetary rewards. If quarterly goals weren't met, future financial allocations were jeopardized and indeed, in cases of egregious inactivity, programs lost funding mid-fiscal year.
The preceeding goal language was created in a vacuum without consultation with any constituents in the space of approx. one hour and is to be used only as an example.
Organizations tend to use too many words to describe what they are trying to accomplish. Grant language must be straight-forward and easily understood. If the average user/volunteer/staff member doesn't understand the goals at first reading then further refining is of the highest importance
Please let me know if there is anything I can do to be of service.
Regards,
Nora (Norawashere) _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
I wanted to throw in another potential way to measure systemic bias…
I find it interesting to see which international award-winners have Wikipedia profiles (note credit to this idea should go as much to http://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/User:Jayvdb as we were discussing it when I was creating an article about Preecha Siri).
For example, I created the page about Aleta Baun only recently, linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Environmental_Prize
It's interesting to note that with this award: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Heroes_Awards only the husband of the 2011 couple who received the special award has a profile, though his wife was joint recipient.
For anyone seeking new biographies to contribute to, the red links in those two pages could be good places to start :)
Cheers, Cobi
On Oct 24, 2556 BE, at 4:20 PM, Jane Darnell wrote:
Sydney, I love your definition of measurement standards as an "evaluation process that is hearty but not too burdensome for volunteers"! I think the most basic problem that I, Nora, and most people have in comprehending the extent of the gendergap problem is that we tend to assume that there are a few measurements already in place, and there are not. It is very difficult to make estimations that can be used for budgeting and tracking purposes that are not related to hard numbers such as "30%". Our problem is that we don't even have a proper "null-line" where we can say "this is where we are starting from".
Because I tend to edit in a niche corner of Wikipedia projects concerning Dutch painters of the 17th-century, I am familiar with all of the problematic gendergap areas related to this niche. If you look at this category:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Painters_by_nationality
Only 151 categories are listed and fewer countries represented, with most of the entries for those countries with higher internet access rates in the general population. There are lots of painters left to categorize! Within this work-in-progress, user "Ser Amantio di Nicolao" decided to help track women painters by setting up the following subcategory back in February:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_painters_by_nationality
You will see the following subcategories (working down the alphabet, exhaustion for Ser Amantio di Nicolao apparently kicked in at "I" for Italy): American women painters (484 P) Australian women painters (58 P) Austrian women painters (13 P) British women painters (3 C, 118 P) Canadian women painters (84 P) Dutch women painters (59 P) French women painters (94 P) German women painters (8 P) Italian women painters (53 P)
I think it would be great to have an overview of female painters across the world and across centuries, but how can we expand such efforts so that more people contribute and more people become aware of this small effort? I decided to add in the women in my dataset, but it's not a priority for me, and never will be. That said, I only started to add women into this category, because I noticed it was there. You can't just go and create empty categories, nor can you create categories for one or two items, so it's a lot of work to add the categories for other countries. Who is ever going to do this? Is it valuable? Would we ever want to pay for it? Recently we had a "kerfuffle" about women novelists being ghettoized - such categories should not remove painters from their main category, but be a tracking category only.
Coming back to the subject of estimations for work planned, it's always a useful experience to state 10 things on Monday that you are 100% positive you will get done by Saturday (because you already have them planned). Each Saturday revisit the list and score (1) for done and (0) for not done. If you do this each week for 10 weeks, add up your score and be prepared to eat humble pie.
In answer to the question of who decides what goals we need to establish -- well, that answer is "we do!"; and the answer to the question of who decides what estimates we need to make of work we want to do -- same thing.
Nora, your tracking idea sounds great when you say "From an operations standpoint the sign-in sheets should be sent to the Main office after every workshop, the results tabulated and reported to the appropriate constituents. At minimum, the board and the sponsoring group should receive feedback on goals on a quarterly basis." Unfortunately, this will not work in our volunteer context, because no one is going to volunteer to do this tabulation and send the reports. Categories are a great way of showing a snapshot of work-in-progress, but they don't roll up and are not automatically created. Somehow though, this is the type of dashboard that we need, with the extra stipulation that we want a dashboard that doesn't require a lot of volunteer tweaking. That is very hard to achieve on Wikipedia. Hopefully WikiData will become the answer, but any and all suggestions are welcome!
Jane
2013/10/22, Sydney sydney.poore@gmail.com:
Hello Nora,
One of the key roles of the FDC is focusing the Wikimedia movement on developing sound measurable goals that match the mission of the movement, and to then have the organizations use a evaluation process that is hearty but not too burdensome for volunteers who are likely to be heavily involved with projects.
The Wikimedia movement as a whole is in an infancy stage of figuring out how organizations can achieve the right balance between time spend on administrative and bureaucratic activities and the time spent creating content for the various Wikimedia Foundation projects.
In my opinion every organization in the movement, small or large, can benefit from the type of comments that you shared in your email. I encourage you and other interested people to push up your sleeves and help the organizations develop meaningful measurable goals around the topic of the gender gap (or anything else.)
It would be really useful for a group of interested people to review the organization various activities and make suggestions about how goals related to increasing the diversity of the movement can be added.
If you or anyone else is interested, I will help you figure out the best way to accomplish this task. The Wikimedia Foundation had staff dedicated to assisting the movement with the general evaluations of projects and programs. But their numbers are few and the task is large!!! Plus the involvement of volunteers is an important ethos of the movement. So the involvement of volunteers is key to getting this done in a meaningful and timely way.
Regards, Sydney
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 22, 2013, at 13:38, "trueself56 ." trueself54@gmail.com wrote:
I reviewed some of the proposals that have been submitted for funding from the aspects of concrete goals. I have a background in United States Human Service charities as an Operations Manager and database administrator. One of the most challenging activities for an agency is to identify goals in a manner that is meaningful to all constituents and can be tracked. If a goal cannot be defined with an action statement and specific target numbers and the result that proves the target numbers, then the goal language must be modified and/or the result that proves the goal changed. At the time of goal identification the tracking methods should be determined and reviewed for feasibility.
A goal should be so clearly written that anyone who is a member of the organization understands how to collect the data that proves the goal. A common failing is creating goals that sound really impressive but are so vague that the people responsible for doing the work and collecting the data don't know which activity proves the goal and what form or question or whatever, they have to do to get the information back to the Main Office. (And "don't they understand that I am very busy and who reads this, and oh lord, what did I do last time I filled out this form and ...")
For example: Efforts will be made to increase the participation of women and other minorities in monthly workshops by 30%. This goal will be verified by sign-in sheets that ask for gender and (ethnicity, cultural group or whatever concrete statistic defines the goal).
From an operations standpoint the sign-in sheets should be sent to the Main office after every workshop, the results tabulated and reported to the appropriate constituents. At minimum, the board and the sponsoring group should receive feedback on goals on a quarterly basis. This keeps the goals in front of everybody and lets everyone know what progress is being is being towards achieving those goals while there is still time to improve their methods.
The most effective grants I worked with tied achievable goals to monetary rewards. If quarterly goals weren't met, future financial allocations were jeopardized and indeed, in cases of egregious inactivity, programs lost funding mid-fiscal year.
The preceeding goal language was created in a vacuum without consultation with any constituents in the space of approx. one hour and is to be used only as an example.
Organizations tend to use too many words to describe what they are trying to accomplish. Grant language must be straight-forward and easily understood. If the average user/volunteer/staff member doesn't understand the goals at first reading then further refining is of the highest importance
Please let me know if there is anything I can do to be of service.
Regards,
Nora (Norawashere) _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap