Utilisateur:JBouchez/Brouillon/MidTermReportDraft

Welcome to the midpoint report for the project History of Quebec and French-speaking North America.

Summary[modifier | modifier le code]

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

Ahead of schedule regarding our project plan for contribution event.
In accordance with our grant proposal.
Establishment of an effective and easily reproducible methodology for the creation of training and contribution events (new learning pattern).
So far, very good ratings from participants who answered our 2 post training and contribution event surveys.
In a process to propose a diversified training program to maximize our results during the next weeks and months.
Objective of long-term sustainability of our relationships with major partners.

Methods and activities[modifier | modifier le code]

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

For several years, the Fondation Lionel-Groulx (FLG) has been concerned about the low representativeness and the low quality of the articles on the history of Quebec and French North America in the wikimedias. The activities and events organized during the first 6 months of the grant are in line with the approach of the FLG since 2014 and are consequently part of the result of previous experiences. Please visit the sections "Current Projects" and "Past Project" of our dedicated Wikimedia page.

During the first 6 months of the project, we hired JBouchez as a wikimedian in residence, we successfully organized 2 major events in May and August, and we have a training and contribution event scheduled for October 3, 2019 in addition to our 3rd major event in mid-November. Please note that we are ahead of scheduled regarding the organization of training and contribution events. Moreover, in June, we put online 3 dedicated pages regarding the projects of Fondation Lionel-Groulx on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. In August, we trained our first history teacher. Finally, 2 major partners of our first event plan to organize their own training programs with our help, probably at the beginning of 2020.

In order to meet our objectives, several key steps were necessary and a methodology was put in place to facilitate the organization of our training and contribution events and to measure their results.

Hiring of JBouchez as wikimedian in residence (March 14)
Selection of an intern in collaboration with Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ). Isabelle Gareau, Director of communications at FTQ, suggested to lend an intern who could help us organize the first event. On April 4, we met and chose Hamza.Tabaichount, master degree student in history at Université du Québec à Montréal.
Several weeks prior to each event and in collaboration with our partners, publication of a PDF document to publicize our event and encourage registrations.
For each event, creation of a list of relevant articles to improve related to the theme of the training and contribution. Each list is sent to the registered participants. The lists can be seen here for the first majort event, and here for the second event.
During each event, we bring a collection of books relevant for the theme. Thus, participants can exercise and edit articles during the afternoon with books in support.
Creation of the campaign "History of Quebec and French-speaking North America" in the online tool "Programs & Events Dashboard" and creation of a program page for each event in order to monitor data related to the training.
A few days after each event, sending of a survey to collect the comments of the participants and their degree of satisfaction. To generate our surveys, we used Framaform from Framasoft, a free software based online services (please see the poll results for each event in the section below).
At the present time, we are building a diversified training program to wikipedia in order to maximize our results during the next weeks and months.

Midpoint outcomes[modifier | modifier le code]

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

We are on track with our goals and even ahead of scheduled regarding the timing suggested in our proposal. The following paragraphs list the realizations and results achieved so far :

First major event (May 31) in Montreal on the "History of trade unionism in Quebec". The event was organized in collaboration with the 3 major trade union organizations in Quebec and a history and archives center on trade unionism in Quebec, the CHAT. Please read our detailed report of the first event.
Second major event (August 14) in Quebec City on the "History of Quebec City neighborhoods". The event was part of the Rendez-vous d'histoire de Québec, a major gathering during 4 days which, through conferences and talks, aims to contribute to the development of knowledge about the history of Quebec city and its surrounding area. Three organizations were partners for this major training and contribution event. Please read our detailed report of the second event.

As described in the section "Method and activities", a few days after each event, we asked participants to answer a short survey in order to know their degree of satisfaction and their willingness to contribute after their training and contributions. Here are screenshots of the charts from the analysis tool of the free software Framaform. Please not that the questions and the results were in French, but we translated them in English for our event reports and the present midpoint report :

In addition to the results provided by Framaform, we've calculated the mean of the answers for each question and the total mean including all the answers. This provide a global notation for each event.
The notation for the 1st event is 4.16/5
The notation for the 2nd event is 4.27/5

Futhermore, we've collected commentaries from several participants. Please click the links cited above to read commentaries in the section "Post event survey" of our event reports.

The table below presents the results of our 2 major events. The data have been collected from the "Programs and Events Dashboard" tool. Here is the link to visit our dedicated campaign and programs.

Major events	2
Total participants	38
Pages created	11
Pages improved	78
Files uploaded	31
Files in use	31

On August 6, we trained Lucia Ferretti (Lancia Spaghetti), history teacher at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR) who will in turn train her students to contribute to Wikipedia as part of her course HST1094. This project exists as part of the UQTR Picom program, which aims to create educational activities at the university that serve the community, usually for a non-profit organization. Here is the link of the project on Picom's website.
On August 26, we posted a dedicated page presenting the details of our diversified training program to wikipedia. Here is the link to visit the page (in French).

Finances[modifier | modifier le code]

For now, we are a little under the budget regarding the purchases of technical and computer equipment.
We bought 80 t-shirts from Wikimedia Canada with the goal of giving them as a participation prize during 4 major events (about 20 per event). We don't expect other major expenses in this expenditure item.

Learning[modifier | modifier le code]

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges[modifier | modifier le code]

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

One of the biggest challenges is to make sure that the partners in each event do their part in recruiting participants. We did not have big problems on this point, but from time to time we still had to contact some partners who did not promote the event enough. To address this situation, we chose to adapt our strategy. For instance, before the event in Quebec City in August, we decided to create a special visual to post on Facebook and we asked our partners to share it as much as they can. For the next events, a good strategy would be to prepare a basic promotional kit comprising one or two visuals "ready to share" on social media.
Another challenge is keeping active participants after our training and contribution events. So far, we've put in place several strategies to do so : sending emails to invite them to free events of training and contribution such as "Mardi, c'est wiki" and "Jeudi, c'est wiki à Québec" organized by BAnQ, one of our major partners. We also recognize their contributions and encourage them by sending "thank you" notifications. In order to improve our editors retention rate, we plan to put in place several strategic solutions.

What is working well[modifier | modifier le code]

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Since the beginning of the grant, we've been using a method to prepare major events of training and contribution. It allows us to propose a list of relevant articles to improve and it gives participants a way to progress and learn on their own. Please find the link to our new learning pattern : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Learning_patterns/Creating_a_prelist_a_relevant_articles_before_a_training_session

Next steps and opportunities[modifier | modifier le code]

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

Roll out and popularize our diversified training and contribution program in order to reach future partners. The program will ease our capacity to propose distance learning session (with our TV + camera set).
Strengthen our excellent collaboration with major partners. For example, Fédération des travailleurs et des travailleuses du Québec and Centrale des syndicats du Québec (2 major trade unions) want to offer their employees training sessions to Wikipedia all year round. In this case, the Fondation Lionel-Groulx would be a key partner in the long term.
Training at least one more history teacher.
We will make sure to take more photos during the next training and contribution events.

Grantee reflection[modifier | modifier le code]

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?