 Thank you. And welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar. My name is Crystal Thomas and I'm the Digital Archivist at Florida State University and I'm currently the Chair of the Project Manager's Group Steering Committee. And we're excited today to be hosting Galen Haynes for a presentation about the Smithsonian Transcription Center's Agile Approach to Program and Community Management. This webinar is a part of our series on skill sharing and virtual learning experiences that we started running last year because of the pandemic. Just a little housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions during the presentation, please type them into the Zoom chat and we will bring them up at the end of Caitlin's presentation. I would also like to let everyone know that this webinar will be recorded and uploaded to the DLF YouTube channel afterwards. So without much further ado, I will introduce Caitlin very quickly. Galen Haynes is the Program Coordinator for the Smithsonian Transcription Center where she collaborates with staff around the Smithsonian and worldwide digital volunteers to improve accessibility to the Smithsonian's digitized historic collections. And with that, Caitlin, it's over to you. Hi everybody. Thank you all so much for coming today. And thank you to Crystal and Anu and Gail and everyone who helped coordinate this webinar today and who helps to manage this amazing Project Manager's Working Group. This is so exciting. I am very passionate about Transcription Center and about collaboration and communication. So anytime we get the opportunity to talk about what we're doing and sort of the lessons we've learned while in communication with others in our field so that we can brainstorm how to make that even better is an exciting opportunity that we usually jump at. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen because I do have a few little slides here. So before I kind of dive into the background of Transcription Center and what we do here. In the Smithsonian, I did want to kind of qualify here, clarify and qualify everything and say that I am not a professional Project Manager. I am an Archivist by Training. I have a graduate degree in United States History and Library Science. And I have sort of grown in different ways professionally in various positions in the cultural heritage field and inside the Smithsonian as well. I've been in this position since 2018 here at the Transcription Center. And I don't have any professional Project Manager or program management certification. And the success of Transcription Center which is a long-standing program is largely due to the sort of diverse kinds of different people inside and outside the institution that helped to make it all possible. And a lot of the work that we're doing right now with agile program management was literally sort of started and developed just a few weeks ago which is really exciting. This is really perfectly timed. And everything that we do even though Transcription Center is eight years old is always sort of still in flux. I think that's sort of the nature of programs in the cultural heritage field regardless. I'm sure I hope a lot of you can relate to that or I hope not. You guys can relate to that that you know we're still sort of always figuring things out always learning and then of course the resources and staff and time capacity are sometimes always changing. So this is sort of just meant sort of the ways that we've approached things the sort of challenges and maybe even failures that we've faced in the History of Transcription Center and the ways in which we're trying to do things a little bit differently now. All right so with that I want to go into a little bit of background about the Transcription Center in general. Since I'm not sure how familiar everybody is with TC. Oh this is my beautiful blurry pictures. Sorry guys. So what is the Transcription Center? So created in 2013 the Transcription Center is the institution's largest digital volunteering and crowdsourcing platform. It was developed inside the Smithsonian's Office of the Chief Information Officer which is our OCIO, our IT unit. It is just a website freely available 24 hours a day 365 days a year that connects curious learners everywhere with digitized content from across the Smithsonian's museum departments, libraries and archives and invites digital volunteers in helping us make those materials more searchable, readable and accessible through collaborative transcription and review. Over the past eight years Transcription Center has grown exponentially. So together alongside more than 52,000 digital volunteers to date we've transcribed and reviewed over 800,000 pages of historical materials including diaries, scientific specimen labels, letters, memorabilia, scrapbooks and more from 19 of our different Smithsonian units. In 2019 we became the first federal crowdsourcing project to launch transcription of archival audio recordings and since then our volunteers have captioned more than 200 hours of these collections. We've also transcribed materials in more than 26 different languages. Anonymous users can transcribe on the Transcription Center anything that they would like without registering but registered users which we do require that our registered users be 14 years of age or older are able to transcribe, review other users' work and track their volunteer activity. Unlike other on-site volunteer programs here at the Smithsonian our digital volunteers can participate as much or as little as they'd like with no minimum work requirement on our end and no particular skill set or past experience required to join. Our volunteers rage in age, background and interest and include high school and college students, educators, retired and active librarians, history enthusiasts, scientists, corporations, everything in between. We do know that we have participation from over 150 different universities, colleges and high schools around the world and then like I said we also have participation internally from our user community of colleagues across the institution from those 19 different Smithsonian units and what I mean by that is of course those different departments within all of the various museums across the institution. Our internal transcription center team so the people that are actually working day to day full-time on the transcription center to help and communicate and in with and engage all of these different user communities inside and outside the institution help with technical development and project and program management is of course myself as the program coordinator and then we also have a community coordinator who's full-time and a technical lead developer so three full-time staff members. Transcription center activity ensures that our Smithsonian collections as I said are not only more easily discovered and accessed but it also provides our diverse and dispersed user communities the opportunity to engage with historical content on a personal level which leads to new discoveries and connections. Thanks to our digital volunteers Smithsonian curators have been able to locate specific information to include in exhibits individuals researching their family history including our very own Smithsonian secretary Lottie Bunch have been able to locate specific ancestors in the historical record and archival collection staff have been able to make connections between our records throughout the Smithsonian and with external museums and throughout all of this our volunteers and researchers worldwide have been very communicative about the ways in which participation and transcription center has impacted their lives which of course means the world to us and I think even one of these comments makes all of the work that we do important and meaningful and worth it but of course what I really want to focus on today and I'm sure why all of you actually joined is the ways in which our team has really developed maintained and grown our user communities both inside and outside the Smithsonian and how our approach and strategies for community and overall program and project management has adapted to some of the major changes that we've seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. So what do we do in the very beginning of transcription center in the two in 2013 I'm going to go all the way back. So the development of transcription center inside the office of the chief information officer provided us with a number of sort of strengths and opportunities so the primary focus in the beginning of transcription center was on technical development and support which we know puts us in kind of a unique position because not all crowdsourcing projects or cultural heritage projects have kind of continuous ongoing technical support so that's always been really amazing and a really incredible strength I think of transcription center and because of that because that was integrated from the very beginning it meant that the development of our platform was really seamlessly integrated with a lot of our internal and homegrown Smithsonian databases and content management systems that our archivists and museum collection staff were working with across the institution so it meant that we could easily sort of import that material that digitize content in different ways and it also meant that we can more automatically and seamlessly export those completed transcriptions into our databases to ensure their searchability and accessibility in a way that didn't require any sort of manual labor on the part of the transcriptions in our team or our archivist librarians or museum staff so awesome excellent all the way but because the focus rightly so being in OCIO was primarily on this technical development and support we didn't necessarily from the very beginning prior equally prioritize or kind of estimate appropriately the need for a community management aspect of transcription center this was there wasn't an element in a component of community management that was built into the initial development of the transcription center it was always meant to be a program centered around public engagement but it was also a pilot project in 2013 to see if and even how this would work within the Smithsonian there wasn't a precedent within our institution to inform best practices or provide information about how the public would engage or wouldn't engage and there was sort of a larger kind of guess that yeah okay we need a community manager I think to engage our internal users but in terms of an external community we're going to build this thing we're going to see how it goes and we're going to hope that they're going to come because it's the Smithsonian so we built it and they did come early participation and engagement and sign up on the transcription center site was really high but it was largely based on the novelty and excitement around the Smithsonian brand at large the question of how to keep users engaged and sustain persistent participation and really build a community of public users and volunteers was a little bit more challenging so in 2014 the team brought on our first dedicated project coordinator so one of my predecessors um Megan Ferreter who is of course at the Library of Congress now and she's incredible and transcription center owes a lot of its success to her um so she was tasked specifically with handling this sort of internal and external community management and engagement but in the beginning as I said things were relatively separated in terms of technical development on one side and community engagement and management on the other um Megan quickly realized that volunteers volunteers were transcribing pretty quickly on the site but that interest was declining since the launch of the transcription center and that most users were not completing the necessary second step of the transcription process which is volunteer review so to solve this she continued and increased a sort of combination of everyday and continuous communications and outreach including the creation of a monthly e-newsletter, social media channels, last of information across social media our website and in the newsletters about new projects, staff highlights, volunteer highlights, collection spotlights, etc. blog posts across the institution and then a pre-recorded and live virtual engagements with other Smithsonian staff. She also began working with colleagues across the institution to craft more structured experiences targeted campaigns that dove deeper into particular topics or projects to keep our community members engaged and interested in the kinds of material that we were launching on the transcription center. She's also the one that coined the phrase volunteer as a way to more accurately capture the role of our participants many of you have seen that hashtag on social media that we use to more accurately capture that role as equals and peers in our initiative rather than simple public participants helping us out because our volunteers really are the ones that are helping us learn just as much if not more than we are getting from them in transcribing these collections. This combined approach that she created that we've continued in transcription center up until this day of sort of combining structured outreach efforts and everyday engagement practices that were consistent and constant offered the increasingly diverse community that we were getting of digital volunteers multiple ways to dive into our Smithsonian collections ensuring that we had this continued public interest and participation even as users cycled in and out which is a just the nature of a crowdsourcing activity. Equally important we found was the various avenues of communications between volunteers and our Smithsonian staff so communication with our volunteers we realized really early on was critical to the success of our program not only to gather inform encourage and support participants but to also help us troubleshoot issues on the platform answer transcription questions and acknowledge the importance and impact of volunteer work also of course a key component of that is soliciting feedback from our participants being open and willing to listen to what they have to say about how things are working or maybe not working to improve and inform our own evolving workflows and projects from the simplest change the most complex technical developments the volunteers had to be involved and continue to need to be involved on every level of this because they are the major ones being impacted and their use and experience of course significantly impacts the success of our program overall so like I said in the beginning this is all going really well everybody's doing a great job there's a lot of strengths to it developing an OCIO and they're being a strong focus on technical development and ongoing support and then of course our community manager our first coordinator did a really good job of creating different kinds of strategies and engagement opportunities to sort of craft this and grow and develop and support this new program but that technical aspect and that community management aspect remained relatively separated our community though itself the growth of it remained relatively steady and while large with still for the most part manageable a manageable number and again that growth was steady so it was okay for us to sort of continue to do things in a somewhat separate way from technical and community perspectives but done done done then we face 2020 and and throughout all of this work let me just back up for a second and we did have of course some sort of continuous and consistent sort of challenges and priorities and messaging that we have always maintained throughout the transcription center pre and post pandemic that of course the primary strengths of our program arise from the pen institutional nature of the program and our dedicated communities that our digital volunteers are essential to the mission of the Smithsonian and that they deserve diverse consistent and clear communication engagement but this larger challenge of course that the community itself is ever evolving and continuously growing and that our resources just like any other cultural heritage project and program are limited so then we get into 2020 um all right so like many other digital platforms and crowdsourcing projects transcription center saw a massive uptick in participation engagement during the pandemic between March of 2020 and March of 2021 the number of registered digital volunteers on our site increased from 14,000 a little bit over 14,000 to over 51,000 with participants transcribing and reviewing an astounding an astounding 5,000 pages a month if not more um demand for new projects and content as well as engagement opportunities also of course increased um with Smithsonian staff working together to ensure that new material was being imported and I'm going to have to apologize I don't know if you guys can hear that but it is really storming outside and it is loudly thundering so apologies if you guys can hear the storm um this high level of engagement and attention on the transcription center um primarily stemmed from the fact that we were one of the only digital volunteering platforms here at the Smithsonian and we are the only digital volunteering platform here at the Smithsonian that allows such flexible participation um because of this though sort of all this attention these new users as you can see this giant spike and our numbers continue to grow um this fiscal year um did result in an increased awareness of our program of course not only externally but also within our own institution so media spotlights um public inquiries directed across the Smithsonian about the transcription center and new requests from corporate partners and donors to our institution's central advancement offices um opened up a lot of new opportunities for our team to collaborate with colleagues and participants that we hadn't necessarily been in communication with before we also saw a significant change in the makeup of our volunteer community so prior to the pandemic transcription center is most active and communicative digital volunteers were what we largely classified as self-motivated participants so these were primarily individuals between the ages of 25 and 65 who chose to participate on their own or seek out on their own the transcription center as a way to gain knowledge give back and directly engage with the Smithsonian and our historic collections many of these individuals had an interest or background in history or science or the cultural heritage field some of them were even professional proofreaders amazing um an engagement from sort of more specific or kind of groups of people um like students and educators and even corporate employees um did exist um but occurred on a relatively rare basis almost immediately at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic though transcription center began to see an extremely high increase in inquiries and participation from both of these new groups students and corporations um I mean sort of groups of individuals participating as a team as part of a course as part of an activity um with their organization etc um seeking opportunities to volunteer safely while at homes we saw a huge uptick in those kinds of participants um with such a high uptick in participation and interest of course our small team which at the time was just myself and our technical lead we did not have a second community coordinator at this time um meant that we were getting quickly overwhelmed as you can imagine with um getting almost uh over 30 000 new digital volunteers in just um a few months um we got pretty overwhelmed and it became really apparent that our previous sort of modes of program management or really lack thereof because we were basically doing things on our own individually um was really inadequate it really spotlighted for us the kind of problems um and gaps in our current processes and amplified existing issues and challenges that we had so it really highlighted the need for more strategic planning and strategic program management um and also of course highlighted the need for um um resources as well to improve collaboration and communication within our own team and of course with our various user communities in short it forced us to prioritize and strategize um as the sole community and program coordinator at the transcription center at the time I was faced with as you can imagine thousands of emails and new volunteers um and so I sort of took a step back and worked um to strategically seek out resources and help from various colleagues around the institution so I called upon fellow volunteer coordinators and museum educators to help me draft new guidelines and information for students who were seeking forms for proof of volunteer service which was a huge huge need um when students could not volunteer in other ways um I called upon our participating Smithsonian units in the transcription center to of course step in and identify additional available content to transcribe and also help me answer all of these public inquiries um and then of course I also kind of took advantage of these new opportunities for collaboration and worked with our office of public affairs in the central Smithsonian and our central office of advancement um with press coverage social media engagement and the development of new virtual engagements for students and corporate partners um I also of course had to start working even more closely and communicatively with is that a word communicatively with our technical development team our technical lead um to ensure that our site could handle this huge increase in traffic that we were seeing and brainstorm additional functionality and troubleshooting to improve our user experience and sort of answer new platform issues questions challenges that we were seeing and that our volunteers were bringing to us these collaborations not only helped in the immediate sense of improving our overall team communications and just like making my life a little bit easier but also opened up new avenues for solving some of our biggest challenges um meaning resources and staff capacity because of the new kind of attention and awareness of transcription center around the institution primarily in our central office of advancement we were able to push leadership here in OCIO and across the institution to dedicate more resources to the transcription center and we were able to hire our new team member um Emily Kane our community coordinator who I believe is also in this call um in November of 2020 to assist with the management of our ever-growing community of volunteers we've also worked with our advancement teams to develop corporate engagement opportunities specific to the transcription center that have resulted in new funding to support transcription center initiatives so things like virtual transcribathons um with corporate members um as well as sort of content experts sharing information about our collections on a deeper more personal level we've also of course engaged in more virtual transcribathons like you see here on the screen with students high school and college around the country and the world um we hosted transcribathons pre-pandemic but primarily in person and so that of course limited things to schools in our surrounding DC area by doing them online we're able to not only welcome more people um but have them with a wider um array of our volunteers um and in a way that fits all of our schedules a little bit better we've also found the virtual transcribathons just work better because we can share screens and really kind of get into the documents together in a way where we're not running around the room and trying to like make everybody pay attention to somebody else's computer um so it actually works really well um most recently though literally in the past few weeks we've been able to take a step back and reassess everything about the way that we were approaching program and management in the transcription center um now that we have a new team member and um more support and resources we were able to take a step back and have an actual strategic planning week to address our overall program management our team roles and responsibilities and our goals and priorities um all of this work um and development helped reaffirm the transcription center's overall mission and allowed us to see the true benefit of collaborative and iterative agile project management so before 2020 as I said the community engagement and management aspects of our program and technical development and management of our program were largely separate so we had sort of all of this ongoing work kind of going on on the day-to-day basis and with larger kind of goals and campaigns and initiatives on the community engagement sign and then our technical work was largely structured as kind of one-off tasks and sort of or one-week sprints and more of like a waterfall project management approach and the two didn't necessarily always meet um it was difficult for us to kind of keep track of each other's progress align goals and priorities and hold each other accountable and hold ourselves accountable for what we were really getting done um other some initiatives kind of dragged on with no real ability for our team to follow through now however after bringing together our internal team just the three of us again we've been able to establish new um processes and workflows that prioritize and organize program initiatives and equitably divide up team responsibilities to address our community needs and capitalize on new opportunities um sort of more efficiently and appropriately when they arise so we're now um sort of focusing and tracking all of our programs and tasks under larger ongoing and upcoming campaigns and initiatives that allow for us to sort of adapt as our ever-evolving community changes while still incorporating new feedback and ideas um so one of the ways that we do this is of course to sort of come up with our larger initiatives campaigns and priorities and then group the technical tasks and the community engagement and management tasks that relate to those things under under that larger project or goal or whatever it may be um and then we can more efficiently and effectively track that work inform each other's decisions provide feedback on each other's work and progress and then also of course incorporate those back community feedback that's so essential to actually making our develop technical development and functionality better we also meet weekly with our larger um OCIO team and with just the three of us to go over our weekly status reports track campaign and initiative progress adjust timelines and tasks and check in on our successes and challenges we've also begun documenting and tracking our work collaboratively through platforms like air table and JIRA that create and share content and allow us to capture those new ideas and comment on each other's work this also ensures that we can more easily maintain not only consistent and transparent communication with each other which was definitely needed and we've improved because of it but also with our internal and external communities because we can more easily pull updates information stats and content for the reports that we um put out monthly to our internal user communities and then also that we can use for social media blasts and campaigns for e-newsletters and for website content like blogs etc um so one example of this without completely pulling back the curtain and letting you guys see every little aspect of our dirty laundry here at the transcription center is that one of the biggest things that we noticed with these sort of massive changes to our user community here in the transcription center was that we were getting a lot of direct feedback from users about um sort of confusion with our process and questions about instructions and then we also were beginning to see an uptick in errors and in the accuracy of completed transcriptions because again a lot of the new users we were seeing were high school students or individuals just participating for one event like a corporate engagement transcript was on um that's not to say that these students or these corporate partners were not um super motivated and engaged and dedicated to the work but transcribing 19th century and 18th century handwriting is hard even for those of us who've been doing it for a long time so we started to notice um an uptick in errors and also you know just sort of those little difficulties in navigating this site or getting overwhelmed with instructions were kind of amplified with all of these new users coming on so we decided that this was a problem obviously um that would best be solved not only by making um this idea of addressing new user needs and challenges its own initiative um and prioritizing it in our workflow but also dividing up what are the individual tasks that we need to do that um kind of bring together both the technical and community engagement perspective so this is something that's ongoing right now we're still working on this we've completed some of these tasks we have in others but we have them sketched out in timelines that we can shift as needed um based on feedback from volunteers and testing that we're doing so we are looking at the user experience um that our users are having we are working with um some of our internal units here in the Smithsonian to conduct a volunteer survey that we'll be putting out hopefully in the next few months um we have developed sort of ways to do targeted outreach and engagement a lot of which has been informed by new technical functionality that our lead developer came up with to sort of make us we get um a little message internally in transcription center if participants are completing pages like really really really really quickly um and that way um our community coordinator can sort of directly reach out to users and say like hey is everything going okay um you just reviewed a thousand pages in an hour um and sort of checking in with users more directly um we've also come up with a number of different ways to engage our users in person uh so by launching new virtual engagements like our online office hours which we launched a few months ago and we have those each month um new kinds of collections deep dives and webinars that we've been hosting um we've been sketching out what uh new web content revising our instructions and our processes a lot of which again has been informed by um our internal community who has been continuously providing feedback as well as sort of drawing upon the strengths of some of our longest serving volunteers um and uh who are open and willing to communicate with us um and sort of test things out for us to say like oh like yeah I'd love to read through these new instructions and tell you if they're terrible or wonderful um and they don't hold back which is actually perfect and super super appreciated um in how we are able to actually develop and implement things so this is just one example of how we're sort of grouping this stuff together in a way that we weren't before and we are really kind of sketching that out again in Airtable and Onjira and um sort of making sure that things are on a timeline but are also iterative enough and flexible enough that we can incorporate user feedback when it comes through because oftentimes that is really what is um leading us to the most success in developing these new fill-in-the-blank instructions content engagements etc and so overall we've learned a lot of lessons um some that we knew before the pandemic and of course some that have been more intensely reaffirmed and then of course new lessons with all of these drastic changes that have come about um the first one and I say this a lot and I mean it is that the crowd is in control and that's really a good thing um that if you don't kind of allow I think every successful program the biggest thing that I've learned period is that every successful program needs to have goals it needs to have expectations it needs to have priorities but your goals and your expectations and your priorities and your strategies cannot be so cemented that you don't allow yourself to be flexible and sort of take in the feedback and information that your crowd whatever that may be whether it's your internal community your external community or both is providing you and being aware that they're going to be changing all the time especially in our in our sense our community is changing all the time and if we sort of don't allow ourselves to be flexible to be adaptable and to kind of shift um in response to those changes we might miss out on some really incredible opportunities like corporate engagement that leads to more funding and resources for transcription center um we've also realized of course that success period in anything that we're doing from the smallest task to the largest initiative is not possible without communication collaboration and consistency and I mean that across the board um so I think that pre-pandemic we were really good about communicating with our internal units and with our volunteers but we weren't so great communicating with each other and by kind of taking a step back to reassess that and to refocus efforts um on doing that we have only gotten better um we've also learned of course that um there's a huge difference between maintenance and growth obviously um and you know making sure that we're targeting the right audiences and not necessarily just building a larger one we're really excited about this large community that we have built and that is continuing to rapidly grow but that doesn't necessarily mean that we want to keep growing growing growing growing growing what are we learning from these new sets of users that are coming into the transcription center what are we gaining what are they gaining from this experience and what are the different ways that we can sort of take that information to develop our program further um you know do we want to sort of focus on an aspect of volunteers who we don't see as much in the transcription center that we want to um or do we want to kind of focus attention on a new community group um that is kind of ballooning um that maybe seems to be having more trouble and really being able to take a step back and kind of strategically assess that has really really served us well in this year so um that is my sort of speed review of how we have changed transcription center um in response to some of the massive and drastic changes that we've seen in the past year and how we're sort of still learning um to kind of go with the flow and adapt as needed um to the needs and um evolving nature of our communities so I wanted to make sure okay good um that we still had a ton of time for questions so I will hand everything back um to you Crystal. Thank you so much Caitlin that was so interesting and I'm hopeful that lots of people have questions um so as we uh noted when we got started you can type your questions right into the chat um or I believe yep gals put the message out you can just unmute yourself and ask your question directly to Kate and while people are thinking oh is there someone? No pressure guys you can also reach out to us anytime um this email transcribe at si.edu come straight to me and our community coordinator Emily um so please don't hesitate to reach out we're always happy to share sort of more about the nuts and bolts of any aspect of transcription center um so yeah please don't be afraid. I have a question that maybe we'll get people going or give people time to think um you said something in the beginning that I think really resonates with lots of people that get involved with the project managers group and that is that we don't have training at being project or product managers that's often just something we get thrown into um as part of our jobs so a question I had for you because we get asked this a lot is how did you go about educating yourself and figuring out what pieces are are useful to you what what type of style is useful um to you and uh yeah let's start there absolutely um yeah I mean that's something that we've struggled with obviously and I think a lot of my own personal kind of challenge with all of this um is just finding the time even to stop for a second you know you're sort of I always say like I'm keeping so many burning plates in the air that I don't have time to like even breathe um or get any sort of training or educate myself on anything else and but I think one thing that is um unique about our situation is that we do work really closely with um uh the contracting company that um employees a lot of our staff a lot of our team and our technical developers here in the Smithsonian and and unlike us in the cultural heritage field a lot of them are professional project managers and program managers and um so as we've been able to finally take the time to step back um our internal three person team has really taken advantage of that and gone to some of these co-workers inside and outside the Smithsonian and been like show us how you do what you do and like can we brainstorm some strategies and you know how do we learn what any of this is and so it's really to the credit of a lot of those individuals who sort of laid out for us like hey you know what isn't useful um approaching community management as like waterfall project management and doing like one-off tasks like that's not useful maybe you guys should think about just like ongoing like iterative approach to your work and we were like oh my god wait what and so as soon as you know we were sort of dropped that kind of lovely idea um that's when myself and my colleague Emily were really able to um just honestly spend a massive amount of time googling and watching like LinkedIn learning and YouTube courses on what kinds of platforms are available to help you document these kinds of workflows and what sorts of workflows do work best for agile project management and how can we track this stuff better and then getting together as an internal team to brainstorm these ideas and these things that we're learning and figuring out what is actually going to work the best for our team um and not only from like the actual implementation standpoint but actually for like what's realistic you know like I think we all get excited about documentation and platforms and um how we're gonna like make everything work with a new workflow but then you actually get into it and you're like I actually don't have time to be like putting this into a new spreadsheet every day um so really sort of figuring that out together and that's where I feel really strongly that like meetings are not a bad thing we all have zoom fatigue um and we're all exhausted and there's never enough hours in the day and I know particularly in the cultural heritage field where I'll ask to do 15 different jobs um and it can be exhausting and we can burn out um and I think because of that we have the tendency to be like no we're not going to schedule another meeting but I think it's not about scheduling more meetings it's about scheduling the right meetings and it's about being strategic about what those meetings are and setting agendas and setting a goal for those meetings and so we found that actually communicating more often and meeting on a more consistent basis as an internal team has really really helped us to not only educate ourselves on what some of these strategies are when it comes to program and project management but to also actually do the work of implementing them and making it happen and making sure that at every step of this process we're checking in with each other um to make sure that we're dividing this work up equitably that we're hearing each other's thoughts and opinions that we're incorporating all of our feedback and our community's feedback um and that we're prioritizing the right kinds of work in the right kinds of ways instead of just trying to do everything that helps a little bit it sounds like all good things we do have a question in the chat um what do you think will change as we all emerge from the pandemic and the work personal situations involved for example do you think you will still have such large numbers of participants in the future yeah that's a great question and it's one thing that we've been talking a lot about internally not only in the transcriptions on our team but across the Smithsonian and we have already started to see our numbers I don't want to say decline but not be as massive every day or every week or every month um our numbers are still increasing every day and every week and every month but you know we're having like a couple hundred new volunteers a week instead of a couple thousand um so we're already starting to see a little bit of a shift I think part of that though is the season so students are not necessarily in class right now um and people are taking time off for holidays um I think overall though the feedback that we have gotten directly from volunteers and from our internal colleagues across the institution primarily our advancement teams who are still getting requests from corporations to do virtual engagements is that you know even if everything tomorrow turns completely back to the way it was pre-pandemic people are still interested in doing this you know they've realized oh I didn't know that was a thing or I knew that was a thing but I didn't know it could work so well or be so enjoyable and so we're still getting these kinds of requests on an individual basis and on like larger organization basis um and I think that that's been really useful for us to see we feel the same way though too like you know we originally thought like when we transitioned to virtual transcribathons that as soon as this was over we would go back to in-person transcribathons and I can tell you right now I don't necessarily see that that's useful um because with a virtual transcribathon you know we can have 400 people on a zoom call and it's not something we have to figure out the space for um or rearrange chairs and we can engage with the materials in a more intimate um kind of close looking way than we were able to in person so I I think that we're gonna see not necessarily the same spike but I do believe that we're gonna see continued engagement and participation and interest. Great um the next question is do you have data on how many people are engaging with the transcription center projects using their tablets and phones? Yeah um yes it's very little um it's very little part of that is um transcription center does work on a tablet or a phone um but we actually really discourage people from doing that just because you can transcribe on your phone but it's like a lot harder um and so we really discourage people from doing that we do know a lot of people do use their tablets though um but it it is not that many it is something we have been thinking about um kind of looking into more deeply though so we have kind of like overall data but we don't have a lot of those like sort of intricate details about user experience um or interest in um mobile engagement with transcription center um and most people don't ask for that um most people if they are going to be looking at our collections on their phone um or on their tablet they're going to be going to some of our other databases they're not going to transcribe if that makes sense but it's definitely something that we'd like to look into further. Next question is could you please say more about how you interact directly with volunteers about their work in cases where you've contacted them as opposed to responding to inquiries from them do you find they are receptive to that contact curious about what you find to be successful? Yeah um I don't Emily can continue to keep herself muted and her camera off if she wants because I don't want to put her on the spot here um but a lot of our development of targeted outreach um like I was talking about before and communications with our volunteers who we notice might be having some challenges or um maybe are struggling with transcribing her accurately that we are directly reaching out to all of that was developed and implemented by our community coordinator Emily Kane and she has done an incredible job of researching some of the new user errors that we're doing and um I think has done a much more effective and seamless and um maybe patient job than I would have so I would love to sort of hear her response to that question. Hey everybody uh wonderful talk Caitlin nice word um nice to see all of you I would say that we definitely have cases where people are not receptive to us contacting them right um especially in uh and I start with that not because that is um the more common response it's not but it does happen um I think especially with a program like ours where people are able to transcribe um at their leisure on their own time in their own space it can be a very sort of independent isolated activity if you want it to be we do have members of our community who uh who don't come to the project in order to be engaged in a community right and so that's something that we try to be very mindful of that everybody has their own preferences and we're only reaching out to people directly whenever we feel like um it's incredibly uh when we feel like it's gotten to that point where we either need to have a conversation and improve the work or we need to discontinue the relationship probably um but in most cases and I think you know in every case your approach is the key here um I spent a lot of time writing out a form template at a time that I wasn't feeling frustrated um and was able to just kind of take a really kind of gentle approach of kind of redirecting people and saying hey I noticed that this was happening so I'm reaching out with some helpful tips so that we can all kind of develop these skills together um and I spent a lot of time writing a template email that sounds kind of like that um as opposed to sort of scolding people uh because it is really important that we maintain a welcoming environment where people can learn together and that we acknowledge that this work is hard and that if you're coming to it from a place um you know that this this may be the only way that people have sort of engaged on this level with museum and archival materials before right and so we want to encourage that sort of behavior by being really um kind of gentle and encouraging and in the vast majority of cases people are really receptive to that and um and you know kind of say thank you for all of those tips and then we notice a change in their behavior. Did anyone have any other questions? You can either type in the chat or unmute yourselves. I will also say too just to follow up on what Emily said um reaching out as well like that also gives us the opportunity to check in and be like what are your thoughts and many times not only are a lot of these volunteers really receptive to hearing these helpful tips but are very communicative as well back to us and saying oh my god yeah uh this was just really confusing that like I thought this button meant that and it really meant this other thing and I didn't realize and that's really eye-opening and helpful for us um to then again incorporate back into the sort of updates and edits that we're doing to our instructions and our content um making our making the buttons more clear you know things that we hadn't thought about because we get we're so deeply entrenched in this right it's sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees and so reaching out to a lot of these volunteers sort of spotlights um spotlights that for us sometimes so that's really useful. Not seeing any further questions and I want to be mindful of time so thank you again Kaylin and Emily Kane for popping in there um for the great presentation I would also like to see this opportunity to thank Gal um the program associate for DLF for setting up the Zoom link and making sure the event ran successfully and um also helped us with the recording and I want to thank you all for uh joining this session uh please feel free to contact the project managers group via Artless Serve if you have any questions or if watching this has inspired you and you want to share work that you are doing in the project management fields um we're always looking for other people to to host with talks like this and then I will also just plug um the project manager group right now is looking for its next cohort for our mentoring program so if you are interested in being a mentor that call actually closes at the end of the day tomorrow and then we will next send out the call for mentees starting next week so hopefully some of you will also be interested in participating in that and all of those details have gone out to the listserv but I will pop into the chat the form to sign up to be a mentor and then the mentee information will go out next week um but I'm just seeing lots of thanks this was great everyone was really interested so thank you again Kailah and it was super interesting um and with that I will let you all go off into your days thank you all so much this was great