Our year 2021 in review
2021-12-29 | @andrea
What a busy year it was!
We started it with just three language versions – now there's ten of them, with even more being at various stages of preparation. We started with a humble 3,6k weekly visits from 2,6k unique visitors – last week it was 223k visits from 144k unique visitors! That's over 50x increase! 🤯 At the moment we host 277k cards created by 335k registered accounts (in January we'll start removing those that don't have a card and just hoard the username).
We added plenty of new features: the Queer Calendar, along with its Mastodon and Twitter bots, the Glossary of Queer Terminology, the Dictionary of Inclusive Language (only in Polish for now), new login and security options, and tons of smaller features, improvements, optimisations and bug fixes. We pushed 1876 commits to our repository!
Most of our efforts are focused on the Polish version, where it's more about establishing and promoting nonbinary and gender-inclusive in the first place, rather than just hosting cards. In February, we conducted the first census of Polish nonbinary language and got whooping 2211 responses! We used the results, along with opinions of experts, to prepare our Manifest with which we're taking a more active role in shaping the language by trying to help Polish enbies pick their pronouns despite their language not having any normative, “default” neutral option. We've also collected submissions to a zine about discovering one's gender identity and living as a nonbinary person. Our efforts to popularise nonbinary forms seem to be working – the number of books, tv shows, games etc. that use them and that we managed to find grew from mere 20 in 2019, to 78 in 2020, to 133 in 2021! Our team was invited to various media outlets 14 times, and was mentioned in the media at least 36 times, including being made fun of by the government-controlled right-wing TV station 😉 We also consulted on multiple academic papers and on the Polish translation of Mark Gevisser's book The Pink Line.
Among all the terrible things happening in the world, at least for our humble project it was a great year. And we wish all our queer siblings that the coming one brings them plenty of happiness, joy, acceptance, inclusivity and equality ❤️