Hey everyone,
Hope the month of July is going well! We have some updates for you. We’ve
been holding Office Hours for the past 11 months, and have engaged with
more than 40 Wikimedians during that time. We’ve enjoyed chatting about
topics ranging from the usefulness of Wikiversity to how best to support
students who edit on mobile phones. Though Office Hours have been
reasonably well attended, we’ve noticed that it may be more useful to
slightly restructure this time. From July, we’ll be hosting only one open
Office Hours event, while experimenting with a way to deep dive with
individuals who need more 1:1 consulting.
While the monthly Office Hours event will remain the same, we are excited
to introduce Office Space. Our goal for Office Space is to provide 1:1
consultation to Wikimedians involved in education activities. As a result
of Office Space, we hope individuals and groups interested in Wikimedia in
education will have better capacity to make their initiatives strong,
results oriented and scalable.
Office Hours will be an open platform for The Wikimedia Foundation
Education Team to hear from the community, share what we’re doing and
answer questions in an open forum where we can learn from each other. The
platform provides an opportunity to share your work with others and learn
from them, get updates from activities happening around the movement and
look for opportunities to collaborate.
Office Space will be a platform where you can schedule a 1:1 consultation
with one or more members of the education team. We’re setting aside 4.5
hours of team time a month for ½ hour or 1 hour consultations. This will
help you get answers to specific questions, and tap into the various
expertise of the Wikimedia Foundation Education Team. We will start
hostingOffice Space events from the month of August. We will triage
incoming requests based on when they were received, and the nature of the
request. We hope that through this mechanism our support to the community
is fair and productive.
From August, the Education Team will host one Office
Hours and one Office
Space each month for the Wikimedians involved in education
activities or
are interested in them. We will be announcing Office Hours events on
the Wikimedia
Space <https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/tags/c/events/education> and will
update the Office Hours events and the minutes of meeting there.
You can sign up for a 1:1 Office Space consultation for August! Just fill
out the form here:
http://bit.ly/2xHwwOz
Do you have queries related to this? Feel free to reach out to me via email
or start a discussion here :
https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/tags/c/other/education :)
Best!
--
*Sailesh Patnaik*
Communications and Wikimedia Outreach Contractor