Dear Chakravarthy,

Thank you for writing to us.  Ravi has very usefully clarified about the A2K grant. Thank you Ravi.

I am adding a little more context and details to what Ravi has mentioned.

Kindly note that the Wikimedia Foundation approved a grant of ₹26,000,000 to the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore to expand their Access to Knowledge (A2K) program in India; of this, ₹11,000,000 has been released. The purpose of the grant is to enable the A2K team to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand on Wikimedia’s Indic-language free-knowledge projects. This information was shared with the Wikipedia India community by Barry Newstead, ex- Chief Global Development Officer, Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). [1]

The A2K team is supported by a team of five people, who are employees of CIS, and work out of offices in Delhi and Bangalore. The team consists of Vishnu (i.e. me) as the Programme Director, Dr. Pavanaja & Subashish as Programme Officer, Nitika as Programme Manager and we are in the process of recruiting a new person. Dr. Tejaswini Niranajana acts as the Adviser to the A2K programme. The team has sent  timely announcements whenever a new employee has been hired. [2] The team aims to generate improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects, and the wider distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge within India.

As it may happen in most donor-donee relation, our donor organisation WMF in consultation with the A2K decides Program Goals and team deliverables. In addition, WMF is also involved in our quarterly and annual reviews. CIS believes in high transparency with it's donors and the community it serves. Hence the team publishes a newsletter every month including all activities, accomplishments, events that the team has been involved with. These newsletters are regularly updated on our website and are also shared with the Wikipedia community every month via various mailing lists. [3]

Please let us know if you have any further questions and suggestions on the revised budget utilization.

Best regards,
Vishnu

[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2012-July/008446.html

[2] Announcement of Dr. Pavanaja's hire: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2013-March/009602.html
Announcement of Vishnu and Tejaswini's hire: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2013-February/009249.html
Announcement of Subhashi's hire: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-December/006030.html
Announcement of Nitika's hire: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-July/003845.html

[3] http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/newsletter-archives?searchterm=newsletter


On 5/7/2013 5:52 PM, Ravishankar wrote:
Hi Vishnu,

Thanks for your effort towards transparency.

Chakravarthy,

The content in all the Wikimedia projects are created by volunteers. But, all these projects are run and supported by a Non-profit entity called Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). The foundation employs staff to carry out various requirements as a full time job.

Please see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors . Besides this expenditure and the money needed for running servers, WMF also provides grants to various people who work towards its mission.

You can see the list of grants at

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index

The Access 2 Knowledge program is one such program that has received a grant from WMF towards strengthening and growing the Wikimedia movement in India. It is run by professionals who are employed full time (unlike volunteers who contribute in their spare time from their home). So, obviously they will need a budget. The spendings of all the grant will be monitored by WMF.

Please let me know if you need any clarification.

Ravi


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--
T. Vishnu Vardhan
Progarmme Director - Access to Knowledge
Centre for Internet and Society
www.cis-india.org