Hi,

A Wiki workshop/academy was conducted at SSN College of Engineering, Chennai on 11 January. It was organised by SSN opensource enthusiasts under the aegis of the SSN Tamil Club. Me, Srikanth Lakshmanan and Arunmozhi from the Tamizha FOSS group. [1] 60 students attended the academy.

The academy began at 9 in the morning with a presentation of open web and open source from SSN opensource enthusiasts. I followed it up with a intro section on wikipedia and a hands on editing session for about an hour. I covered the basics of wikipedia, notability standards, five pillars, copyright issues. I also covered basics of Wiktionary and Commons.  Next Srikanth took a session on technology behind wikipedia and how the students could contribute technically to Wiki projects. We broke for lunch at 12 and reconvened an hour later.

The afternoon session began with a audio recording exercise, where songs of the Tamil poet Subramania Bharathi  were sung and uploaded to commons.[2] This served as a hands on exercise to identify the common copyright problems and which material can be added to Wiki projects without copyright issues. Public domain, nationalisation, copyright term expiry, threshold of originality, open source file formats etc were discussed. Next Arunmozhi ( a student of a College of Engineering Guindy and a developer of Tamil open source software) took a session on the initiatives of the Tamizha group. After that we went on a photo walk of the SSN campus. We split into two groups and walked around the SSN campus taking pictures. The images were uploaded to Commons. [3]. This served as an oppurtunity to explain copyright issues like freedom of panorama and derivative works. The academy ended with a vote of thanks from the Tamil Club convener.

Over all it was a highly successful exercise (IMO) and a lot of productive work was done. The attendees were highly motivated and asked a lot of pertinent questions which lead to some interesting discussions. They also gave a few interesting suggestions about improving the usability of Wiki pages from newbie perspective (Srikanth has already started work on implementing one of the suggestions).

I would like to thank the organising team (Dwaraka, Harvesh, Jason and others) for doing an excellent job in organising the event , SSN Tamil Mandram for its patronage and Wikimedia India Chapter for its help with swag and printed material (though the quantity was nowhere sufficient :-). Please ramp up the operation guys).

==Links==
[1]http://thamizha.com/
[2]http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tamil_audio_songs
[3]http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SSN_College_of_Engineering

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