hi Nitika,
A parameter to consider while trying to measure effectiveness of an
outreach session is the time constraints of the person doing the
outreach. If working folks are involved, it would be difficult to get
this sort of feedback. Things get easier, though, when size of the
group with which outreach is done is less than 5. Perhaps doing
micro-outreach and relying on a domino effect would be more effective
in measuring effectiveness of outreach. Just a theory.
Also, for the aforementioned working force, a single page outreach
cheat sheet would be awesome.
I'd also push for more advanced editing workshops to encourage the
next generation of admins. I'd also push for a few more tech workshops
per year.
Pradeep
Handheld
On 12/01/2012, Nitika <ntandon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi everyone,
I wanted to share with you all few things that I'm currently working on and
I'd love to get your ideas, thoughts, suggestions, questions and most
importantly approvals.
Supporting Outreach
I started working on this sometime in December by talking to some community
members and understanding how they have been conducting outreach session,
what they think about outreach, how can we make it more effective etc etc. I
got varied comments with some talking positively about outreach while some
thought that outreach was not helpful. Im in the process of collating all
comments & suggestions I got during my conversations with community members
and including them with some of my own views as to how can we make outreach
sessions more effective. This includes building presentations, brochures,
FAQs, tips, ideas on how can we provide the appropriate kind of training on
Wikipedia, how can we make sessions more fun for the participants, how can
we follow up with the participants, how can we measure the effectiveness of
these sessions etc.
The objective is to build a handbook that is inclusive of all ideas and
standardized documents that one could use to conduct outreach session
anywhere in India. We want to facilitate community members efforts wanting
to conduct wiki workshops and motivate others to conduct similar sessions.
Initially, these documents will be in English - but can be translated to
Indic languages subsequently. I'd want to work closely with the Chapter to
conduct WIki Academies with other community members to conduct these
workshops.
Here is the link to the
handbook:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Progra….
Ashwin, Naveen, Srikanth L, Srikanth R, Suyog, Pradeep, Subhashish have
contributed to this document by giving me ideas or helping me build
standardized documents. I'd like really like to thank each one of them to
help me work on this handbook and make it what it is today. I'd encourage
all of you to please feel free to edit, expand, improve and suggest.
Testing Outreach
I want to test wether all the ideas such as what kind of pre-work an
outreach needs, repository of documents, follow up ideas, and all the other
suggestions that are collated in this Outreach Handbook are effective or
not. The best way of testing this would be conducting outreach programs
following these suggestions and measuring their effectiveness. I have
reached out to several institutes in Delhi with the idea of conducting Wiki
sessions at their institutes. To name a few: I have written to 9 different
department heads at IIT Delhi including biochemical, management science,
civil, chemistry engineering departments, National Institute of Fashion
Technology, St.Stevens College, Lady Shir Ram College, Netaji Subhash
Institute of Technology etc. I have already heard positively from some
institutes and I'll keep you updated as and when things become a little
clearer.
Even if we're able to conduct 4 of these sessions in Delhi over the next
month it will give us a good testing ground for this Outreach Handbook. The
idea is to measure results of these 4 sessions in terms of no. of total
participants, no. of participants who created usernames, no. of participants
who started editing, keeping in touch with the participants over a period of
time and evaluating no. of participants who continued editing over a period
of 3 months - measure and share this data with you all.
Since the community size is small in Delhi, I plan to conduct these
sessions with the help of Shiju, Subha and any interested local community
members. I request any other local community members who are interested to
let me know if they can join in these outreach sessions. (I have already
started reaching out individually to as many as are listed on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Delhi_Wikipedians on their talk
pages to invite them to the planned meet up in Delhi on Jan 15th.
With regards to outside Delhi, I am realising that it does take time and
effort to identify potential places to do outreach - and this is one reason
some community members do not do outreach. I would love to help out other
cities as well, and I am going to approach local communities in Mumbai,
Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkatta and Pune in this regard.
Institutional Partnership
One of the other things I'm currently working on is how to build
partnerships with like-minded organisation. For this - and with Noopur's
help - I am exploring how to partner with SPIC MACAY (
www.spicmacay.com).
The main objective of this organisation is to preserve and promote Indian
classical music, dance and cultural heritage. SPIC MACAY is also a volunteer
based organization with chapters spread all over the country and some in
other foreign countries as well. They conduct events where they have
prominent Indian classical artists (vocalists, instrument players, dancers
etc) perform, they conduct heritage walks to old monuments like Galib ka
Ghar etc, they have a resource center where they have a lot of information
about Indian artists, videos/pictures clicked by volunteers, they also have
a weekly newsletter etc. To summarize, they have gold pot of information
about Indian classical musicians, instruments, dancers which can contribute
to Wikipedia articles in a big way and increasing more Indian content.
Thanks for all your help on this one, Noopur. Fingers crossed!
I see two potential ways of working with them one would be to organize wiki
workshop for their volunteers and they can start contributing to Wiki
projects and become independent contributors. The other could be that they
can provide us with all their resources and Wikipedia volunteers can take
over collaborative editing to write articles on these topics. We're just
doing preliminary discussions with SPIC MACAY as for now. I'm planning to
meet with SPIC MACAY volunteers again sometime soon. Here is the
presentation that I'll be using:
https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/present/edit?id=0AdsrCZ_fInBPZGhueG….
Im sharing this presentation so that you can give me your feedback on this
as well as if you'd like to use/reuse it to reach out to similar institutes
in your cities.
Wikipedia 11 Years Celebrations
We are organizing a Wikimedia Commons workshop for a photography club named
Tassavurrati in Delhi on the day of Wiki 11th Anniversary. The club members
travel through the length and breadth of India and are very passionate to
contribute to Wiki projects. The idea is to brief all the participants about
Wikimedia Commons, how to upload pictures and a bit about licensing. Noopur
is also helping us organise this session. And maybe as a follow up we can
conduct Wikipedia takes Delhi with these set of participants. Post this
session we've organised a meet up in Delhi where these club members are also
invited to join us. Here is a link to the event:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Commons_Workshop_Tassavurrati
I would love to know what you think of all the above work. It's really
essential for me to hear each one of your opinions to make sure that Im
serving you all in the most effective and useful manner.
Waiting for your comments and inputs. :-)
Thanks
Nitika