Welcome Hisham
It is great to have you on board.
Mani
Mani Pande, PhD
Global Development Research
The Wikimedia Foundation
Twitter: manipande
Skype: manipande
On 2/15/11 10:36 AM, Hisham Mundol wrote:
Dear All
Thank you for the welcome.
I'm tremendously motivated by this assignment. Wikimedia's mission is
both noble and inspiring. I can't imagine a more exciting time and
place to be in.
There's been a huge amount that's already been achieved in India by
the community - and I am eager to learn from the community how this
was done. I also know that there's incredible opportunity to make
even more rapid strides, and I look forward to working with the
community for this.
Warm Regards,
hisham
On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 10:40 PM, Barry Newstead
<bnewstead(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:bnewstead@wikimedia.org>> wrote:
Dear colleagues, (please feel free to cross-post this to local
lists within India)
I am pleased to announce the appointment of Hisham Mundol as a
consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation to support us in our
program initiatives in India.
As you know, the Wikimedia Foundation declared India to be a
strategic priority during the strategic planning process [1]. I
announced our plans for the formation of an office in August 2010
and the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved the
creation of the Wikimedia India chapter in June 2010. India is a
priority for the Wikimedia movement as it has a strong and growing
community of Wikimedians building the Indic and English language
projects. It is a country where the Wikimedia movement can achieve
our mission and learn important lessons for achieving impact
elsewhere. The engagement of Hisham will enable the Wikimedia
Foundation to pilot new initiatives aimed at accelerating the
growth of the community in India. I am very happy we’ve now
reached this point.
As I have mentioned in the past, we have a lot of momentum in
India but we have a long way to go to achieve our full potential
as a movement. Indians represent 4% of the world’s Internet users
today (and this share is growing), yet they only represent 1.5% of
page edits on Wikipedia. We should be able to rapidly increase
this share - across all projects - and expand readership in a
corresponding fashion.
Hisham’s title will be Consultant, India National Programs. He
will report to me. His role will be to design and implement
specific pilot programs that encourage many more Indians to become
contributors to our projects in Indic languages as well as
English. The National Programs initiative will focus on the
following areas in the first year:
*
Design and implement an India-wide program to increase
Wikimedia’s footprint on university and college campuses
with students and faculty with the aim of encouraging
contributions to Wikimedia projects
*
Support the launch and implementation of community-initiated
programs that seek to increase the editor base for Wikimedia
projects
*
Engage with the community and chapter to build a strong
relationship among these stakeholder groups and create
communications forums that allow for effective partnerships
As a newcomer to the Wikimedia movement, Hisham’s first task will
be to deepen his understanding of us: our history, goals, values,
culture and mission. To that end, he will be spending the coming
weeks (not months!) in learning mode: Hisham and I will be meeting
with community members in Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore on Feb 23-25
and then Hisham will join community meetings across the country as
they occur. Hisham will also spend time in San Francisco with the
staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as with other
like-minded individuals and organizations and he will attend the
chapter conference in Berlin.
Hisham will be creating a workspace on strategy wiki where he will
share what he is learning and develop the core elements of the
action plan going forward. We encourage active community
engagement on this wiki. We aim to move to action quickly and
welcome input and guidance from across the community.
Hisham was most recently a consultant with the Public Health
Foundation of India (in a partnership with the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation). He designed and implemented large-scale
national programs on HIV/AIDS prevention. He worked to understand
the dynamics of hard-to-reach communities by conducting in-depth,
on-the-ground analysis (ask him to tell you about his experience
talking to drivers while sitting under their trucks). The
programs he designed and implemented sought to convince people in
large numbers - 400 million young people across the nation - to
change very personal behaviours. While we are not tackling issues
of such an intimate nature, we do aim to convince large numbers of
people across the country to contribute their personal time to
Wikimedia projects. During this assignment, Hisham worked closely
with public, private and community groups (local and
international) to work through the details of the programs and
build partnerships for implementing them at scale. He did so in a
manner that used persuasion rather than power to build support to
move things forward. We think his experience navigating these
varied groups position him well to work in the Wikimedia
community. His earlier career was in marketing and business
development with a number of well-known businesses: Infosys,
Accenture, Cadbury and Unilever. This experience positions him
well to engage with a movement and organization that is global in
nature, in particular to work with a team that is based halfway
around the world.
We have scheduled an IRC chat with Hisham and myself for Thursday,
February 17 at 22:00 India Standard Time (16:30 UTC).
I want to thank everyone who helped in the selection process that
identified Hisham. It was a five month process in which we made an
open call for consultants (using my visit in September to drum up
interest via conversations with the community and the media) in
India and around the world. We had 197 applicants from a wide
range of professional backgrounds. Egon Zehnder’s India office,
part of a leading global executive search firm, helped screen
candidates and manage the process. Egon Zehnder conducted indepth
interviews with 25 candidates based on the inputs from Bishakha
and I who helped shortlist. I interviewed 12 candidates via Skype
in the first round and then I had the help of Bishakha Datta and
Achal Prabhala to interview the top seven in person in Bangalore.
Our top two candidates met with Sue and Erik in Delhi and then
Hisham met with the entire WMF leadership team and a broad group
of staff members in San Francisco.
We are very happy with the selection of Hisham. We recognize that
we did not manage to hire someone from inside the Wikimedia
community or the open source community. We did look for people
with this background and one of our finalists was a long time open
source advocate. We also engaged with a long time Wikimedian for a
role, though he ultimately decided to withdraw for personal
reasons. We are committed to seeing Hisham integrate himself into
the community quickly and to seeing him add people to his team
from the community. We hope that the community will engage
actively with him to bring him into the fold. Hisham will most
definitely bring fresh perspectives to the movement that will help
us grow and change for the better.
Please join me in welcoming Hisham to the Wikimedia movement.
Note: An FAQ will follow shortly.
Best,
Barry
[1]
_http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Role_of_the_WMF_
[2]
_http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-August/000850.h…
--
Barry Newstead
Chief Global Development Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
Tel: +1-415-839-6885 x. 6634
Skype: barry.wikimedia
Twitter: @bazanews
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