[Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: [WMF Staff] Announcing Hisham Mundol as consultant for National Programs, India
Jay Walsh
jwalsh at wikimedia.org
Tue Feb 15 18:06:25 UTC 2011
Barry - can you send this to:
wikimediaannounce-l at lists.wikimedia.org
As well? I'll approve it right away.
Begin forwarded message:
> From: Barry Newstead <bnewstead at wikimedia.org>
> Date: February 15, 2011 9:01:50 AM PST
> To: WMF Staff <staff at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Cc: hisham <hisham.mundol at gmail.com>
> Subject: [WMF Staff] Announcing Hisham Mundol as consultant for National Programs, India
> Reply-To: WMF Staff Mailing List <staff at lists.wikimedia.org>
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> 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.
>
>
> [1] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Role_of_the_WMF
> [2] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-August/000850.html
> --
> Barry Newstead
> Chief Global Development Officer
> Wikimedia Foundation
> Tel: +1-415-839-6885 x. 6634
> Skype: barry.wikimedia
> Twitter: @bazanews
> _______________________________________________
> Staff mailing list
> Staff at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/staff
--
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org
blog.wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609, @jansonw
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