Some of you know me, but for those of you who don't, let me introduce myself briefly: I am a program officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and work in the Community Resources (formerly called Grantmaking) team. While I handled grants in the past, I am now working on capacity-building activities with emerging communities, in a program called Community Capacity Development[1] (CCD, [[m:CCD]]), one aspect of which -- the Community Capacity Map[2] (CCM, [[m:CCM]]) -- you may have run across on the Wikimedia-l in the past few weeks. I write today to ask whether your community would be interested in discussing a possible visit to Sub-Saharan Africa by me, with several related goals in each country I'd visit, including: * a strategy/planning workshop with the group of active contributors. This would build on any existing plans or strategy you have, and also integrate thinking about the broad goals identified in the movement strategy project's phase 1 (presented at Wikimania in Montreal in August 2017.) * Meetings with important existing/prospective partners (if deemed helpful) * Public speaking (if deemed helpful) * capacity-building workshops for your community members, on topics such as (I'll need your help in determining which of these would be useful): ** Free licenses, non-free licenses, copyright, and OTRS (or: How to contribute to the Wikimedia Commons) ** Composing encyclopedic prose from a neutral point of view (NPOV) ** Negotiating notability and reliability requirements on Wikipedia ** Conflict management for Wikipedians ** Group facilitation skills ** Introduction to Wikidata ** Querying Wikidata with SPARQL ** Modern tools demonstration ** How to build a partnership ** etc. Some logistical details: *If I come, it would be after the Wikimedia Conference and before Wikimania, i.e. between late April and early July. * If I come, I would probably stay in Africa for between two and three weeks total, to have enough time for the above in several countries, and to accommodate your needs and availability. * I will have a budget for some domestic travel, to bring key volunteers together * No expenses are expected from your group's budget. Only your time and cooperation. Please take some time to discuss this idea and let me know if your community is sufficiently interested that we should discuss it further, over email or a video call. If you feel this would not be very helpful, or you really can't accommodate any additional activities before July this year, *please* don't feel obligated to respond. I am genuinely interested in helping, and there are other communities I could be supporting with this budget and time, so I won't be offended or upset, promise! :) I look forward to hearing from you. Asaf [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CCD [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CCM