Forwarding this along in relation to the original post I made in terms of ideas and if anyone is interested in working on this or has other ideas. :)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com Date: Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 1:28 PM Subject: Re: [wmau:members] Grant to improve the lift of women in the ACT To: "Ms. Anne Frazer" members@wikimedia.org.au Cc: Leigh Blackall leighblackall@gmail.com
On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 12:44 PM, Ms. Anne Frazer wrote:
** This is good news. And of course this is an excellent opportunity to avail ourselves of funding that is on offer to promote female participation - as an unshackled open approach to sharing knowledge. We shouldn't need to incarcerate women's thinking into any one particular pathway or content. That the grants emanate from ACT is indeed a good opportunity to advantage our northern sisters and brothers. Your idea needs a commitment from a group of women and men reading this (or who know someone who might like to help) and to begin by coordinating it through one volunteer who would like to get this up and running. Anne
I was trying to think of things that could be done to generally meet this grant and work with existing goals. My initial thought was some scanning related project related to women's rights in Australia and possibly working with the National Library and contacts there to do that. I just don't know if that could be argued as a way to help improve the lives of local women.
My next thought was we could try to work with an international student department at either the University of Canberra, Australian National University, CIT or ADFA to develop a textbook aimed at female international and aboriginal students who move to the territory to attend university. The purpose of the textbook would be to provide a female specific guide for issues upon arrival, things like visas, getting care specific to being female, how to be safe in the city, how to socialise, customs that may be different than other countries, The book could possibly be developed in multiple languages, by trying to find bilingual female students who could write a version for their native language.
This could be done on something like wikibooks. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Auxiliares_de_Conversaci%C3%B3n,_Language_and_C... to be some what similar in terms of scope. Ask for something like $3,000 to $5,000 with $1,000 for printing costs, $2,000 for staff training and incentives to contribute to the development of the book, $2,000 for recruiting local female international students to contribute and incentivise them to contribute.
If something like that could be done successfully, then it could be done a as a model for other universities around Australia. It would also help with some of goals as they pertain to LangCom with developing materials in other languages.
It just isn't something I would be peachy keen to do on my own.