Hiya,
This is to inform you that Bishakha (WMF Trustee,
in cc) and I had a meeting with the team at the
Akshara Centre (
http://www.aksharacentre.org/),
a Mumbai based NGO that works on womans rights and
runs a library in Mumbai earlier today. The
meeting was organised by Bishakha, who knows some
of the people running the organisation, as there
was some interest from their end to see if they
could collaborate with us in any way. I was asked
to join in as a Wikipedian to conduct a small
workshop for the team at Akshara so that they
could understand the principles and basics of
editing.
The scope is unimaginably big. As we realised,
rights issues in India are not covered much, even
on English Wikipedia. We have proposed starting of
a "Collaboration of the Month" initiative with
them, wherein we will choose a topic where both
Wikipedians involved and the NGO are comfortable
with - using Akshara's library resources as
references. They sounded excited about running
such a COTM on a pilot basis and have suggested we
organise a WikiAcademy for which they will invite
interested persons to come and attend, thus making
it easier for them to start off.
From our end, we are looking for atleast a couple
of Wikipedians who can help support such a project
online on a regular basis - we will be sending out
an email to various lists once things are
formalised.
Inputs on the above are most welcome.
Kind Regards,