cross posting to Offline & Wikimedia-India.
Hi
I'm working on the Wikimedia Foundation's initiatives in India and I'm reaching out for help on a really exciting opportunity. Assam is a state in the North-East of India. The Government has an interesting scheme to give laptops to deserving students leaving secondary school (i.e., completed 10 years of education and about 15-16 year olds.) This scheme is being managed by an organisation called Amtron - who have issued a Tender for the procurement of these laptops.
There are 19,000 laptops that will be distributed in this initiative. (These are on Ubuntu Linux - and very reasonably configured.)
Assam has traditionally had a problem with infrastructure and Internet access is a problem. Someone who is supporting Amtron has asked the Foundation if we can give them an offline version of Wikipedia to pre-load onto these computers. Given that it is for 15-16 age group, it does need to be of appropriate content. They'd like it to have topics of academic interest covered (e.g., classical sciences, humanities, literature and accountancy.) Ideally we'd like them to also have articles on India (e.g. history, geography, culture, etc.) as well as other areas of general interest (e.g., music, sports, etc.) Currently, everything is required in English only.
While these laptops aren't going to necessarily be in classrooms, given that they will be with some students, it's safe to assume that other students, friends and relatives would access these. Given the context of Assam, I thank we can easily assume that 10 people would access these computers. That adds up to improving access for nearly 2,00,000 people! I'm really inspired by the potential of this partnership because because it allows us huge scale with efficiency in effort.
I understand that Wikipedia for Schools is readying for release sometime in July 2011 - and the timing couldn't be better.
Can you help us out with
a) how you could help on adding the additional articles that this initiative would require? (You could also sign up on the Volunteer Page)
b) how fast this can be given to Amtron? (They are looking for the inputs in July 2011.)
c) any other ideas that you think might be useful?
Many thanks.
Best,
Hisham Mundol
Wikimedia India Programs
skype : hisham.wikimedia
gtalk : hmundol(a)wikimedia.org
twitter : @mundol