Dear Indic wikimedians,

Thank you very much for the welcome messages and for making me feel at home.

Over the past few years I have interacted with many of you for the various Indic Wiki related activities and we have done many successful projects. Thank you very much for all those wonderful projects. Now when we are moving to a different phase of growth of Wikimedia in India, I request more support from your side.

To get started we shall together develop a plan for Indic language wikis and design few pilot projects to gain learnings to drive growth. I propose to develop this plan collaboratively and openly - in true wiki style. This will include focused Indic language meetups, virtual meetings, desk research and constantly synthesizing the findings from all of these into learnings. These learnings will then flow into pilots that we will implement and review and learn from.

For this purpose, I will be using the following page http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_L.... It is very preliminary right now - but will keep updating it. The page will give you a flavor of the kind of process and methodology I plan to use - and also give you a hint of the end output. However, I stress that is nothing more than a stub right now. So please provide your suggestions.

I will be in touch soon and regularly on the next steps and I will keep you constantly posted on progress - both positive and whenever we face setbacks.

The task is huge. The potential is even more massive. I will need a lot of your help. I invite and welcome and urge all of you to contribute to this process - during physical meetups, in virtual meetings, one-on-one conversations or meetings, on the talk page to the Indic Languages page and in any and every manner that you can imagine.

As part of the India Programs of WMF, my official ID is shiju@wikimedia.org. You can reach me anytime regarding any WMF's Indic wiki related topic.

Thanks Shiju

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 7:23 AM, Hisham hisham@wikimedia.org wrote:

Dear All

As I had mentioned in a previous posting (and as was so touchingly welcomed by so many of of you), Shiju Alex is joining us to lead our Indic Languages initiatives. In this mail ( http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-July/003845.html), I had indicated that he would join around September-October.

I'm really pleased to inform you that he has now joined India Programs (on September 24th.)

Indic Languages is an important priority for us - and Shiju intends to start work on this urgently. He'll be in touch shortly on this matter.

Welcome aboard, Shiju!

Warmest Regards,

hisham