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Fwd: [Wikimediaindia-l] Volunteer for CIS's A2K programme director recruitment committee
by Noopur Raval 03 Aug '12

03 Aug '12

FYI ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sunil Abraham <sunil(a)mahiti.org> Date: Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 2:41 PM Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Volunteer for CIS's A2K programme director recruitment committee To: Wikimedia India Community list <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: wikimedia-in-exec(a)lists.wikimedia.org Dear Wikimedians, I would like to request members of the Indian Wikipedia community to nominate themselves to serve on the CIS's A2K Programme Director recruitment committee. This programme will hopefully receive large grant from Wikimedia Foundation and we would greatly benefit from community input during the hiring process of the new Programme Director. The volunteer must be experienced Wikipedian, based in India [ as we cannot afford international travel for the interviews] and must have sufficient managerial experience [including experience with conducting interviews]. The volunteer should be able to spare time in September to review applications remotely and also conduct face-to-face interviews for 2 days either in Bangalore or Delhi. Those who fit the description are requested to nominate yourself by sending me an email with a profile and relevant URLs before COB 25th August 2012. I will publish a long list on cis-india.org on 29th August, after removing those nominations that don't have the required qualifications. The volunteer to serve on the recruitment committee will be selected from the long list by using IETF's Publicly Verifiable Nominations Committee (NomCom) Random Selection[1]. The other members of this recruitment committee will consist of 1. One of the existing independent consultants [Hisham, Nitika, Noopur, Shiju or Subha] 2. One member from the Wikipedia Chapter (Wikimedia India Program Trust) community. To be nominated by the Chapter Executive Committee. 3. Executive Director of CIS - me. The recruitment committee will be responsible for screening the long list of eligible applications and conducting one-on-one face-to-face interviews with the short list of applicants. Best wishes, Sunil [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3797.txt The random seeds will be the 30 August 2012 result for the following national lotteries - Australia (http://www.lotto.com.au/), UK (http://www.national-lottery.co.uk) and USA (http://www.powerball.com or http://www.usamega.com) _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l -- Noopur Raval

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Farewell
by Hisham 30 Jul '12

30 Jul '12

Dear Chennai Community I'm writing to inform you that I plan to leave my current role supporting Wikimedia in India. I am going to be exploring opportunities and evaluating options that are closer to my career aspirations and my personal circumstances. I will be working through to ensure that there is a smooth transition - and this is likely to take 2-3 months. I am writing now because I felt it appropriate and opportune to inform you as early as possible. I want to start off by thanking the Wikimedia community and movement for giving me this extraordinary opportunity. Working on something like India Program has been something that has been professionally enriching and personally fulfilling. Over the past 1 1/2 years, I have been supported by so many of you - and I want to thank you for everything you have done! The passion and intellectual firepower of our community has been my constant source of drive and guidance. There are so many examples of powerful stories from all over the country: the incredible efforts put in by the IEP Campus Ambassadors in Pune; the army of volunteers that drove the outreach push across the country in the first few months of this year; the beautiful stories of fantastic community initiatives from far and wide across the country and sub-continent, and indeed the world; the remarkable stories from so many communities - large, small and tiny ones! I want to thank the team that I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with - Nitika, Noopur, Shiju & Subha. You guys have been wonderful. The work that we are doing is experimental and we have been innovating every day, and I know the circumstances have not always been easy. Take strength and inspiration from the large number of community members who have been touched by you and appreciate your efforts and value your work. I will send an actual "over and out" message later. In the meantime, I will continue to work on everything that needs working on. Happy Editing! Warmest Regards, hisham

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India Program: Community Building Pilot Update: Fantastic Story from Assam
by Hisham 30 May '12

30 May '12

Dear All I wanted to share with you an update on the work that Shiju[1] is doing on Indic languages[2] as part of India Program.[3] A guiding principle for the thinking and efforts of our team is that community building should be the most essential aspect of all the work that we do. In the context of small Indic communities, Shiju has been working to try and identify the various elements that need to come together to foster community building. This update is about the Community Building pilot[4] that was run for the Assamese community. For context, community building means different things to different people and in fact there was a very interesting post[5] that Shiju put out that articulated his thinking on this and, hence, our priorities. The results of these efforts have been outstanding number of editors on Assamese Wikipedia has increased to 31 in April 2012 (from 18 in December 2011 and just 10 in November 2011.) number of Wikiprojects increased to 6 (from a situation where there were no reasonably active ones in December 2011- and including 5 Wikiprojects independently conceptualised and managed by the community) average monthly edits on Assamese Wikipedia increased to about 5000 in April 2012 from around 3000 in November 2011 There are 5 key factors that are responsible for this remarkable growth Strong communication. This started with Shiju building personal connections with Assamese editors and then encouraging them to communicate with each other on-wiki, online and in meet--ups and outreach sessions. Initial push. Shiju visited Assam in January where he spent time in 2 towns with 7 of the most active community members, who also conducted 2 outreach sessions. This visit has proved to be really useful because it helped to energise the community and also helped to establish a personal relationship between Shiju and these editors (and also, amongst the editors themselves.) Encouraging collaboration. Wikiprojects and outreach are really useful to galvanise a community and helped build personal equations. It's wonderful to see the increase in Wikiprojects and Building capacity & confidence. In all the work that has been done for the Assamese community, the endeavour has been to build capacity. For instance, support was given to get basic outreach material including FAQs prepared and outreach sessions were guided by Shiju. It's inspiring to see the Assamese community now take things to a whole new level and plan out an ambitious 10th anniversary.[6] Healthy environment. This is the last - but probably the most essential point - and it is something I want to call out because it is what will help or severely hinder the abilities of individual communities realise their dreams and potential. The reason why the Assamese community is making such wonderful steps forward is because there is a set of editors with the right level of initiative and motivation a strong sense of co-operation and good spirit amongst the editors an extremely welcoming approach to new editors None of this would have been possible without the efforts of every single Assamese community members. In the early days when Shiju started off, he was interacting with Bishnu, Dipankar, Gitartha, Jyoti & Prabhakar - who helped organise the first meet-ups and outreach sessions. Thanks to their efforts, a list of thank-yous would now be 31 strong! Thank you and congratulations to all of you! To the Assamese community, I wish you the very best for your 10th anniversary.[6] There are exciting plans including your photo contest and your article contest and the meet-up and the outreach session. I know that you are doing most of the event largely independently (with Noopur[7] providing media assistance for the 10th anniversary and an India Chapter[8] grant[9] supporting you.) This is the true signs of a community that is coming of age. There are tremendous opportunities in outreach to get new editors, initiatives like your article & photo contests to improve content and in proposed projects like offline to make transformational changes in the community. With regard to the way forward for India Program, the pilot design page[4] on meta[3] has now been updated. The next steps are going to be to see how we can adapt or build on these experiences with other communities, and as we move to other communities, do them in a more scaleable manner. To all community members - across languages across India - if you did want any help in any aspect of community building, please feel free to reach out to Shiju[1] at shiju(a)wikimedia.org. Please also do add comments or ideas or suggestions you might have to the Community Building Pilot's talk page.[10] hisham[11] Notes [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Shiju [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Basic_Community_… [5] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-December/005813.… [6] http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/05/16/ten-glorious-years-of-assamese-wikipedi… [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Noopur28 [8] http://wikimedia.in/ [9] http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Grants/Photo_and_Article_Competition_and_Wiki_Work… [10] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Basic_Commu… [11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hisham

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Fwd: [Blog]: Postcard from the Tamil Community
by Noopur Raval 17 Apr '12

17 Apr '12

*Fyi* *Blog post on Tamil Wikimedia Contest* ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Noopur Raval <nraval(a)wikimedia.org> Date: Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 12:03 PM Subject: [Blog]: Postcard from the Tamil Community To: wikita-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Hey folks, The Tamil Wikimedia Contest organized by User: Sodabottle and other members of the Tamil community recently got over. As you are all aware, it generated over 15,000 media files and got over 250 new contributors to Commons. A detailed report was published at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Tamil_Wikimedians/TamilWiki_Media_Con… There's also a blog post that we've been working on that takes a peek at TWMC behind the scenes with inputs from the organizing team. It might be really useful to any community planning to conduct a similar events in future. You can read the post here: http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/04/17/postcard-from-the-tamil-community/. It's a great story of how an off-the-cuff conversation between 2 editors resulted in a massive community wide initiative - with participation of the Tamil community (and other communities) from across the world, the kind of intense efforts, the use of technology enablers and last - and most certainly not the least - some fantastic images (a sample of which can be seen at http://www.tawp.in/r/33zx) - which have now been used to create or improve articles (6122 on Tamil Wiktionary, 1659 on Tamil Wikipedia and more). Do go through the story and add comments. Please also share it with others. Don't forget to use the images to improve articles on your Wikipedia! (They are all available on Commons at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:TamilWiki_Media_Contest) I am thankful to Natkeeran for the wonderful story idea and to Sodabottle, Logicwiki and others for your inputs, insights and times! Regards Noopur -- Noopur Raval -- Noopur Raval

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India Program: Fortnightly IRC: Indic Languages: Thursday April 5th 9pm (IST): #wikimedia-office
by Hisham 05 Apr '12

05 Apr '12

Hi Folks Reminder about the IRC today (9pm IST on Thursday April 5th) Do join us using this link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office. Here is what we would like to discuss today - which we shall do for the first 45 minutes and then throw it open for 15 minutes for any other topics that anyone wants to discuss related to India Program. You may have noticed that we are increasing our emphasis on Wikisource. Please see Shiju's post on using simple technology to support digitazation (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Digitization_o…) and Noopur's story of the Gujarati Wikisource (http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/04/04/realizing-the-dreams-of-communities-3-y…) In addition, Shiju has been engaged with other communities on how to start or accelerate their respective language Wikisources. Wikisource has some very important characteristics that make it attractive. > It's a (relatively) easier way for newbies to start contributing than the respective Wikipedia > It's a great way to reach out to language lovers - and love for a language is an important motivator for contribution (on this and other projects) > There is a much lower gender gap on Wikisource, and it's easy for a wider age group to contribute > It's more "accessible" as an entry point to newbies because it has less policies than other projects > It's can act as a gateway to other projects In today's IRC, we'd like to talk through the work that's happening on Wikisource by many communities, discuss best practices and provide a channel of support for anyone interested in joining the project from any language. Speak soon. hisham

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India Program: Pilot Designs
by Hisham 29 Mar '12

29 Mar '12

Hi Folks One of the aspects that India Program constantly works on is that the the work that your team does for and with our community is based on clear objectives, robust design and relevant progress parameters. India Program has / is / will be undertaking a series of pilots. Pilots by nature indicate that we try innovative things out sometimes, and we may or may not always suceed. We must be bold and try them out - but we must also carefully build these pilots out and measure progress. On the main India Program meta page, I've created a tab that links to a new sub-page called Pilot Designs - where I have published 3 of these pilot designs. More will follow as they are ready, or as we undertake new work, so do add the page to your watchlists. Basic Community Building is the work that Shiju is doing with small Indic communities - in this case, Assamese. It will show what steps can be taken to build such communities - from communication to collaboration to outreach. This work is especially relevant to small Indic communities - but there are pointers even for larger communities (including English.) Story-telling for Community Building is the work that Noopur just announced (and as illustrated by the profile on Netha) - where we want to celebrate the diversity and magic in our community. Supporting Community Communications Initiatives (Wikipatrika) for Community Building is the initiative just announced by Noopur to support our community's newsletter, Wikipatrika. The attempt is to see how Wikipatrika can become more participative, richer in content and more regular in publication. Do go through these. Do also add your comments on the respective talk pages. The constant endeavor of all the work that we do is to help community members who want to take up the various initiatives that we are piloting (with them or with other community members.) Do go through these pilot designs and if you are interested in getting involved, or if you need clarification, or if you want support - please feel free to ask for it on the talk pages or offlist to any of us. Best hisham

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India Program-Fortnightly IRC: Thursday March 29th @ 9pm IST (Outreach & Communication) (#wikimedia-office)
by Hisham 28 Mar '12

28 Mar '12

Hi Folks Reminder about the IRC later today (9pm IST on March 29th.) Join in using this link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office. As I had indicated earlier, what we will do going forward is to publish an opening statement - which is below. We'd like to have a rich discussion around these topics for 45 minutes and then throw it open for 15 minutes for any other topics that anyone wants to discuss. There have been more than 22 outreach sesssions (English + some Indic languages) across India over the past 2 1/2 months. We have been working on constantly every component of outreach. * Pre-session work - building supporting material (documents, presentations, handouts etc), evaluating different ways of conducting an effective outreach, using different ways to reach out to organisations with the proposal to conduct a session etc. * Session work - adopting different techniques of doing outreach, how do we get participants more involved during the session, how to filter out the folks so that we do the editing session only with the genuinely interested participants, how to balance between practical and theoretical aspects of training, how much information to give out in one session etc. * Post-session work - how do we provide editing support to the participants, how do we collect their contact information, how do we keep in touch with them on regular basis, how do we invite them to join other Wiki projects, how do we track their edit count - soon after the session, after 1 and 3 months of conducting the session etc. We'd like to discuss these. In the IRC, the following will be covered: * Indic Outreach: How can we do more outreach session in Indic langauges in particular? / Can regional communities work to translate supporting material? / How do we provide more support to different language communities to conduct these sessions? * More Outreach: If we are doing 7 outreach session in one month right now is there a way of us doing 10 every month? / Can we find more community members who will be willing to conduct these session? / For community members who are interested to conduct outreach sessions but think they lack confidence - is there a way we can help them? * Better Outreach: Can we find some volunteers who will be willing to "adopt" these newbies and give them support? . I'd strongly encourage all those folks who have been actively involved in conducting these sessions over the past 2 months to join this IRC. It will be great if you could share your first hand experience with the wider community on what worked, what didn't, what we could have done better etc. I especially do want to ask Indic Wikimedians to join because we desperately need more outreach sessions in Indic languages. We will also briefly address the early stages of the communications work - which are the storytelling and Wikipatrika support that was announced yesterday. Given it's early days on communications, I'd prefer this IRC stay largely focussed on outreach since there is so much to work through there. See you all there! Apologies for sending this note this morning and not last night as I had promised. hisham p.s. There is a (tiny) possibility that I might be slightly late but you'll all be in Nitika's safe hands. I shall try and my level best to be on time.

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Voice Recording application in python for tamil wiktionary
by Shrinivasan T 23 Mar '12

23 Mar '12

On March 17, there was a wikipedia hackathon at ThoughtWorks, Chennai. I participated that event. There was around 20 programmers joined together to work on building some interesting applications using wikipedia. We picked up the ideas form the link. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Chennai_Hackathon_March_2012/Ideas I picked up an idea of creating an application to record audio for adding voices to the tamil wiktionary site. Example: http://ta.wiktionary.org/wiki/tiny In this page, there is an audio file on how to spell the word 'tiny' Not all the words in the tamil wiktionary has the audio files. It has around 2 lakh words. It is a boring process to record a word, upload to commons.wikipedia.org and link back to ta.wiktionary.org page. I wrote an application to make this process easier. It will show you a word, record it and upload it to commons. get the source code at https://github.com/tshrinivasan/voice-recorder-for-tawictionary see a demo screencast on the application here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a5Iv_ol1So There are some 13 applications developed and all participants showed their demo on the same day. Thanks for yuvipanda and srikanth for organising a nice event. some snaps: https://picasaweb.google.com/102002010785949271518/WikipediaHackathon -- Regards, T.Shrinivasan My Life with GNU/Linux : http://goinggnu.wordpress.com Free/Open Source Jobs : http://fossjobs.in Get CollabNet Subversion Edge : http://www.collab.net/svnedge

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*cross-post* India Program - Fortnightly IRC: Thursday March 15th @ 9pm IST (Indic Languages) & Thursday March 29th @9pm IST (Outreach & Communication) (#wikimedia-office)
by Hisham 17 Mar '12

17 Mar '12

cross-posting to reach pan-community; apologies if you received it from other mailing lists already Hi Folks, One of the essential things that India Program needs to constantly work out is keeping the community informed of the work that we are doing - so that this work is clearer but also to help cross-pollinate ideas amongst a wider set of community members who might not have been engaged on specific village pump / talk page discussion or involved in particular activities (e.g. outreach events) or wikiprojects. We used to have a monthly IRC with the community and India Program. (For those who are not familiar with IRC, it is an Internet messaging system similar to a regular chat room. It's very simple to use and you can join in by clicking on the following link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office.) I have been remiss in conducting these for the past few months - and I'd like to make amends by restarting, with a couple of modifications. a) I'd like to propose fortnightly instead of monthly. (I was wary of doing it any more frequently than monthly earlier because I didn't know if there would be enough on the plate to discuss. I have changed my mind now - because there is too much to discuss to cover in a single monthly session.) I'd like to propose that we do it in the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of every month at 9pm IST (which is GMT + 0530) - THOUGH NOT THIS MONTH - BECAUSE I HAVE MISSED THE TIMELINE. Just for March, we will do it on March 15th and March 29th (both at 9pm IST which is GMT + 0530) b) I'd like to propose that we do it focussed on specific work streams instead of general. The reason I say this is that - as with many community meet-ups, folks will give time to attend a meet-up or participate in an IRC only if there is a topic of relevance to them. To that extent, we could do one IRC on Indic languages and one on Outreach & Communications. I'd start both the IRCs with a re-cap of India Programs activities for the fortnight (or so) prior to the IRC and forward from the IRC - and then we could talk about either Indic langauges or Outreach & Communications. The March 15th one will be focussed on Indic Languages and the one on March 29th will be on Outreach & Communications. Having said that, there is quite a bit of overlap on these topics - so feel free to join both. The more the merrier! Please do also invite anyone who is interested to know more about India Program or - even more importantly - interact with fellow Wikimedians interested in a particular activity to join in. (It's quite a lot of of fun {citation required} - and i've heard a rumour {citation required} that there was actually a romance that started on one of the IRCs...) As always, the logs will be put up on meta for the benefit of those who can't attend and for the record. I'll send a reminder on the day of the session and one 30 minutes before the session. Thanks hisham

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Announcing Noopur Raval as Consultant, Wikimedia Foundation (India Program, Communications)
by Hisham 05 Mar '12

05 Mar '12

cross-posting to reach pan-community; apologies if you have already read this from another list. Dear All, I am pleased to announce that Noopur Raval ([User:Noopur28] has been selected as Consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation, and will support Communications for India Program. This position will perform 4 key functions. Firstly, it will support communications with our community. This involves a regular set of updates (such as newsletters) as well as specific communication projects such as story-telling of local community initiatives (to document experiences, celebrate successes and cross-pollinate ideas.) This is not for day-to-day program communications - which is a core part of each of our responsibilities in the India Program team. Second will be to support media & PR for local community initiatives. The single biggest challenge here will to be get more Indic language media coverage to support community building efforts. This will be done directly with community members and also in co-ordination with the India Chapter's Communications Media & PR team. The third aspect is to build and expand existing community social networks (such as WikimediaIndia on facebook) and to help with the use of social networks to support community building. Lastly, there is untapped potential of using digital outreach - to augment existing physical outreach efforts. We need to (very, very carefully) explore if we can reach out to our large and growing reader base and inform, encourage and enable them to become editors using online channels and resources. Noopur is a community member and has supported outreach activities (in Ahmedabad & Delhi), is a member of Delhi SIG of the Chapter, has participated in community collaborations like Collaboration of the Month and has been actively trying to start GLAM in India. Noopur is from Gandhinagar and is graduating from JNU with a Master's in Arts & Aesthetics. She has a triple honors Bachelor's in Media Studies, Literature and Psychology from Christ College, Bangalore. She has interned with Radio Mirchi, Times of India and the Centre for Internet & Society (amongst others) - as well as done some teaching assignments. She is an active blogger (including for the India Art Summit, 2011.) She has published a novella and co-authored an anthology of poems, plays & short stories and has co-presented a paper on "Wikiwars" with [User:Srikeit.] She is also an amateur photographer and has contributed to Commons as well as other platforms. The Communications position has taken a long time to fill. The initial call for selection was in September. I reported back to the community in December that I had failed to find the right candidate and hence the delay. There were a number of deserving candidates and this selection has taken time because of the need to find the most suitable profile for a complex role. This role requires the right mix of an academic foundation in communications, domain expertise as well as adequate familiarity with our community. It also requires adaptability and strong learning skills - because so much of what we are trying to do is pioneering. I am confident that she brings the right level of experience and competencies - and I'm very excited by the opportunity of making a step jump in the impact of communications for our community. Do join me in welcoming Noopur. She will start on March 12 and will be based in New Delhi. Best hisham

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