I had the good fortune of accompanying Ashwin, where I conducted workshops on the OpenStreetMap project [1]. It was a unique learning as well as a fun experience to do this along with him.

These kind of outreach efforts, especially to less connected areas like the northeast are extremely important and I hope more such events take place for the students of that region. From what we could gauge, the level of exposure to latest technological trends and especially the open source movement is fairly limited. There seems to be no form of tech community or any kind of activities taking place in the entire region with the possible exception of IIT Guwahati. It was particularly sad to see that such a large number of young and bright students who are so eager to learn have absolutely no one to mentor them on the possibilities out there with today's technology.

Ashwin and I managed to build a very good relationship with the students at both NERIST and NIT Arunachal Pradesh. Apart from the wikipedia and osm workshops, we also made sure we exposed the philosophies behind these open projects and what FOSS is all about. I feel its our responsibilities as ambassadors for these kind of projects to make sure that people can make the connect between sharing, openness and the subsequent impact that this has on each of our own lives, and not just limiting ourselves to 'how to edit wikipedia'.

My personal opinion is that our outreach efforts should be less about power point presentations and more about educating others on why we do this. After all I'm sure a good portion of us wikipedians who love what we do never learnt any of this by sitting through a lecture. We learnt it because we were curious and somewhere found some meaning in taking the effort to learn.

-Arun

PS: Is there any particular place where there is a collection of notes from the different wiki academies in India? One understands a lot by conducting these workshops and it would be nice if I could share that knowledge so someone who wants to do it for the first time can be prepared to the kind of questions and issues he will face. This will make it so much easier for more people to give talks in other places.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Planemad/Basic_cartography_workshop