Great idea!

I suggest that in parallel with planning for a real-life all-India meetups, we also start doing Skype audio (or other platform a/v) conferences. They can be planned similar to the city meetups, with participants putting in their skype id's and the meeting's organizer placing the group call.

We can keep a google/other shared doc open in parallel where we can all write in as the conference progresses, hence co-creating documentation during the meeting itself instead of burdening one person after. Google docs has an added benefit of automatically opening a chat window on the right pane so that can serve as a backup in case anybody drops out of skype or the skype call crashes.

In our seminar in NERIST, we had people from elsewhere in the world coming on Skype and giving presentations. Here, we had to scroll through the presentation while the wikipedian dictated; I've recently found a better way to do it : Zipcast on slideshare : here the presentation is in control of the person giving it and everybody else watches on slideshare website without having to download anything. That also has group chat feature. And free of course. (There are also other solutions that give screen-sharing but they need to be downloaded; and in Skype, screen-share isn't possible for 2+ way conferences last time I checked plus it's a live stream so badder quality whereas slideshare is browser-based vector flash)

Another potential I see with web conferences : We can have an edit party co-create an article on google docs (here it's all live and you can see the other person's cursor inputting stuff real-time), and then one person can copy-paste the whole thing to wikipedia once we're ready. This way we can avoid latency periods and edit conflicts in an edit party, and involve a much larger number of people in. And you'll have to attend one to see how much fun it is, with multiple cursors moving all around the place! ;)

Of course, I'm zero on content suggestions - just suggesting methods with which we can work together and do something more productive than just a meeting, using the web and bridging the distances that divide us.

(I'm going to be out on coming weekends else I would have pitched for a particular date for a pilot conference! And apologies for completely missing the Pune meetup, guys!)

Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
Teach For India Fellow, 2011-13
www.nikhilsheth.tk
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| Wikipedia For Schools project



On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 6:32 PM, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta@gmail.com> wrote:
Love the idea and hope it happens,
Bishakha

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 3:10 PM, <wheredevelsdare@hotmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

I think it might be a good time to start an annual WikiConference in India on the lines of what Wikimedia UK has (http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_UK_2011).  We are starting afresh, talks on a setup are still progressing and the future beholds. It will be a wonderful opportunity for all of us to put a face to names as well as to interact with each other and pave the way forward for Wikimedia in India. Any thoughts?

Regards,
User:AroundTheGlobe

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