Dear all,
I am extremely sorry that this report is long overdue but as I was busy
with my exams and other stuff, I literally did not get time to compile
this. This is related to the Wikipedia Stall I helped set up in Netaji
Subhash Engineering College, Kolkata. NSEC had their annual
techno-management fest, Avenir, 2012 from 16th - 18th March, around the
time I got back to Kolkata from Pune during my prep leave. As there was
already a WikiAcademy, in NSEC, I tried to procure a lab for an editothon,
however, Sucheta who awesomely spearheaded everything for me from her
college part informed me that labs were not available, however, a stall was.
I sent out to set up the stall for the three day fest. I contacted the
local community as well as the India Programs team as this was my first
ever Outreach that I organized. I sent a mail on both the India mailing
list as well as the West Bengal mailing list. Unfortunately, there was a
lack of volunteers as almost everyone was busy. On day 1, Sucheta
accompanied me at the stall for the whole day, however, on Day 2 even she
was busy with her own fest work.
Also Day 1 saw much better numbers that Day 2 and as I was not available on
Day 3, Day 3 was dropped completely. The pros and the cons are as follows:
The Cons:
1. There was serious lack of volunteers and hence at times I felt very
overburdened having to deal with over 10 people at one go.
2. Lack of banners/posters - Though this might not be a big issue but as
there was no large poster available. It was very difficult to inform people
about the stall. I tried my best with A4 documents I printed myself, but
the problem still remained because of the size.
3. Lack of numbers - Perhaps this might be my take, but am used to fests in
the Pune/Mumbai circuit and hence the numbers to me, seemed very less,
although I was informed this was the largest turnout, even more than last
year. Still on Day 1, about 30 people at most visited the stall. On Day 2,
the number was far less.
The Pros:
1. I was highly impressed with the amount in interest in Kolkata. The
students were not only highly interested, they had an array of curious
questions.
2. Certain students even waited for me to finish with others so that they
could get a deeper understanding of Wikipedia and even do some hands on.
3. Two students were so interested, they were coming back again and again
and I even helped them upload pics to their user profile.
4. One student, User:Sanu531 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sanu531>1 first
tried a live edit uploaded his own pic and updated his user page himself.
In my opinion, if there is this level of interest, I think, a student club
of types could do wonders here. I did not create any page on WMIN as this
was only a stall, however, I did upload pics
here<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:NSEC_Kolkata_Outreach>
2. Also as there was no flier/handout available for such I tried to make a
very rookie version in both Bengali and English back to back in one page,
here <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kolkata_Outreach_Doc.pdf>3.
Special thanks to Nitika Tandon for the Presentations which enabled me to
create the poster as well as the whole of India Teams for the support as
well as both the India and Bengali Community for the encouragement.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sanu531
2 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:NSEC_Kolkata_Outreach
3 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kolkata_Outreach_Doc.pdf
--
Regards,
Debanjan*
- Lets make this world a better and more informative place*
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
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
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.
সুধী,
বেশ কিছুদিন আলোচনার পর গতকাল, ২৬ মার্চ বাংলা উইকিপিডিয়ার নতুন প্রধান পাতা
চালু হয়েছে। বাংলা উইকিপিডিয়ার আগের প্রধান পাতাটি অনাকর্ষণীয় -- এমন মত বেশ
আগে থেকেই আমরা পেয়ে আসছিলাম। পরবর্তীতে বেশ কিছুদিন আগে বাংলা উইকিপিডিয়ায়
নতুন প্রধান পাতার ডিজাইন শুরু হয়। জমা পড়া মোট তিনটি ডিজাইন থেকে একটি বেছে
নিয়ে এবং অনেক যোজন-বিয়োজনের পর এই নতুন পাতাটি নির্বাচিত করা হয়।
নতুন এই প্রধান পাতায় এবার নির্বাচিত নিবন্ধের সাথে ভালো নিবন্ধগুলোও যোগ
করা হয়েছে। সেই সাথে আপনি জানেন কি, ভালো নিবন্ধ, ও নির্বাচিত নিবন্ধে
র্যান্ডম সুইচিং চালু করা হয়েছে তাই আপনারা প্রতিবার পার্জ (পাতার সর্বডানে
ওপরে হালনাগাদ লিংকটি দেখুন) করলে নতুন নিবন্ধ/তথ্য আসবে।
আপনাদের সবার অংশগ্রহণে বাংলা উইকিপিডিয়া এগিয়ে যাক, এই শুভকামনা।
তানভির
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
Reminder that there is an outreach event tomorrow. Hope few people from the
Kolkata community will show up at least. It will be nearly impossible for
me to manage the stall alone.
On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Debanjan Bandyopadhyay <debastein(a)gmail.com
> wrote:
> I have gotten in touch with the chapter. I am infact a chapter member
> myself (IN-135). I have also informed and asked the Kolkata community for
> help and support. Jayanta da has told me that he will bring the banner that
> we have in Kolkata.
>
> I am currently trying to make a basic info guide which I can xerox and
> distribute. I need help with that if anyone is interested.
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan <
> parakara.ghoda(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Excellent! This is indeed brilliant. I suggest you get in touch with
>> the Chapter soon. The chapter is your one stop place for all Wikipedia
>> related support. If you need any help on wiki, let me know. More than
>> willing to help.
>>
>> --
>> Regards,
>> Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
>> Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on February 12th.
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore
>> Aliens invaded Tamil Nadu, left their Spacship and now it is a Toll Plaza.
>>
>> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IVRCL-Vijayamangalam-Toll-Plaza.JPG
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Regards,
> Debanjan*
>
> - Lets make this world a better and more informative place*
>
>
--
Regards,
Debanjan*
- Lets make this world a better and more informative place*
Hello all,
I am currently in Kolkata, and upon reaching here two days ago, a fellow
community member, Sucheta, had informed me that her college, Netaji Subhash
Engineer College, Garia was organizing a tech fest, Avenir
2012<http://www.avenir.net.in>from 16th of March to the 18th of March.
As such I got in touch with her
college organizers and with Sucheta's help we were able to procure a stall
for free. We might even get a hall if possible.
I really wanted the lab for an edit-o-thon but that is very hard to
procure. I also relayed the message to both Jayanta da as well as WMF
office in Delhi as they had organized an academy in the same college.
We really need volunteers for the event, so anyone who can give their
precious time please do join us. It would be awesome if all you guys came.
I'd really love to meet the Kolkata community also.
What I was planning was that, we concentrate more on uploading pics on
commons, pronunciation drive (i.e. easier ways to contribute than writing
articles) because young people in fests will hopefully respond better to
such stuff. Also wanted to spread the word about WP:India and Indic
languages. I need a lot of help so would really appreciate any volunteers.
Can reward with cupcakes (virtual of course). :)
Please guys, whoever, can, do attend, this will be Kolkata's first outreach
in a fest, if I am not wrong, if its not, then doesn't matter, it will be
an outreach in Kolkata and all of us really need to know what's the right
formula and practice makes you perfect they say. :)
Will create a page about this in en:Wiki and WM-IN soon. See you tomorrow
guys, sharp at 10 am (hopefully). :)
--
Regards,
Debanjan*
- Lets make this world a better and more informative place*
Hello everyone,
I was just curious as whether there was any Wikimeet scheduled or not in
the next two weeks as I will be coming to Kolkata. I really wanted to meet
the Kolkata community.
--
Regards,
Debanjan
*Campus Ambassador,
Wikimedia Foundation
**
- Lets make this world a better and more informative place*
সম্প্রতি সফল ভাবে অনুষ্ঠিত হলো 'প্রথম বাংলা উইকিপিডিয়া অসম্মেলন
২০১২'..চট্টগ্রামে অনুষ্ঠিত এ অসম্মেলিন নিয়ে আজ দৈনিক প্রথম আলোর প্রজন্ম ডট
কমে প্রকাশিত সংবাদ..'একটি অসম্মেলন'..
http://www.prothom-alo.com/detail/date/2012-03-09/news/231121
--
Best Regards,
*Nurunnaby* *Hasive*
*User: nhasive*
