Welcome Bishakha :-)
From my perspective having more focus on women's related topics and
issues in the WMF projects would be a good thing! So I welcome your involvement; including your perspective as someone who has encouraged and empowered women to contribute in the public domain on women's issues.
Sydney Poore
On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Bishakha Datta bishakhadatta@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks, all. Thought I would just introduce myself a bit more.
Building on Michael (Snow's) email, for the last 12 years I have run Point of View (www.pointofview,org), a Mumbai-based non-profit that puts the voices and points of view of women in the public domain through media, art and culture. We work on issues ranging from domestic violence, sex workers' rights, gender and HIV - to enabling women in low-income communities to access and use digital technologies (video, photo, net) to tell their own stories and talk about their own realities.
Info-activism, specially via online platforms, is one of the issues that we started working on a couple of years back. Our first foray into info-activism was as one of the seeders of the Public Access Digital Media Archive (http://pad.ma), which is built on open source software and principles.
Apart from managing POV, I also make documentary videos on issues of gender and sexuality, and am currently writing a non-fiction book on the lives of sex workers in India. I also serve on the boards of many other non-profits that work in the Global South, including CREA (www.creaworld.org) and Breakthrough (www.breakthrough.tv) - and consult for foundations and non-profits in India, the US, and parts of Africa.
Coming to Michael (Peel's) question about my prior involvement with Wikipedia, I'm one of its millions of daily readers/users around the world. I have yet to contribute enough by way of edits to call myself an editor.
Cheers - and really do look forward to contributing in more ways than one, Bishakha