Dear Wikimedians,

This e-mail is to take your suggestions about the below proposal.

As some of you may know that Swatantra 2014 (5th International Free Software Conference, Kerala) is being held in Trivandrum during December 18-20, 2014. More details can be found at this link http://icfoss.in/fs2014.html. Organized by ICFOSS (GoK) this event is set to attract hundreds of Free Software enthusiasts. CIS is one of the supporters of this conference.

There is a dedicated track for Wikipedia/Wikimedia during the conference. We are also planning to set up a Wikimedia stall at the event. We are hoping to have ML Wikimedians take lead on this.

We are considering to give travel and stay scholarships for select Wikimedians from across India, who are interested to participate in this event and benefit from it. This will also be a great opportunity to meet and interact with Malayalam Wikimedia community.

CIS-A2K is considering to support upto 2 Wikimedians from each language community. Interested Wikimedians will be asked to put up a request, along with a statement of purpose, in their respective Wikimedia Village pumps and will request the community members to second them. Based on the community response CIS-A2K will decide on providing travel and stay scholarships. CIS-A2K will support this as part of its Community Strengthening Initiatives [1]

Please let us know your suggestions on the above process and share your inputs on how we could do this in a better manner. We would like to put out a call by November 10. We will be open to receiving your feedback until November 7, 2014.

You could also leave your feedback on Meta here [2]

Best wishes,
Vishnu

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Draft_Work_plan_July_2014_-_June_2015#Community_Strengthening_Initiatives
[2] http://bit.ly/1tBuWpT