Hisham Mundol's role will be to design and implement specific pilot programs that encourage many more Indians to become contributors to our projects in Indic languages as well as English. The National Programs initiative will focus on the following areas in the first year:

Design and implement an India-wide program to increase Wikimedia’s footprint on university and college campuses with students and faculty with the aim of encouraging contributions to Wikimedia projects

Support the launch and implementation of community-initiated programs that seek to increase the editor base for Wikimedia projects

Engage with the community and chapter to build a strong relationship among these stakeholder groups and create communications forums that allow for effective partnerships

As a newcomer to the Wikimedia movement, Hisham’s first task will be to deepen his understanding of us: our history, goals, values, culture and mission.

Hisham was most recently a consultant with the Public Health Foundation of India (in a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). He designed and implemented large-scale national programs on HIV/AIDS prevention. He worked to understand the dynamics of hard-to-reach communities by conducting in-depth, on-the-ground analysis (ask him to tell you about his experience talking to drivers while sitting under their trucks). The programs he designed and implemented sought to convince people in large numbers - 400 million young people across the nation - to change very personal behaviours. While we are not tackling issues of such an intimate nature, we do aim to convince large numbers of people across the country to contribute their personal time to Wikimedia projects. During this assignment, Hisham worked closely with public, private and community groups (local and international) to work through the details of the programs and build partnerships for implementing them at scale. He did so in a manner that used persuasion rather than power to build support to move things forward. We think his experience navigating these varied groups position him well to work in the Wikimedia community. His earlier career was in marketing and business development with a number of well-known businesses: Infosys, Accenture, Cadbury and Unilever. This experience positions him well to engage with a movement and organization that is global in nature, in particular to work with a team that is based halfway around the world.