Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Update on my work

Hi everyone, I wanted to share with you all few things that I'm currently working on and I'd love to get your ideas, thoughts, suggestions, questions and most importantly approvals. Supporting Outreach I started working on this sometime in December by talking to some community members and understanding how they have been conducting outreach session, what they think about outreach, how can we make it more effective etc etc. I got varied comments with some talking positively about outreach while some thought that outreach was not helpful. Im in the process of collating all comments & suggestions I got during my conversations with community members and including them with some of my own views as to how can we make outreach sessions more effective. This includes building presentations, brochures, FAQs, tips, ideas on how can we provide the appropriate kind of training on Wikipedia, how can we make sessions more fun for the participants, how can we follow up with the participants, how can we measure the effectiveness of these sessions etc. The objective is to build a handbook that is inclusive of all ideas and standardized documents that one could use to conduct outreach session anywhere in India. We want to facilitate community members efforts wanting to conduct wiki workshops and motivate others to conduct similar sessions. Initially, these documents will be in English - but can be translated to Indic languages subsequently. I'd want to work closely with the Chapter to conduct WIki Academies with other community members to conduct these workshops. Here is the link to the handbook:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Progra…. Ashwin, Naveen, Srikanth L, Srikanth R, Suyog, Pradeep, Subhashish have contributed to this document by giving me ideas or helping me build standardized documents. I'd like really like to thank each one of them to help me work on this handbook and make it what it is today. I'd encourage all of you to please feel free to edit, expand, improve and suggest. Testing Outreach I want to test wether all the ideas such as what kind of pre-work an outreach needs, repository of documents, follow up ideas, and all the other suggestions that are collated in this Outreach Handbook are effective or not. The best way of testing this would be conducting outreach programs following these suggestions and measuring their effectiveness. I have reached out to several institutes in Delhi with the idea of conducting Wiki sessions at their institutes. To name a few: I have written to 9 different department heads at IIT Delhi including biochemical, management science, civil, chemistry engineering departments, National Institute of Fashion Technology, St.Stevens College, Lady Shir Ram College, Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology etc. I have already heard positively from some institutes and I'll keep you updated as and when things become a little clearer. Even if we're able to conduct 4 of these sessions in Delhi over the next month it will give us a good testing ground for this Outreach Handbook. The idea is to measure results of these 4 sessions in terms of no. of total participants, no. of participants who created usernames, no. of participants who started editing, keeping in touch with the participants over a period of time and evaluating no. of participants who continued editing over a period of 3 months - measure and share this data with you all. Since the community size is small in Delhi, I plan to conduct these sessions with the help of Shiju, Subha and any interested local community members. I request any other local community members who are interested to let me know if they can join in these outreach sessions. (I have already started reaching out individually to as many as are listed on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Delhi_Wikipedians on their talk pages to invite them to the planned meet up in Delhi on Jan 15th. With regards to outside Delhi, I am realising that it does take time and effort to identify potential places to do outreach - and this is one reason some community members do not do outreach. I would love to help out other cities as well, and I am going to approach local communities in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkatta and Pune in this regard. Institutional Partnership One of the other things I'm currently working on is how to build partnerships with like-minded organisation. For this - and with Noopur's help - I am exploring how to partner with SPIC MACAY (www.spicmacay.com). The main objective of this organisation is to preserve and promote Indian classical music, dance and cultural heritage. SPIC MACAY is also a volunteer based organization with chapters spread all over the country and some in other foreign countries as well. They conduct events where they have prominent Indian classical artists (vocalists, instrument players, dancers etc) perform, they conduct heritage walks to old monuments like Galib ka Ghar etc, they have a resource center where they have a lot of information about Indian artists, videos/pictures clicked by volunteers, they also have a weekly newsletter etc. To summarize, they have gold pot of information about Indian classical musicians, instruments, dancers which can contribute to Wikipedia articles in a big way and increasing more Indian content. Thanks for all your help on this one, Noopur. Fingers crossed! I see two potential ways of working with them one would be to organize wiki workshop for their volunteers and they can start contributing to Wiki projects and become independent contributors. The other could be that they can provide us with all their resources and Wikipedia volunteers can take over collaborative editing to write articles on these topics. We're just doing preliminary discussions with SPIC MACAY as for now. I'm planning to meet with SPIC MACAY volunteers again sometime soon. Here is the presentation that I'll be using: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/present/edit?id=0AdsrCZ_fInBPZGhueG…. Im sharing this presentation so that you can give me your feedback on this as well as if you'd like to use/reuse it to reach out to similar institutes in your cities. Wikipedia 11 Years Celebrations We are organizing a Wikimedia Commons workshop for a photography club named Tassavurrati in Delhi on the day of Wiki 11th Anniversary. The club members travel through the length and breadth of India and are very passionate to contribute to Wiki projects. The idea is to brief all the participants about Wikimedia Commons, how to upload pictures and a bit about licensing. Noopur is also helping us organise this session. And maybe as a follow up we can conduct Wikipedia takes Delhi with these set of participants. Post this session we've organised a meet up in Delhi where these club members are also invited to join us. Here is a link to the event: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Commons_Workshop_Tassavurrati I would love to know what you think of all the above work. It's really essential for me to hear each one of your opinions to make sure that Im serving you all in the most effective and useful manner. Waiting for your comments and inputs. :-) Thanks Nitika