Welcome to the Wikiverse, Hisham. Hope that your participation will help advance
the movement goals in India.
Wish you all the best.
- Sundar
"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for
the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
From: Barry Newstead <bnewstead(a)wikimedia.org>
To: India list <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: hisham <hisham.mundol(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Tue, February 15, 2011 10:40:13 PM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Announcing Hisham Mundol as WMF consultant for
National Programs, India
Dear colleagues, (please feel free to cross-post this to local
lists within India)
I am pleased to announce the appointment of Hisham Mundol as a
consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation to support us in our
program initiatives in India.
As you know, the Wikimedia Foundation declared India to be a
strategic priority during the strategic planning process [1].
I announced our plans for the formation of an office in
August 2010 and the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
approved the creation of the Wikimedia India chapter in June
2010. India is a priority for the Wikimedia movement as it has
a strong and growing community of Wikimedians building the
Indic and English language projects. It is a country where the
Wikimedia movement can achieve our mission and learn important
lessons for achieving impact elsewhere. The engagement of
Hisham will enable the Wikimedia Foundation to pilot new
initiatives aimed at accelerating the growth of the community
in India. I am very happy we’ve now reached this point.
As I have mentioned in the past, we have a lot of momentum in
India but we have a long way to go to achieve our full
potential as a movement. Indians represent 4% of the world’s
Internet users today (and this share is growing), yet they
only represent 1.5% of page edits on Wikipedia. We should be
able to rapidly increase this share - across all projects -
and expand readership in a corresponding fashion.
Hisham’s title will be Consultant, India National Programs.
He will report to me. His 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. To that end, he will be
spending the coming weeks (not months!) in learning mode:
Hisham and I will be meeting with community members in
Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore on Feb 23-25 and then Hisham will
join community meetings across the country as they occur.
Hisham will also spend time in San Francisco with the staff
of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as with other
like-minded individuals and organizations and he will attend
the chapter conference in Berlin.
Hisham will be creating a workspace on strategy wiki where
he will share what he is learning and develop the core
elements of the action plan going forward. We encourage
active community engagement on this wiki. We aim to move to
action quickly and welcome input and guidance from across
the community.
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.
We have scheduled an IRC chat with Hisham and myself for
Thursday, February 17 at 22:00 India Standard Time (16:30
UTC).
I want to thank everyone who helped in the selection process
that identified Hisham. It was a five month process in which
we made an open call for consultants (using my visit in
September to drum up interest via conversations with the
community and the media) in India and around the world. We
had 197 applicants from a wide range of professional
backgrounds. Egon Zehnder’s India office, part of a leading
global executive search firm, helped screen candidates and
manage the process. Egon Zehnder conducted indepth
interviews with 25 candidates based on the inputs from
Bishakha and I who helped shortlist. I interviewed 12
candidates via Skype in the first round and then I had the
help of Bishakha Datta and Achal Prabhala to interview the
top seven in person in Bangalore. Our top two candidates
met with Sue and Erik in Delhi and then Hisham met with
the entire WMF leadership team and a broad group of staff
members in San Francisco.
We are very happy with the selection of Hisham. We recognize
that we did not manage to hire someone from inside the
Wikimedia community or the open source community. We did
look for people with this background and one of our
finalists was a long time open source advocate. We also
engaged with a long time Wikimedian for a role, though he
ultimately decided to withdraw for personal reasons. We are
committed to seeing Hisham integrate himself into the
community quickly and to seeing him add people to his team
from the community. We hope that the community will engage
actively with him to bring him into the fold. Hisham will
most definitely bring fresh perspectives to the movement
that will help us grow and change for the better.
Please join me in welcoming Hisham to the Wikimedia
movement.
Note: An FAQ will follow shortly.
Best,
Barry
[1]
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Role_of_the_WMF
[2]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-August/000850.ht…
-- Barry Newstead Chief Global Development Officer Wikimedia Foundation Tel:
+1-415-839-6885 x. 6634 Skype: barry.wikimedia Twitter: @bazanews