Hiya,

This is to inform you that Bishakha and I had a meeting with the team at the Akshara Centre (http://www.aksharacentre.org/), a Mumbai based NGO that works on womans rights and runs a library in Mumbai yesterday. The meeting was organised by Bishakha, who knows some of the people running the organisation, as there was some interest from their end to see if they could collaborate with us in any way. I was asked to join in as a Wikipedian to conduct a small workshop for the team at Akshara so that they could understand the principles and basics of editing.

The scope is unimaginably big. As we realised, rights issues in India are not covered much, even on English Wikipedia. We have proposed starting of a "Collaboration of the Month" initiative with them, wherein we will choose a topic (i.e. one article) where both Wikipedians involved and the NGO are comfortable with - using Akshara's library resources as references. They sounded excited about running such a COTM on a pilot basis and have suggested we organise a WikiAcademy for which they will invite interested persons to come and attend, thus making it easier for them to start off.

From our end, we are looking for atleast a couple of Wikipedians who can help support such a project online on a regular basis - the Wikipedian need not be Mumbai (or even India) based, as this is an online collaboration. Do contact Bishakha/me if your interested in helping out/ forward this to other lists where you feel we might get a response on the above.

Inputs on the above are most welcome.

Kind Regards,