Hi Piyush
Many thanks for your efforts. Your report is interesting and insightful. You sound like
you had a good time too, and that's great!
I'm curious about what the student profile was - age, kind of college (IT,
engineering, arts, commerce, etc.), location of college, and anything else on the profile
of the students.
It'll be really good if you can stay in touch with those who you met and see how they
are getting along on editing. Sometimes, newbies want to edit but run into difficulties
and need a bit of hand holding.
Thanks, once again.
Hisham Mundol
India Programs - Wikimedia Foundation
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs
skype: hisham.wikimedia
gtalk: hmundol(a)wikimedia.org
twitter: @mundol
On Apr 10, 2011, at 8:38 AM, Piyush Aggarwal wrote:
A brief Report on OSSCamp at Lucknow, Dated 26-27th
March, 2011
On 26-27th march there was an OSSCamp organised at Babu Banarasi Das Group of Educational
Institutions at Lucknow. College has taken
the initiative to invite the representatives of various OpenSource communities like
Wordpress, Joomla, Mozilla Firefox, Drupal, Php etc. Wikimedia volunteers were also
invited for the event. The purpose of the event was to make students aware of the various
open source technologies and their advantages. Also, it was an effort to motivate students
to come forward and contribute.
Students from various colleges were gathered to learn and explore new and different
technologies. I went there to represent Wikipedia. My presentation was scheduled on 26th
of March, 2011 in the post lunch session. I talked about the different projects of
Wikimedia foundation, some Wikipedia statistics, Wikimedia India chapter and discussed the
role of volunteers and in the end I tried to motivate them to contribute.
Over there, I was surprised to know that awareness of the students towards Wikimedia
foundation was minimal. Most of the students over there were not even aware that they can
actually edit the contents of Wikipedia. Only couple of them knew about the other projects
of Wikimedia foundation other than Wikipedia like Wikitionary , Wikiquotes, commons etc.
After the talk, on special request of students I demonstrated the editing process in
Wikipedia and took hands on workshop of interested students. Students were very keen and
enthusiastic to learn about Wikipedia. The session went on for almost ninety minutes and I
had one to one interactions with the students. The inquisitive questions and their high
level of interest made me more motivated to explain.
Pic1:
http://tiny.cc/stu1
Pic2:
http://tiny.cc/stu2
Even after the hands on session, many students contacted with different queries. For me
also, it was wonderful learning experience. The college authorities and student organisers
namely Nitesh Sinha and Abhinav Upadhyay deserves huge round of applause for their
tireless effort for organising a successful OSSCamp.
Regards,
Piyush Aggarwal _______________________________________________
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