I contributed to the Kannada section of the newsletter last time and going by my experience It'd be nice if more people from the community are involved in this effort. Rather than 'recruiting' or handpicking people to do this, it'd be nice if the effort happens on a wiki (wikimedia.in perhaps?) and is opened up to the entire community for editing. Given that the nature of contribution by editors to the wiki is dependent on their free time, no editor is 'active' all the time.

And looks like this is being funded now:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_IN/Wiki_Community_development_in_India_and_newsletter

I see that Tinu and Shiju as the contact persons for this grant. Going by the grants page, $8000 has been set aside?

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 6:58 AM, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear All,

As all of you know, the first edition of the Wikimedia India Community Newsletter was released by Barry Newstead on 2010 September.

The wikimedians  associated with the Newsletter know that much effort had put behind to bring out the first edition. We all are happy to see that the newsletter is well received by Wikimedians across the world. There were many obstacles faced while we were working on the first edition. But the community was able to overcome all these and bring out the first edition. There are many lessons learned during this process.

Now almost 3 months had passed after we released the first edition. It is important that this initiative needs to be carried forward. In the past 2 months many people have asked me about the second edition of the Newsletter. Even though I voluntarily coordinated the various activities for the first edition, I am no longer in a position to continue that for the future editions. It is better to form a team of active Indian Wikimedians to coordinate the various activities of the Wikimedia India Newsletter.

I request the help and support from different Indian language wiki communities to take this initiative forward. The idea is to form a team with 2 or 3 active users from each language community and coordinate the activities for the Wikimedia India Newletter. Srikanth Lakshmanan has informed me that he will help me to form the initial setup. Once the initial setup is formed the complete responsibility of the Newsletter rest with this Newsletter team.

Eligibility: The only criteria that needs to be fulfilled to be part of this initiative is,  the person must be an active wikimedian in any of the Indian language wiki community. The person needs to be part of the language community and should be able to coordinate with the respective language community to prepare content for the Newsletter. The respective language community can decide which active users can be part of the Newsletter team.  

Please send a mail to me (shijualexonline@gmail.com) and Srikanth (srik.lak@gmail.com) so that we can take this forward.

Thanks
Shiju Alex

--
Hari Prasad Nadig
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