Hi Folks

Reminder about the IRC later today (9pm IST on March 29th.)  Join in using this link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office.

As I had indicated earlier, what we will do going forward is to publish an opening statement - which is below.  We'd like to have a rich discussion around these topics for 45 minutes and then throw it open for 15 minutes for any other topics that anyone wants to discuss.

There have been more than 22 outreach sesssions (English + some Indic languages) across India over the past 2 1/2 months.   We have been working on constantly every component of outreach.  

* Pre-session work - building supporting material (documents, presentations, handouts etc), evaluating different ways of conducting an effective outreach, using different ways to reach out to organisations with the proposal to conduct a session etc.

* Session work - adopting different techniques of doing  outreach, how do we get participants more involved during the session, how to filter out the folks so that we do the editing session only with the  genuinely interested participants, how to balance between practical and theoretical aspects of training, how much information to give out in one session etc.

* Post-session work - how do we provide editing support to the participants, how do we collect their contact information, how do we keep in touch with them on regular basis, how do we invite them to join other Wiki projects, how do we track their edit count - soon after the session, after 1 and 3 months of conducting the session etc.

We'd like to discuss these.  In the IRC, the following will be covered:

* Indic Outreach: How can we do more outreach session in Indic langauges in particular? / Can regional communities work to translate supporting material? / How do we provide more support to different language communities to conduct these sessions? 

* More Outreach:  If we are doing 7 outreach session in one month right now is there a way of us doing 10 every month? / Can we find more community members who will be willing to conduct these session? / For community members who are interested to conduct outreach sessions but think they lack confidence - is there a way we can help them? 

* Better Outreach: Can we find some volunteers who will be willing to "adopt" these newbies and give them support? . 

I'd strongly encourage all those folks who have been actively involved in conducting these sessions over the past 2 months to join this IRC. It will be great if you could share your first hand experience with the wider community on what worked, what didn't, what we could have done better etc.  I especially do want to ask Indic Wikimedians to join because we desperately need more outreach sessions in Indic languages.

We will also briefly address the early stages of the communications work - which are the storytelling and Wikipatrika support that was announced yesterday.  Given it's early days on communications, I'd prefer this IRC stay largely focussed on outreach since there is so much to work through there.

See you all there!

Apologies for sending this note this morning and not last night as I had promised.  


hisham