Hey folks

The next India Program IRC (2nd for April) is scheduled for Thursday 19th April at 9 p.m. IST.  Do join us using this link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office.  

We'll be discussing Outreach, Communications and Education in this one. Here is what we plan to discuss this time:

Outreach
 
Over the past few months we have conducted several outreach sessions and have been able to curate outreach standard presentation decks, best practices and tips. Now we want to assist community members in adopting/adapting these to conduct effective outreach sessions in their respective cities/languages. We'll be soon working on 2 aspects for increasing the number of outreach sessions we are doing on Indic languages but we need your help on this:

1. Start translating outreach supporting documents to Indic languages - To start with we want Indic language community members to help us translate outreach documents and presentations to Indic languages.

2. Create opportunities for Indic outreach - We have been mailing/calling a lot of institutes to organize a Wikipedia session (see list here)[1] in their regional language but we have not able to get as many outreach sessions as we'd like since they feel more comfortable corresponding in their own regional language. We want help from Indic langauge editors who are interested to do more outreach in their regional languages/cities to help us reach out to these institutes. 

I'd request all the Indic language editors who want to help us out on either of the two points mentioned above to show up on the IRC  or write to us offlist since we'll be discussing ways of doing effective outreach in regional languages.


Communications: Wikipatrika:
6 communities (Assamese, Gujarati, Marathi, Nepali,Odia, Telugu ) have already created Wikipatrika pages on their respective Wikipedias. The new template for Wikipatrika is up here.[2]  In tomorrow's outreach, we could discuss ideas and suggestions to make Wikipatrika more useful. We could also discuss any problems that community members maybe facing.

Communications: Odia Social Media pilot:
As proposed earlier, here's[3] the social media pilot to support the Odia community members. The end result of this pilot is to attract more newbies and introduce them to the Wikiverse. This pilot is to try out effective messaging strategies to use a platform like Facebook optimally and try to recruit more editors to the Odia Wikipedia. The most important nuance is that we have built a draft social media messaging strategy and plan to work closely with the Odia community to implement it - through the community members.  We hope to discuss this plan and get your inputs on it. 

As always, the first 45 minutes will be focused on these and the last 15 minutes will be open to any other topic.
Hope you all can join us.

(For those who can't join, the logs will be put up the next morning at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/IRC_meeting_2012-04-19

Thanks



[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Correspondence
[2] http://wiki.wikimedia.in/WikiPatrika/2012-05/Community_News
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Social_Media


--
Noopur Raval