Hi Folks
One of the aspects that India Program constantly works on is that the the work that your team does for and with our community is based on clear objectives, robust design and relevant progress parameters.
India Program has / is / will be undertaking a series of pilots. Pilots by nature indicate that we try innovative things out sometimes, and we may or may not always suceed. We must be bold and try them out - but we must also carefully build these pilots out and measure progress. On the main India Program meta page, I've created a tab that links to a new sub-page called Pilot Designs - where I have published 3 of these pilot designs. More will follow as they are ready, or as we undertake new work, so do add the page to your watchlists.
Basic Community Building is the work that Shiju is doing with small Indic communities - in this case, Assamese. It will show what steps can be taken to build such communities - from communication to collaboration to outreach. This work is especially relevant to small Indic communities - but there are pointers even for larger communities (including English.)
Story-telling for Community Building is the work that Noopur just announced (and as illustrated by the profile on Netha) - where we want to celebrate the diversity and magic in our community.
Supporting Community Communications Initiatives (Wikipatrika) for Community Building is the initiative just announced by Noopur to support our community's newsletter, Wikipatrika. The attempt is to see how Wikipatrika can become more participative, richer in content and more regular in publication.
Do go through these. Do also add your comments on the respective talk pages.
The constant endeavor of all the work that we do is to help community members who want to take up the various initiatives that we are piloting (with them or with other community members.) Do go through these pilot designs and if you are interested in getting involved, or if you need clarification, or if you want support - please feel free to ask for it on the talk pages or offlist to any of us.
Best
hisham
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
p.s. There is a (tiny) possibility that I might be slightly late but you'll all be in Nitika's safe hands. I shall try and my level best to be on time.
Dear all,
I'm writing with regard to Wikipatrika. For the folks who don't know, this
is the community newsletter which has come out twice (in September
2010<http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_India_Communi…>
& June 2011 <http://wiki.wikimedia.in/WikiPatrika/2011-06>) It's a
really wonderful way documenting and celebrating the amazing work done by
so many community members across so many communities in the various
projects. It helps share ideas with and helps pick up ideas from other
communities.
I think Wikipatrika is something that could be more frequent - given the
range of activities across communities - and I'd like to support it. In
this regard, I approached all the editors who were involved in the previous
2 issues to ask their interest in bringing out the next one in end April
covering Jan - Mar 2012, and to see if we can make it more regular
(potentially every quarter.) 5 community members from different languages
have already offered to help. Another community member will setup a
template that all languages can use (on wiki.wikimedia.in)
I have also started reaching out to editors who might not have been
involved before, and hence this mail.
The template for Wikipatrika will be ready only by April 2nd week. In the
meantime, can I ask whoever is interested to create a page on
their respective languages wikipedias and start sharing stories and updates
on this page. I'd encourage everyone to write these in whatever language
they are comfortable in to begin with. (Once the template is set up on
wiki.wikimedia.in, these individual pages could then be posted there.) To
start off, you could start with the following sections (which I'm
illustrating using the
Bengali<http://wiki.wikimedia.in/WikiPatrika/2011-06/Community_News/bn>
page
from a previous Wikipatrika), and just start adding content.
1. General overview
2. Bengali Wikipedia
3. Bengali Wikisource
4. Bengali Wiktionary
5. Bengali Wikibooks
6. News reports
7. Any other section(s) you want to add
Please do add as much as you want on
- Updates on the various projects
- Landmarks, birthdays, celebrations, events, conferences, etc between
Jan-Mar 2012
- Reports on outreach sessions conducted
- Links to meetups and where to find the next ones
- Please feel free to add sections that you think would be nice. I
could suggest "Featured Wikimedians" and "Featured Newbies" as examples.
Here
<http://This%20should%20go%20on%20India%20and%20Indic%20mailing%20lists%20%2…>is
how the Nepali community did it last time. After you set up the page,
please do post this on your respective village pumps or mailing lists and
any other forums so that all community members know. Please do share the
page with me (offlist) so I can help out too.
If you would like to help but are not sure how, or if you are facing any
kind of difficulties, please do not hesitate to contact me (
noopur(a)wikimedia.org)
Regards
Noopur
*Apologies for cross posting. FYI
--
*
Dear all,
To celebrate Women's History Month, I thought it would be really nice to
celebrate an Indian woman editor's story. A short story on User: Netha
Hussain was posted on the WMF
blog<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/27/wiki-women-joining-indic-languages/>
.
(Netha is an editor on Malayalam Wikipedia, has been involved in women
topics and recently coordinated the first women's
edit-a-thon<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/India_WikiWomen%27s_Edit-a-Th…>
in
India.)
While I was preparing this, I was wondering if we could make story-telling
of this nature a regular feature, and see how it can support community
building. We could do a series of short profiles of editors - in the form
of stories - covering your life as well as your wiki journey. The intent is
to reflect the diversity of our community - language, age, profession,
projects. I am going to try and bring out at least one such story every
month - but we can always try and work on as many more as we can get.
I am already looking for new story ideas and would love to hear from
interested community folks. Here is how it works. I prepare a short set
of questions and points for the story and send it across to you. Once you
reply, I draft out a story and send it back for your approval. After we
make necessary changes to the draft, I can publish it. If you are ok, we
can also look at forwarding these stories to the local media as
well. Please do write to me at nraval(a)wikimedia.org and let's start working
on your story!
Don't forget to go through the Netha's
story<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/27/wiki-women-joining-indic-languages/>;
it's really inspiring!
Regards,
Noopur Raval
Dear All,
When I wrote about the digitization in Wikisource using
DjVu<http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/digitization-of-books-in-wikisour…>
few
Indic language community members asked me the following question.
When we are able to store the books in its graphic format say PDF/DjVu
> format. what is the need to type it? why not let it be as it is, the reader
> will read it in its graphic format."
This question is very important from Indic wikimedian's perspective. The
immediate answer I could give is about the importance of *searchable* and *
reusable* text.
But when I discussed this topic with Amir Aharoni (a multi language
wikimedian, which includes Indic languages also :)). Amir shared with me
lot of other important topics about this, which helped me
to understand that digitization in Wikisource is more than
about searching and reusing.
The result of our discussion turned out to be blog post. Here it is:
http://aharoni.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/the-advantages-of-wikisource/ In
this blog post Amir discusses about the Advantages of Digital Texts in
Wikisource. Kindly share your comments.
Thanks
Shiju Alex
Dear Indic Wikimedians,
Here is a small blog post about the digitization of books using DjVu (or
about using Proofread extension).
http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/digitization-of-books-in-wikisour…
Post is also placed in metawiki at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Digitization_o…
Few Indic wiki source communities (Sanskrit and Malayalam) are using this
method extensively to digitize the books. Few other communities are not
aware about the use of such an extension. This post is just to share the
best practices from differenent Indic wiki communities.
Going forward I will be sharing these type of best practices and lessons
from various Indic language wiki communities. This is essential since in
most cases challenges, issues, and solutions are similar.
Shiju Alex
cross posting to reach pan-community; apologies if you received it from other mailing lists already
Hi Folks,
One of the essential things that India Program needs to constantly work out is keeping the community informed of the work that we are doing - so that this work is clearer but also to help cross-pollinate ideas amongst a wider set of community members who might not have been engaged on specific village pump / talk page discussion or involved in particular activities (e.g. outreach events) or wikiprojects.
We used to have a monthly IRC with the community and India Program. (For those who are not familiar with IRC, it is an Internet messaging system similar to a regular chat room. It's very simple to use and you can join in by clicking on the following link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office.) I have been remiss in conducting these for the past few months - and I'd like to make amends by restarting, with a couple of modifications.
a) I'd like to propose fortnightly instead of monthly. (I was wary of doing it any more frequently than monthly earlier because I didn't know if there would be enough on the plate to discuss. I have changed my mind now - because there is too much to discuss to cover in a single monthly session.) I'd like to propose that we do it in the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of every month at 9pm IST (which is GMT + 0530) - THOUGH NOT THIS MONTH - BECAUSE I HAVE MISSED THE TIMELINE. Just for March, we will do it on March 15th and March 29th (both at 9pm IST which is GMT + 0530)
b) I'd like to propose that we do it focussed on specific work streams instead of general. The reason I say this is that - as with many community meet-ups, folks will give time to attend a meet-up or participate in an IRC only if there is a topic of relevance to them. To that extent, we could do one IRC on Indic languages and one on Outreach & Communications. I'd start both the IRCs with a re-cap of India Programs activities for the fortnight (or so) prior to the IRC and forward from the IRC - and then we could talk about either Indic langauges or Outreach & Communications.
The March 15th one will be focussed on Indic Languages and the one on March 29th will be on Outreach & Communications.
Having said that, there is quite a bit of overlap on these topics - so feel free to join both. The more the merrier! Please do also invite anyone who is interested to know more about India Program or - even more importantly - interact with fellow Wikimedians interested in a particular activity to join in. (It's quite a lot of of fun {citation required} - and i've heard a rumour {citation required} that there was actually a romance that started on one of the IRCs...)
As always, the logs will be put up on meta for the benefit of those who can't attend and for the record.
I'll send a reminder on the day of the session and one 30 minutes before the session.
Thanks
hisham
cross-posting to reach pan-community; apologies if you have already read this from another list.
Dear All,
I am pleased to announce that Noopur Raval ([User:Noopur28] has been selected as Consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation, and will support Communications for India Program.
This position will perform 4 key functions. Firstly, it will support communications with our community. This involves a regular set of updates (such as newsletters) as well as specific communication projects such as story-telling of local community initiatives (to document experiences, celebrate successes and cross-pollinate ideas.) This is not for day-to-day program communications - which is a core part of each of our responsibilities in the India Program team. Second will be to support media & PR for local community initiatives. The single biggest challenge here will to be get more Indic language media coverage to support community building efforts. This will be done directly with community members and also in co-ordination with the India Chapter's Communications Media & PR team. The third aspect is to build and expand existing community social networks (such as WikimediaIndia on facebook) and to help with the use of social networks to support community building. Lastly, there is untapped potential of using digital outreach - to augment existing physical outreach efforts. We need to (very, very carefully) explore if we can reach out to our large and growing reader base and inform, encourage and enable them to become editors using online channels and resources.
Noopur is a community member and has supported outreach activities (in Ahmedabad & Delhi), is a member of Delhi SIG of the Chapter, has participated in community collaborations like Collaboration of the Month and has been actively trying to start GLAM in India.
Noopur is from Gandhinagar and is graduating from JNU with a Master's in Arts & Aesthetics. She has a triple honors Bachelor's in Media Studies, Literature and Psychology from Christ College, Bangalore. She has interned with Radio Mirchi, Times of India and the Centre for Internet & Society (amongst others) - as well as done some teaching assignments. She is an active blogger (including for the India Art Summit, 2011.) She has published a novella and co-authored an anthology of poems, plays & short stories and has co-presented a paper on "Wikiwars" with [User:Srikeit.] She is also an amateur photographer and has contributed to Commons as well as other platforms.
The Communications position has taken a long time to fill. The initial call for selection was in September. I reported back to the community in December that I had failed to find the right candidate and hence the delay. There were a number of deserving candidates and this selection has taken time because of the need to find the most suitable profile for a complex role. This role requires the right mix of an academic foundation in communications, domain expertise as well as adequate familiarity with our community. It also requires adaptability and strong learning skills - because so much of what we are trying to do is pioneering. I am confident that she brings the right level of experience and competencies - and I'm very excited by the opportunity of making a step jump in the impact of communications for our community.
Do join me in welcoming Noopur. She will start on March 12 and will be based in New Delhi.
Best
hisham
Dear All,
I wanted to share interesting examples of what two Indic communities are
doing to reach out to speakers of respective language, record its editing
history, improve communication, increase motivation, and inspire
participation.
Tamil and Malayalam communities prepare an annual community report. The
2011 report of Tamil and Malayalam communities are available here:
- Tamil Community 2011 annual
report<http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%…>
- Malayalam community 2011 annual
report<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%…>
(Malayalam community's report
includes report of all Malayalam wiki projects (Wikipedia, Wikisource,
Wiktionary, Wikiquotes, and Wikibooks)
Tamil community is maintaining the annual report from the year 2005.
Following are Tamil communiy's report of previous years
- Tamil Community 2005 annual
report<http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%…>
- Tamil Community 2006 annual
report<http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%…>
- Tamil Community 2007annual
report<http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%…>
- Tamil Community 2008 annual
report<http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%…>
- Tamil Community 2009 annual
report<http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%…>
- Tamil Community 2010 annual
report<http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%…>
Malayalam community published previous years report in its mailing list.
But from 2011 Malayalam community also started recording its annual editing
history in wiki itself.
(The above reports are not available in English since its aim was to
communicate to the respective language speakers. It will be good if some
volunteers translate it to English so that rest of the world can read and
understand what happened in the respective wikis)
Personally, I think these reports serve multiple purposes.
- It help the current active community to share with the larger
community (including retired or not current active editors) all the many
things that individual volunteers are doing - which gives a sense of
momentum to a community.
- It help the community to reach out to the rest of the language
speakers and tell them about what is happening in their respective language
wiki
- It allows other community members to learn from others' experiences -
and also provides a contact point for any queries they might have.
- It is very useful for media / PR - because it gives a tangible story
for the press which is newsworthy and uplifting
- it documents the editing history of community every year
My main objective behind sharing this is that I know most communities don't
do this. My guess is that many of them don't know that such a thing is
possible. Another concern that you might have is whether there is enough
to fill into an annual report. I think if you just step back and think of
all the many things that are happening in your communities, you would be
amazed by how much is actually taking place. Even if it has not happened
historically, the increased activity in India over the past few months
should reassure you that there is so much to write about. In this context,
I would specifically call out the wonderful activity levels of Assamese,
Marathi, Nepali, Odia and Sanskrit as just 5 illustrations of communities
which have load of stories to share.
If you are interested and need some help, please feel free to ask me and I
will help out.
Happy Reporting!
Shiju Alex