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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sunil Abraham <sunil(a)mahiti.org>
Date: 11 నవం 2015 4:07 PM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] CIS-A2K 2.0 and new Programme Associates
To:
Dear Wikimedians,
It gives me immense pleasure to announce that CIS-A2K is implementing its new model of
working - CIS-A2K version 2.0. This model takes on board many of the criticisms that have
been made of our work so far.
We will be eliminating the role of Program Director in this version, and I (from July,
2015) am the person at the Centre for Internet and Society in charge of programming under
the WMF grant. Nirmita Narasimhan (from this month onwards), Policy Director will be
assisting me. This will result in a reduction of the budget.
As part of this version 2.0, CIS-A2K would try to engage communities towards an in depth
analysis of community engagement, and take A2K programme closer to the community by
contracting Program Associates (PA). Each of the five focus language areas(FLAs): Kannada,
Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu will have one PA each working from the city or town
where most of the community members operate. This will help CIS-A2K understand the
language community more closely and work in accordance with needs of the community. Thus
avoiding duplication of resources and bringing focus to the activities organised. The PAs
will be directly managed and be held accountable by members of each language community who
will assign any work they want to be done. CIS-A2K team will provide an additional layer
of supervision and oversight. This will reduce need for CIS staffers to travel from
Bengaluru for every event/activity.
In addition, the existing employees at CIS-A2K would now be working for all the five FLAs
in a more specialized role as follows:
Pavanja : Would be responsible for creating movement resources such as handbook, tutorial
videos, etc, and shall plan for creation, printing and distribution.
Rahmanuddin : Would operate as technical liaison person.
Subhashish : Will help Wikipedians create blogs on Wikimedia blog and report all events
happening around, along with media publication and coverage of events organised by the
communities and A2K team.
Tanveer : Would be responsible for all insitutional partnerships and content donation
activities. Communities are encouraged to get in touch with Tanveer if they want any
specific institution to be explored for Wikipedia activities.
This will enable the above core A2K team members to have multiple touch points with the
FLA Wikimedia communities. Unlike the previous model where a single Programme Officer was
solely responsible for activities for a FLA.
Abhinav and Tito Dutta would be Program Associates and will be working on Marathi
Workplan and policy level discussions respectively.
We have ensured that the PA selection process is done by community consensus.
Announcements were sent out on the FLA Wikipedia village pumps in the 2nd and 3rd week of
August.
A community nomination was expected to set the process rolling, but with multiple people
applying, A2K team asked the applicants to translate some of the important movement
resources documents (These were handbooks regarding Editing Wikipedia, Illustrating
Wikipedia, GLAM handbook, Free licenses handbook and so on) to assess the applicants
understanding of Wikimedia projects.
The translations sent by the participants were put up for community members to review
(these were uploaded by candidates on
commons.wikimedia.org). The reviews did not offer
any decisive inputs regarding finalising PA position. It was also felt based on visit and
conversations with Telugu Wikipedia community members, that a selection committee should
be constituted for selecting PA for each language.
Telugu -
Telugu announcement was made on 19 August, Candidate A applied on 20 August. As this was
the only application, the application deadline was extended to 15 September and an
announcement in this regard was put out on 7 September on Telugu Wikipedia village pump.
Candidate B and Candidate C submitted their applications on 26 September and 28 September
respectively. Mr. Ravi Vyzasatya, Dr. Rajsekhar and Ms. Sujatha were part of the selection
committee. Selection committee members and their profiles:
Ravi Vyzasatya: Mr. Ravi Vyzasatya with username వైజాసత్య is one of the earliest Telugu
Wikipedians and sysop on Telugu Wikipedia and Telugu Wiktionary. He has been a Wikipedian
for more than 10 years. His areas of interest are research articles, biographies of
personalities. He is instrumental in creation of village articles on Wikipedia using his
bot, which has created close to 24,000 articles on Telugu Wikipedia. He also proposes
rules and policies on Telugu Wikipedia. By profession he is a researcher with expertise in
Molecular Biology, Immunology, Cell Biology.
Rajasekhar: Dr. Rajasekhar, username Rajasekhar1961, has been a Telugu Wikipedian for
over 8 years and is a bureaucrat & sysop on Telugu Wikipedia, sysop on Telugu
Wikisource and Telugu Wiktionary. He was one of the senior most Wikipedians with interest
in wide range of areas like Biology, Telugu language, Yoga, Telugu personalities, Medicine
and Transportation. He is a pathologist by profession. Interesting thing is that he has
turned his lab into Wikipedia help centre and has provided his phone number publicly for
anyone to call and know about Wikipedia.
Sujatha: Ms. Sujatha Thummapudi, username T.sujatha, has been a Telugu Wikipedian for
over 9 years and is a sysop on Telugu Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikisource. She has been
writing articles on spirituality, religion, places and so on. She was part of the
Lilavathi's daughters project and lead the project in Telugu. She, along with her
husband Mr. Sriramamurthy garu has been actively working in Te Wiktionary, Te Wikipedia
and Te Wikisource as well.
Mr. Ravi Vyzasatya asked the three candidates two questions and the candidates answered
the same on Tewiki village pump. Later A2K team asked the selection committee to send us
their decision.
The selection committee for Telugu came to a consensus and selected Mr. Pavan Santhosh as
the candidate for the post of PA for Telugu for a period of 3 months on trial basis. If
the performance is satisfactory during this period, we can continue with him. His profile
is given below:
Pavan Santhosh: He has been a very active Telugu Wikipedian with more than 16000 edits to
his credit and has worked extensively to improve content and quality in Telugu Wikipedia,
Wikisource & Wiktionary. He was the joint secretary of the committee that organized
the 11th anniversary of Telugu Wikipedia. He has been an Individual Engagement grantee
from Wikimedia Foundation for the project “Making Telugu content accessible”. He has
organized and co-organized many meetups, events and outreach programs.
Kannada -
The announcement for PA was made on Kannada Wikipedia village pump on August 12, It was
postponed twice to 15 September and 15 October. The decision was given by selection
committee in last week of October.
Selection committee members and their profiles:
Tejas Jain (User:Teju2friends): Software engineer by profession. Has been an active
Kannada Wikipedian since 2007. Has more than 4500 edits in Kannada Wikipedia, about 250 in
Kannada Wiktionary, about 35 in Kannada Wikiquote. He has also contributed to other
Wikimedia projects. He has written useful scripts. He has participated in many Kannada
Wikipedia events, meetups and conducted outreach programs.
Harish M G (User:M G Harish): Software engineer by profession. Has been an active Kannada
Wikipedian since 2006. He has more than 2700 edits to his credit in Kannada Wikipedia,
about 105 in Kannada Wikiquote. He has been an administrator of Kannada Wikipedia. he has
written useful scripts. He has participated in many Kannada Wikipedia event, meetups and
conducted many outreach programs.
Vikas Hegde (User:Vikashegde): Software engineer by profession. Has been an active
Kannada Wikipedian since 2009. He has nearly 800 edits to his credit in Kannada Wikipedia
and about 35 edits in Kannada Wikiquote. He has also contributed to other Wikimedia
projects. He has been the major contributor to some projects in Kannada Wikipedia. He has
participated in many Kannada Wikipedia events and meetups. He is also a well known Kannada
blogger and written some useful blogs about using Kannada in IT.
The selection committee has agreed to appoint Mr. Ananth Subray for a period of 3 months
on trial basis. If the performance is satisfactory during this period, we can continue
with him. Here is a profile of Mr. Ananth Subray. As he is a student, he would be employed
as an intern.
Ananth Subray (User:Ananth subray): Mr. Ananth Subray is a 2nd year BSc. (PCM) student at
Christ University, Bengaluru. He has been part of the Wikipedia Education Program in the
university from last 2 years. Having been recommended by the faculty and his other fellow
batch-mates, he also helped us to run the Wikisource activities for the Education Program
for the junior batches in his university. Ananth is fluent in Kannada, Hindi and Telugu
apart from English. Even though new in the Wikimedia community, Ananth has been a fast
learner and is active as a Wikimedian. He has participated in the Mediawiki
Train-the-Trainer programme conducted by CIS-A2K this year.
Konkani
The Konkani Wikipedia community has selected Ms. Melissa Simoes as the consensus
candidate to become the next PA for Konkani. Here is her profile.
Melissa Simoes (User:Melissa Simoes on
gom.wikipedia.org): She is a graduate and has a
degree in education. She has worked as teacher in a high school at Goa. She has been a
very active Konkani Wikipedian and has contributed whole heartedly to Konkani Wikipedia.
She had important contribution in making Konkani Wikipedia go live. Writing poems is one
of her hobbies.
Odia
The announcement for Odia Wikipedia PA was made on 14th August, but was postponed to 10th
October as one of the previous selection committee members requested that he would want to
apply for the post. A new selection committee was formed. The selection committee gave
their decision on 1 November.
Selection committee members and their profiles
Mrutyunjaya(User:MKar): most active Wikimedian in the Odia Wikimedia community so far.
Admin on Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource. Been active in building the
"WikiTungi" (Odia Wikimedia user group) in Nalconagar where he has brought many
Wikimedians onboard. Active in conducting community surveys, designing and implementing
WikiProjects and WEP; discussion and content acquisition for Wikisource from many
authors.
Shitikantha Dash(User:ଶିତିକଣ୍ଠ ଦାଶ): OR WT admin, active in WP and WT. created over 100K
words by using a 1930 lexicon, created an encoding converter for Shreelipi Oriya
font-Unicode conversion. MWTTT participant and active tech contributor in OR WM community.
Currently pursuing MTech in Rourkela, Odisha.
Harihar Prasad Satapathy(User:Hpsatapathy): Works in the court at Rayagada. Active since
2014 on OR WP and EN WP. The articles he created about Rayagada distt. been the highest
no. of articles ever created about any distt. on OR WP.
The selection committee has agreed to appoint Mr. Sailesh Patnaik for a period of 3
months on trial basis. If the performance is satisfactory during this period, we can
continue with him. Here is a profile of Mr. Sailesh Patnaik. As he is a student, he would
be employed as an intern.
Sailesh Patnaik(User: Saileshpat): Mr. Sailesh Patnaik is a Mechanical Engineering
student at KIIT University, Bhubaneswar. He has been active in Wikimedia Movement from
last three years. He is also involved and coordinating with CIS-A2K from 2013 for the
growth of Odia Wikipedia and strengthening the community. He is already handling the
social media accounts and outreach programs for Odia Wikipedia.
Hope the Wikipedia communities in India will continue to guide us and hold as accountable
with their feedback and criticism during A2K version 2.0 so that we can continue to evolve
and change the programme.
Best wishes,
Sunil
Ph: +91 9611100817