[Foundation-l] Announcing Hisham Mundol as WMF consultant for National Programs, India

[Barry Newstead]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 9:32 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Barry Newstead wrote:
> > As I have mentioned in the past, we have a lot of momentum in India but
> we
> > have a long way to go to achieve our full potential as a movement.
>  Indians
> > represent 4% of the world¹s Internet users today (and this share is
> > growing), yet they only represent 1.5% of page edits on Wikipedia. We
> should
> > be able to rapidly increase this share - across all projects - and expand
> > readership in a corresponding fashion.
>
> To what end? What's the virtue of going after India?
>

The end is the achievement of Wikimedia's vision and the movement's
priorities of increasing participation and reach.  India represents a
significant share of all human beings and a larger share of all human beings
living in a relatively free and uncensored environment.

>
> > Hisham¹s title will be Consultant, India National Programs.  He will
> report
> > to me.  His role will be to design and implement specific pilot programs
> > that encourage many more Indians to become contributors to our projects
> in
> > Indic languages as well as English.
>
> Is this position a staffer or a contractor?
>

Contractor/consultant

>
> > As a newcomer to the Wikimedia movement, Hisham¹s first task will be to
> > deepen his understanding of us: our history, goals, values, culture and
> > mission. To that end, he will be spending the coming weeks (not months!)
> in
> > learning mode: Hisham and I will be meeting with community members in
> > Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore on Feb 23-25 and then Hisham will join
> community
> > meetings across the country as they occur. Hisham will also spend time in
> > San Francisco with the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as with
> > other like-minded individuals and organizations and he will attend the
> > chapter conference in Berlin.
>
> So Hisham has never edited a Wikimedia wiki? I'm curious how much of a
> factor "having a familiarity with Wikimedia" was in choosing an individual
> for this role. Can you elaborate?
>

 We had very few candidates from the Wikimedia community apply, so in the
end most of the candidates we were looking at had some familiarity, but that
was limited and didn't differentiate them from each other in a way that was
meaningful vs. other dimension such as the ability to design and implement
national scale programs or the ability to work in an environment with a
range of stakeholders.  These dimensions were big differentiators.

>
> > Hisham will be creating a workspace on strategy wiki where he will share
> > what he is learning and develop the core elements of the action plan
> going
> > forward. We encourage active community engagement on this wiki. We aim to
> > move to action quickly and welcome input and guidance from across the
> > community.
>
> The strategy wiki was intended to be used to create a five-year strategic
> plan for Wikimedia. He should be using Meta-Wiki for cross-project
> coordination, right?
>

WMF has been using strategy wiki for some of our ongoing projects.  I'm open
to alternatives, so long as we are on public wikis, which Meta is.

>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
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-- 
Barry Newstead
Chief Global Development Officer
Wikimedia Foundation