[Wikimediaindia-l] Announcing Hisham Mundol as WMF consultant for National Programs, India
BalaSundaraRaman
sundarbecse at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 16 03:54:20 UTC 2011
Welcome to the Wikiverse, Hisham. Hope that your participation will help advance
the movement goals in India.
Wish you all the best.
- Sundar
"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for
the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
>
>From: Barry Newstead <bnewstead at wikimedia.org>
>To: India list <wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>Cc: hisham <hisham.mundol at gmail.com>
>Sent: Tue, February 15, 2011 10:40:13 PM
>Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Announcing Hisham Mundol as WMF consultant for
>National Programs, India
>
>
>Dear colleagues, (please feel free to cross-post this to local
>lists within India)
>
>I am pleased to announce the appointment of Hisham Mundol as a
>consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation to support us in our
>program initiatives in India.
>
>As you know, the Wikimedia Foundation declared India to be a
>strategic priority during the strategic planning process [1].
>I announced our plans for the formation of an office in
>August 2010 and the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
>approved the creation of the Wikimedia India chapter in June
>2010. India is a priority for the Wikimedia movement as it has
>a strong and growing community of Wikimedians building the
>Indic and English language projects. It is a country where the
>Wikimedia movement can achieve our mission and learn important
>lessons for achieving impact elsewhere. The engagement of
>Hisham will enable the Wikimedia Foundation to pilot new
>initiatives aimed at accelerating the growth of the community
>in India. I am very happy we’ve now reached this point.
>
>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 world’s
>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.
>
>
>Hisham’s 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. The National Programs initiative
>will focus on the following areas in the first year:
> * Design and implement an India-wide program to increase
>Wikimedia’s footprint on university and college campuses with
>students and faculty with the aim of encouraging contributions
>to Wikimedia projects
> * Support the launch and implementation of
>community-initiated programs that seek to increase the editor
>base for Wikimedia projects
>
> * Engage with the community and chapter to build a strong
>relationship among these stakeholder groups and create
>communications forums that allow for effective partnerships
>As a newcomer to the Wikimedia movement, Hisham’s 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.
>
>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.
>
>Hisham was most recently a consultant with the Public Health
>Foundation of India (in a partnership with the Bill &
>Melinda Gates Foundation). He designed and implemented
>large-scale national programs on HIV/AIDS prevention. He
>worked to understand the dynamics of hard-to-reach
>communities by conducting in-depth, on-the-ground analysis
>(ask him to tell you about his experience talking to drivers
>while sitting under their trucks). The programs he designed
>and implemented sought to convince people in large numbers -
>400 million young people across the nation - to change
>very personal behaviours. While we are not tackling issues
>of such an intimate nature, we do aim to convince large
>numbers of people across the country to contribute their
>personal time to Wikimedia projects. During this
>assignment, Hisham worked closely with public, private and
>community groups (local and international) to work through
>the details of the programs and build partnerships for
>implementing them at scale. He did so in a manner that used
>persuasion rather than power to build support to move things
>forward. We think his experience navigating these varied
>groups position him well to work in the Wikimedia community.
>His earlier career was in marketing and business
>development with a number of well-known businesses: Infosys,
>Accenture, Cadbury and Unilever. This experience positions
>him well to engage with a movement and organization that is
>global in nature, in particular to work with a team that is
>based halfway around the world.
>
>
>We have scheduled an IRC chat with Hisham and myself for
>Thursday, February 17 at 22:00 India Standard Time (16:30
>UTC).
>
>
>I want to thank everyone who helped in the selection process
>that identified Hisham. It was a five month process in which
>we made an open call for consultants (using my visit in
>September to drum up interest via conversations with the
>community and the media) in India and around the world. We
>had 197 applicants from a wide range of professional
>backgrounds. Egon Zehnder’s India office, part of a leading
>global executive search firm, helped screen candidates and
>manage the process. Egon Zehnder conducted indepth
>interviews with 25 candidates based on the inputs from
>Bishakha and I who helped shortlist. I interviewed 12
>candidates via Skype in the first round and then I had the
>help of Bishakha Datta and Achal Prabhala to interview the
>top seven in person in Bangalore. Our top two candidates
>met with Sue and Erik in Delhi and then Hisham met with
>the entire WMF leadership team and a broad group of staff
>members in San Francisco.
>
>We are very happy with the selection of Hisham. We recognize
>that we did not manage to hire someone from inside the
>Wikimedia community or the open source community. We did
>look for people with this background and one of our
>finalists was a long time open source advocate. We also
>engaged with a long time Wikimedian for a role, though he
>ultimately decided to withdraw for personal reasons. We are
>committed to seeing Hisham integrate himself into the
>community quickly and to seeing him add people to his team
>from the community. We hope that the community will engage
>actively with him to bring him into the fold. Hisham will
>most definitely bring fresh perspectives to the movement
>that will help us grow and change for the better.
>
>Please join me in welcoming Hisham to the Wikimedia
>movement.
>Note: An FAQ will follow shortly.
>Best,
>Barry
>[1] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Role_of_the_WMF
>[2]
>http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-August/000850.html
>-- Barry Newstead Chief Global Development Officer Wikimedia Foundation Tel:
>+1-415-839-6885 x. 6634 Skype: barry.wikimedia Twitter: @bazanews
>
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