[Wikimediaindia-l] India Programs: Update

[hisham mundol]

Dear Folks,

I'm writing to update you on the community meets held last week.  (I had 
visited Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore along with Barry.)

First of all, thank you to everyone who came over.  Appreciate your time 
and also the educative, informative, engaging and wide-ranging 
discussions we had.  I look forward to carrying on these conversations 
going forward.  I also look forward to meeting up with the community 
across a wider set of towns and cities.

I also wanted to share some initial thoughts that I had.

a) Communication

    I think it will be useful to open a regular channel of
    communication.  My current thinking is that this could be in the
    form of a monthly IRC, as well as periodic emails (probably once a
    fortnight, but more or less frequently depending on relevance.) 
    Would be good to get your thoughts.  Also, would 8pm (India time)
    for 1 hour on the first Thursday of every month work well for the IRC?

    In addition to the above, my contact details are the bottom of this
    mail.  Do feel free to reach out; I'd love to hear from you.

b) Outreach

    A lot of the discussions that we had were centered around outreach
    activities.  There were 3 stories that I thought were particularly
    insightful which I wanted to share with you.

        * A 67 year old gentleman in Chembur (Mumbai) heard about
          Wikipedia in Kannada from a Wikimedian.  He started
          contributing because he thought it would be an novel way of
          spending his free time.  He said that it now keeps him
          occupied doing something that interests him - and it has
          reignited his family's respect for him.

        * A young student of Symbiosis in Pune said he discovered that
          he could edit while playing an online computer game - when
          some Japanese gamers told him how he could pitch in and
          contribute articles on the game's characters.

        * A young guy in Bangalore spoke about how a friend of his
          attended the 10th do - and came back and told him that he
          could contribute articles in Oriya.  He's started contributing.

    These 3 stories are familiar to many of you, and they are but 3 of
    100s if not 1000s of similarly awesome tales.  They are also
    illustrative of the kind of impact that outreach has.  Personally, I
    found them both inspiring and thought-provoking.  Here's what they
    have triggered in my head.  (...and I must confess I have more
    questions than answers right now!)

        * Outreach takes time and effort.  Given that it conducted by
          volunteers such as yourselves, there's always going to be
          limits to how much you can be devote; you all have day
          jobs/personal lives to lead.  Therefore, how can we improve
          the odds of impact?  It starts of with saying every single
          outreach activity must be regarded as precious and every
          attempt must be made to help realize the fullest potential of
          the initiative.  If that's the philosophy, then how does one
          better understand the audience and, therefore, calibrate
          messages as appropriately as possible.  (Also, and this is
          from my personal experience in community mobilization and
          outreach messaging, it's very easy to get tempted into
          providing multiple messages.  ...even more so when it comes to
          Wikimedia when there are so many incredible stories to tell. 
          ...but audiences very rarely take out more than 1 or 2 key
          points.) /Given this, how does one identify and focus on these
          key messages?  For instance, should the message be different
          when talking to IT versus arts students?  Should the tone of
          the message be different when talking to 18 years olds as
          opposed to 30 year olds?  Can outreach kits be developed?  Can
          these include some kind of capability building?/

        * Outreach requires a feedback loop.  Currently, while outreach
          is happening frequently and widely, it is physically difficult
          to stay in touch after the event. (I heard about an event in
          Trichy where 65 people attended.  It'd be physically
          impossible for one or two individuals to regular communicate
          with all of them.) /Is there a way that we can open some kind
          of simple and low-resource channel to stay in touch with
          people who have attended outreach meets.  This feedback loop
          could potentially include what message they took out from the
          event, whether that got them going to start contributing (and
          if not, why), and if they started, how things were going.  Can
          this be done online in some manner?  How do the results get
          shared with those who conducted the outreach?/

        * Potential contributors are everywhere.  They're not only in IT
          colleges, though these are significant.  Anecdotally, I
          suspect there might be greater age diversity in the India
          community as compared to the rest of the world (though I don't
          currently have evidence for this.)  One thing is for sure,
          there's opportunity all over the place. For instance, any of
          our population segment (e.g., 18-25, 25-35, 60+ etc.) are so
          huge, they're bigger than many, many countries. /Wouldn't it
          be really interesting to see how they can be reached out to,
          and the relative results?  Also, given the enormous potential,
          what are high-scale, highly-scalable models that can be piloted?/

    As I said earlier, I don't have answers to these but am excited
    about working on making an attempt at articulating these.

c) Other Bright Sparks

    I'm also sharing these examples I heard of because they are quite
    remarkable.

    * Some guys in Pune are pursuing an incredible goal of installing an
      offline edition in every school in Pune.  Mind-boggling given
      there are 10,000 schools in and around Pune!

    * A professor in Jadhavpur University has conducted a 2 day session
      on editing Wikipedia for his students, and has now integrated
      editing Wikipedia articles into the academic plan for his students.

d) Chapter Discussions

    Barry and I met up with the Chapter and discussed how we can work
    collaboratively for the community.

e) Next Steps

    In terms of next steps, specifically with regard to outreach, I'd
    like to study past outreach efforts with Wikimedians and
    identify/design about 5 pilots that we can explore.  I hope to
    identify these pilots and flesh them out to the richest possible
    extent in the next two weeks. I'm going to request anyone and
    everyone to share examples that you think are relevant.  More on
    this in the IRC.

It'd be wonderful to hear your thoughts on these and any other aspects.  
(btw, if you prefer to write to me directly, my email ID is 
hmundol at wikimedia.org)

There's amazing opportunity for Wikimedia in India.  I'm excited and 
looking forward to serving the community to support taking Wikimedia 
project to even greater heights.

Thank you for your time.

Kind Regards,
-- 
/hisham/
*India Programs - Wikimedia Foundation*

mobile : +91 750 300 1971
skype : hisham.wikimedia
google talk: hmundol at wikimedia.org

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