ICC2014

Hi everybody!

India Community Consultation 2014, Day 1, Saturday, October 4th 2014

Venue: Mövenpick Hotel, Bangalore

Let's pick a hashtag: #WMINCC2014 ?

Consultation word?


 * 1) WMINCC2014 would be more apt? great!

Introductions
Facilitator reads out this poem by Rabindranath Tagore with line "where knowledge is free". http://allpoetry.com/Where-The-Mind-Is-Without-Fear

Task 1

Cards have been handed over to write.

Yellow for Name/call me/role in WMC since .... years.

Green for writing "WMC is important to me because..."

What should happen here that I will go back a satisfied person .... (Blue)

What should NOT happen here and I take responsibility to see that it does not happen... (Pink)

In two groups bring back summary of 2/3/4 on flip chart

Well, this is a punishment for someone who's better used to typing than writing! :-)

Now everyone's busy putting up the cards on a board. Mr. Sethi wants a summary from this.

The cards will now be read out. Do we get to know who's written each of these? No. But we can ID these later, says Viswa.

Group 1 results
Wikimedia community is important to me because:

its largest free knowledge source

comunity oriented nature, collaborative

addictive

biggest knowledge platform

What should happen in this meeting for me to go back satisfied?

planning and agenda setting for each community

vision and role for each community

steps towards plan of action

shared understanding of the movement, of the challenges faced, and agreed paths forward.

how to reach the goals?

clear agreement on WHO does what

What shouldn't happen in this meeting, and I am commiting to see that it doesn't:

no lamenting the past

nobody should beat up on anybody

be civil, no heated arguments

volunteerism should not be ignored

should not appear as if a consensus will be achieved from this meeting. Should not be a whitewash.

no forceful one-sided decisions

Group 2 results
WMC is important because --


 * Knowledge shaping


 * collaboration


 * importance on a grander scale


 * builds collective knowledge


 * brings knowledge to regional languages

What should happen in this meeting for me to go back satisfied?


 * Collaboration


 * Civil, honest

What should happen in this meeting for me to go back satisfied?

Be civil - not fighting and be honest (let's ask the hard questions)

Transparency from all sides

Need a road map and clarity on road maps.

What projects have been kicked off

Better support for Individuals and Community in transparent and unbiased way.

What shouldn't happen in this meeting, and I am committing to see that it doesn't

No in-fighting, no personal attacks

no delving into the past

No handwaving without conrete objective results

^^^ The above needs to be recorded better! many points missed out. CC: Vishnu. Yes :) Have put Arun's comments below - should we move it up? Probably, yes.

What shouldn't happen in this meeting, and I am commiting to see that it doesn't:

No personal attacks

no delving on past

Arun Ram says -

What worked and what did not work

We should not repeat the mistakes that we have done in the past

Agree on game changing projects

HPN: The individuals and community should get better support and more unbiased and transparent support. Also focus on bettering individual level support.

Anivar: WMF should look at supporting community beyond WMIN and CIS. Arun Ram-Receiving foreign funding directly is a challenge.

TASK 2

Quickly looking at the past and as Community members:

name 3 things we are proud of as a community & 2 things we regret, in buzz groups of 8-9 people

Bring results on cards for prouds. (WHITE) and regrets (BLUE)

Mr. Sethi requests everyone to look at the past quickly and as community members, and to list out:

"3 Prouds"

"2 Sorry" till now.

This needs to be submitted in buzz groups of five.

The results are to be brought on cards for prouds (WHITE) and Sorry (BLUE).

Table 1
(Viswanath BK, Nikita, Ahmed Nisar, Pavan Santosh, Pranay Raj, Sowmyan, Rahmanuddin)

Proud Moments :

1) The community itself which is strong, good and collaborative

2) Outreach events

3) Decennial Celebrations

4) Ups in the stats pertaining to number of editors, quality of articles

Sorry Moments:

1)  Collaborate with Government

2)  Failed to convert to thematic groups into wikipedians

Table 2
(Ansuman Giri, Mrutyunjaya Kar, Subas Chandra Rout, Tito Dutta, T. Vishnu Vardhan, Omshivprakash & Karthik Nadar)

Proud moments
1) Wiki Conference India 2011.

2) WLM Winner from India.

3) Release of huge content under free license (Mysore University, Goa University, Karnataka Cultural Dept, NCERT books reliease under CC licenses/Other content Donataion).

4) Wikipedia TTT program.

5) Wiki 10 across many cities in India.

6) Small Communities driving large projects in India tirelessly.

7) User:Sitush - one of the best contributor for India relevant content - discovered to be a British Citizen.

8) Wikipedia in college and University curriculum (e.g. Bangalore, Christ University and Surana College)

Sorry moments
1) India Education Program Debacle.

2) CIS A2K first Grant is given without Community Consultation.

3) Decline of WikiPatrika; Last published in 2012 May.

4) Lack of next-gen Leadership in Indic Language Wikipedias; Burnt Out of Long term contributors.

Table No 4
(Subha, Satdeep, Darshan Shankar Kandolkar, Sushant, Vihan*, Dhaval, Manoj, Anivar)

Proud moments

 * 1) NCERT books release under CC license/other content donations by govt/organisations


 * 1) Wikipatrika (cross community generated newsletter) # New Wiki projects as well as Indic community members winning global competetions


 * 1) WLM and Umepedia Challenge Winners from India. (Not Included)

Sorry moments

 * 1) Active user community burn-outs


 * 1) Not much  govt. level policy changes towards freeknowledge  . It is ignored

3) Decline of WikiPatrika; Last published in 2012 May.

4) Lack of next-gen Leadership in Indic Language Wikipedias; Burnt Out of Long term contributors.

Table No 4
(Subha, Satdeep, Darshan Shankar Kandolkar, Sushant, Vihan*, Dhaval, Manoj, Anivar)

Proud moments

 * 1) NCERT books release under CC license/other content donations by govt/organisations


 * 1) Wikipatrika (cross community generated newsletter) # New Wiki projects as well as Indic community members winning global competetions


 * 1) WLM and Umepedia Challenge Winners from India. (Not Included)

Table No.7
Prouds:

Samskrit Wikipedia grew from Zero to 4 Full-fledged projects Sorry:

Tea Break
Activity : You are given a card, just find out some details about the person.

I met a rocket scientist! - Abhay

Reimbursements

 * 1) Get the form from Garfield, fill it out


 * Fill it out with itemised costs


 * Attach receipts where you have them, scan and email those you don't have receipts for later (to gbyrd@wikimedia.org), or put down the itemised costs if you don't have receipts


 * 1) Return the form to Garfield tonight (Oct 4) at dinner time, by 7pm


 * 1) Garfield, Anasuya and Asaf will do reimbursements tomorrow morning (Oct 5) from 8-9am in the meeting room (Davos)

Session 2 ; Day 1
Creating the future: vision and roadmap[s]

SESSION 3

Asaf's presentation
Asaf presents "Wiki Maturation Lifecycle (as flower)"

We need this presentation to be circulated. CC: Asaf

where he is giving analogy of Wikipedian's life to that of a flower.

Session 4

(5 pm to 6 pm)

What are the two things we must stop doing to achieve better results

What are the three things we should start doing so that the sorries are avoided

What are the two things we must continue which we are proud of..

What are our special needs that need to be taken care of? (support needed)

Work in groups:

Bring results in (field of action) in the next day:

Bloomers
(Sowmyan, Selva Kumar, Ravi, Anivar, Viswa, Manoj, Rahim, Pranay, Viswanadh, Bala, Sibi, Nisar, Jayanta, Pavan, Muzammil, Abhishek and Vishnu)

[Communities represented - Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, Urdu & Hindi]

What are the two things we must stop doing to achieve better results

- Not alienate new users. We need to seriously look into this.

- WMF Engineering should not force changes without community consultation. These have potential to kill the small communities. Opt-in and pilots are essential for software feature changes.

What are the three things we should start doing so that the sorries are avoided :

- Create a welcoming environment for new users.

- Deletion poilicy should be re-looked along with creating new user friendly policies.

- Forming technology road map suitable for low bandwidth regions like India in Indian languages.

- Find better ways of recognizing the Wikimedian's efforts and look at incentive mechanisims.

What are the two things we must continue which we are proud of..

- Something like Train the Trainer programs and inter-Indic community programs and meet-ups (which are intensive)

- Having regional conferences.

- Continuing the organic growth path.

- Localization.

What are our special needs that need to be taken care of? (support needed)

- See below language wise details...

- Simplify the editing process with technical improvements

Work in groups: Bring results in (field of action) in the next day:

Tamil

 * to be copy pasted by Ravi

1) Acquisition of DSAL University of Chicago content for TA Wikitionary

2) Tamil Wikisource - Evolve a model for content absorption from already available digitization projects. Grants/partnerships with organizations like RMRL, Tamil Virtual Academy and so on...

3) Adopt affiliate organization model for Outreach. Eg. FSFTN, INFITT,

4) Technical needs - OCR, Spell checker, TTS. Support for the IEG proposals from Tamil.

5) Offline events - Seek Human resource from WMIN or CIS-A2K for logistics, admin, Grant writing and reporting (Reduce Admin overhead by assigning Program Officers from CIS-A2K or WMIN on request)

6) User Groups for Srilankan Tamils, Malayasian Tamils and Singaporean Tamils, etc... +France, Diaspora

7) Concentrate on Sister projects of Tamil Wikimedia than focus on Tamil Wikipedia - Leave Tamil Wikipedia as it is - it has good organic growth.

8) Extensive community consultation before rolling out technical changes like ULS.

9)Make concentrated effort to bridge Gender Gap in Wikipedia and its sister projects

Malayalam
1) Bandwidth issues for users

2) Wikipedia Zero to solve access issues

3) Low bandwidth solutions

4) Easy support for Outreach programs - Eg. Travel support, etc with less hassels

5) Regular supply of swags and popularizing the brand Wikipedia - Wikimedia handbook, stickers, and so on...

6) Library and Resource Journals access to Malayalam Wikimedians, like JSTOR, etc. for improving citations

7) OCR, TTS, spell checker and other Indic language computing related tools.

8) Reimagine GLAM as per Indian context

9) Recognition of various movement partners (more plurality and diversity) - Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, Grandhashala sangam, Kerala Sahitya Academy, Kweala Sastra Sahitya Parishat etc

Hindi
Problems - Technical

Frequent problem with gadgets as seen in the Village pump discussion regarding Twinkle and Hotcat (Cf: http://bitly.com/twinkleprob)

Non-inclusion of Hindi on Wikidata Terminator (Cf: http://bitly.com/wtnohindi)

Non-inclusion of Hindi in some of the enquiry tools such as most viewed articles lists (http://bitly.com/wikitrends2013)

Special Needs - Need for tie-up / Collaboration :

Wikipedia Education Programs / Outreach: Possible institutions to be approached:

Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University of Journalism and Communication, Bhopal

Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University, Wardha, Maharashtra.

Central Institute of Hindi, Agra

Availing readily available opportunities -

“Bihar on Wikipedia” (http://bitly.com/biharonwp) announced by former Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar – can definitely boost the number of active users if properly channelled.

WikiSammelan (Hindi Community Conference-)

Based on a opinion-gathering exercise, I asked for opinions on holding Hindi Wiki Sammelan on Hindi Wikipedia Village Pump (http://bitly.com/archive34).

There was perfect unanimity on the need for the event.

Suggested locations:

Delhi

Any metro city in India

Greater Noida

Bhopal

Bhilai

Mauritius

Pune

Telugu
1) Most of the points covered in Malayalam and Tamil apply to Telugu

2) Content acquisition remains the same - SVK, PSTU,

3) Affiliate models - Thematic approach - Journalism students, etc..

4) Open Telugu project similar to Open Tamil

5) (Essential?) Policies across Indic Wikimedia projects

6) Discussion & Sharing Space for Indic language communities

7) Policy white papers and templates - Best practices need to be shraed across Indic Wiki communities. Replication Wiki for processes, templates, documentation, etc.

8) Well defined and simplified manuals for Grants, etc.

9) Idea exchange across Indic Wikimedia communities

10) Access to libraries for Wikipedians as research scholars

11) Deeming Wikipedians as press for culture dept concessions in travel, etc

Bangla
1) Most of the points common with other communities

2) Outreach beyond Kolkata

3) GLAM project in WB - Digitization of Bangla books in local libraries

4) Tie-up with Bangladesh community and mutually help each other

5) Also focus on sister projects like Wikisource

Urdu
1) Awareness and Outreach programs in India.

2) Focussed work in Urdu centric cities & states where the second language is Urdu.

Ripening
(Shyamal, Tito, Arun, Karthik, Patricio, Anasuya)

Challenges of enWP from India

 * Haven't found a way to organise ourselves and communicate effectively


 * Sporadic, passion-driven edits


 * Need India-specific English projects


 * Don't have quality reference sources


 * Average Indian doesn't have the ability to recognise what quality reference sources are


 * Notability and systemic bias (especially by non-Indian enWP editors who may not understand context)


 * Quality assessment drive needs to be done systematically and periodically

[done]===What are the two things we must stop doing to achieve better results===


 * Don't assume that enWP from India has high quality content.


 * Barring the use of the English (and other language) references on specific language WPs


 * Indiscriminate bot-ing to create stub articles without the base to improve them in a reasonable time period


 * 80 per cent of stubs are created by new editors, anonymous editors and spammers. Shouldn't be doing projects without clear deliverables.


 * High quality references are required. Journal access has been addressed by the Foundation. Books are the problem.


 * Stop talking about WP without credibility within that specific community (issue, language...)

[done]===What are the three things we should start doing so that the sorries are avoided===


 * Focused space for communications across the enWP editors from India


 * India-specific Commons and projects (e.g. classical music, dance forms...) that can be supported


 * High quality BLP photographs


 * 5 projects with at least 50 active contributors (perhaps +50 edits?), one or two per year


 * Get experts involved (scientists, scholars etc) and institutions (like government)

[* Encourage good IP edits with a template of welcome and log in details? e.g. GuWP]


 * Core 100(0) articles that India must have - see list of basic India topics


 * Concerted effort to drive quality across languages


 * Support translations of high quality articles from languages to en


 * printed books of key articles


 * Liberation of content from GLAM institutions


 * Indian-related content not digitised - can we have partnerships with real libraries, who can release key content


 * Library membership


 * Work with WM communities in other parts of the world who have India-related content GLAM insitutions


 * some private institutions may also release content


 * Run notices across language Wikipedias comparing size of content, encouraging people to cross-translate


 * Create a list of important articles that need photographs


 * Quality of legal articles (Badri from NLS) - pushing law students into working on WP articles


 * Goethe institute has commissioned work on EDM music


 * City based or issue based editathons

[Action: some government support for British Library content. MCIT? Ministry of HRD/Culture?]

What are the two things we must continue which we are proud of

 * Continue to put the volunteer first (let initiatives be volunteer-led)


 * WPRx (Wikimed)


 * Collaboration of the month

What are our special needs that need to be taken care of? (support needed)

 * WMF to support content analysis of enWP India-related content to see gaps and activity level (India projects activity levels+google knowledge graphs on top search terms related to India)


 * Support/funds for reward/challenges/competitions


 * Meet up spaces in different cities


 * More notice board support from across the community (re-activate enWP india maillist, or FB or any other social media, but do work on wiki: announce work on wiki/noticeboard)

Policies and procedures of the Network(between movement organisations) (RELATING

Budding

 * Technical issues-


 * Wiki markup is still a hindrance


 * VE & ULS integration needed


 * Awareness needed


 * Basic PR skills needed


 * Train the trainer needed


 * Outreach material -better material needed


 * Followup after the outreach program needed


 * Policy document/page needed


 * Abusive admins -how to deal with them

Combined notes
Note - text after ";" on each line indicates responses/suggestions from other participants

Stop doing

--

w:gu - stop idling sub-projects

w:mr - repel new users with less-than-friendly messages

Start doing

---

w:gu - more outreach programs

w:gu - active editors collaborate/focus on a single topic and take it to completion

w:gu - translate/develop need-based content being searched, especially by younger audience; need information on searches

w:pa - media exposure (in Punjabi media); cold-call media representatives and students of mass communication; explore citizen-journalism

w:sa - identify/create/prioritize contemporary content

w:ka - socialize sub-projects within the community and complete subprojects

w:pa - smaller audience for workshops

add support for wysiwyg editors (especialy for Indic languages); libre-office may be a solution

Systematically follow up on outreach programs

restart wikipatrika; who?; volunteers? some found at the table; quarterly

policy coherence; model against another projects; establish minimum policy/standards? NPOV; No-copyright-violation; admin conferences;

Instigate users on voting to create discussion and induce higher vote count

w:mr - co-ordination between on/off wiki activities

Recruit non-wikipedian technical experts

Organize a monthly(?) hangout/voice conferences to showcase tools/scripts

Consider low-bandwidth users when testing/developing tools

Create wiki-how (or similar) mechanisms to create HOWTO documents/videos/tutorials/presentations

Continue to do

--

wsource:gu - active editors collaborate/focus on a single book

w:pa - identify highly interested/motivated wikipedian candidates

Support needed

--

w:gu - convert expenses (travel+prizes) for volunteers -- need details and clarity around funding

w:gu - need information on searches (on/off wiki)

w:pa - need help from media consultants/representatives on crafting press releases/messages

w:sa - connect with w:esperanto for similar issues

CanWMF partner with libreoffice to improve their interface/plug-in?; Mediawiki tool already in progress

WikiMetrix needs better tutorials/documentation

Consider low-bandwidth users when testing/developing tools

Tools available

---

Content translation Tool (w:es+w:ca beta-testing) for articles. Suggest machine translate as suggestions at edit-time

WikiMetrix - Tool to report on specific user-contributions. Can be used for followup with infrequent editors; needs better tutorials/documentati

Open Session
Learning from the Past and Move forward in to the Future

Hari: We need to involve more and more people in the conversations. Earlier voices were not heard - opinions were ignored/sidelined, this made people aggressive; passion makes people incensed when their favorite project and even life work is at stake.

Bishaka: We need to have processes to capture the larger communities voices and opinions. we have actually improved in many of our processes in the past few years. For example, the Funds Dissemination Committee h(FDC) has a built in period for comments and review by the community (on a schedule suitable for volunteer time constraints). But sometimes voices _have_ been heard, considered, but overruled; even by other volunteers (the FDC committee is a volunteer committee too), and it's important to accept that sometimes a decision was made after hearing a voice, without agreeing with it.

Voicing an opinion does not mean that the opinion will always gets accepted. E.g. FDC decison is not seen as community's decision. We need to accept that a process exist to capture wider community voice.

Hari: concrete example. Many people talked about the India Programs at its inception (2011), but those opinions were not taken on board.

The onwiki talk page discussions are not for everyone and not many contributors are comfortable with this. Many community members are not comfortable with the talk pages.

Ravi: WMF is not a Grant making organization for non-Wikimedia entitites. There is a long journey for becoming eligible to to receive funding from WMF. But an exception was made for CIS and this exception should remain as an exception and Wikimedia should make a policy decision before it wants to make grants to non-Wikimedia entities. The difference in governance structure between membership-based organizations like chapters and WMF (and also CIS, which has very few members), puts the different organizations on unequal footing.

Anasuya: At the end of the day we are about growing communities and open knowledge projects and then reverse engineer from there about the various models that we would like to work with. It is important that the challenge and context is more important for us than being limited by certain institutional structures to begin with.

Asaf: There is a category called Movement Partners for partnering entities like CIS. They are not chapter and are never going to become Wikimedia partners. Who would be a Movement Partner, how do we identify them and how do we do community consultation in identifying a Movement Partner is still something that WMF is figuring out and we want to move out of a situation where we do not be seen as making an exception.

Anivar: We never heard officially from the WMF about the failure and learning from the IEP. Anasuya: We did the mostly lengthy documentation and report of the failures of IEP and WMF accepted the failure and the report is publicly.

Asaf: 4 of those failures - Too ambitious in terms of no. of institutions involved, less of community consultation, too naive copying of the US model and most crucially the response when things went wrong was not right.

Arun: To me IEP is a classic examples of outcomes first over actions. This movement is here because of the volunteers and they have believed in right actions. I need outcomes that was the focus. If there was a little bit of community consultation the IEP would have been successful. The most hurting part was that the Indian community got a bad name. Do not put Outcomes over Actions - this important learning should not be repeated. The Chapter was not consulted in transferring the India Program to CIS. Why was not the Chapter asked if they could take on the India Program. Do not delink Actions and Outcomes. What are the methods by which the WMF is learning so that the changeover in team does not get repeated? There should be an Organizational mechanism for capturing institutional learning by WMF.

Bhishaka: granted that there was no consultation at the beginning of the catalyst program. I was part of the movement roles working group and the resolution tf

Sudhanwa: What is the distinction between Partner and Movement Partner?

Asaf: a chapter is a dedicated

Anasuya: User Groups,

Hari: Strengthen the impact measurements of the movement money irrespective of which entity receives funding.

Anivar:

Bhishakha:

Garfield:

Sudhanwa:

Bala:

Selvakumar:

Patricio:

Shyamal:

(help capturing the rest of the informal conversation would be appreciated.)

Muzzamil from Hindi Wikipedia said Hindi Wikipedia needs attention from CIS well as WMIN.

Hindi is major language in India with 422,048,642 speakers (41.03% poppulation) without any programs, with dedicated efforts we can improve more.

Asaf said Hindi Wikipedia needs leadership and encouraged Hindi Wikipedia representatives to start and lead programs. WMF will be more than happy to support new programs and initiatives.

Day 2

Session 1
Gagan asking Wikimedians participating to give feedback.

Ravi asked for more inter-community interactions.

Selva thanked Asaf, Anasuya for organising the interactions well.

Shyamal insisted on discussing solutions and not just discuss flaws.

Hari: thanks Patricio for his words about WMF's learning; it has reduced the deficit of trust.

Anasuya insisted participants to listen to others especially from the Indic communities.

Gagan presenting on "Movements and how they matter"

Blooming Group
Format for sharing - Programs / Activities we are doing :

stop

 * same people accepting invitations to do events on their own -- risk of burnout, and no experience sharing.


 * We need to stop conducting workshops in places where it doesn't work to an acceptable level. I'm now hopeful a bit to let the CISA2K continue their effort doing this. - Ansuman, Odia Wikipedia.

start

 * Focus on few subjects/programs of appropriate size, and see them to completion. Generates satisfaction and sense of success, paving the way for more activities.   Avoids spreading ourselves too thin.


 * digital outreach -- Tamil Wikipedia example: using Sitenotice to feature photos and photographers and invite others (already on the site) to contribute. Effective an d no risk of burnout.


 * variation, from Odia Wikipedia: feature a different volunteer every week on the Odia Wikipedia Facebook page. Add facebook page to sitenotice.


 * deliberately cultivate new volunteers to do outreach and represent the community. Mentor them: take them along a few times; let them do it themselves with your guidance; then let them do it on their own.


 * When conducting workshops, make sure audience is focused and interested


 * Consider using and publishing information about third-party visual editors for online and offline editing, e.g., LibreOffice


 * Reach out to educational institutes to add wikipedia as a topic in syllabus. Cite examples of other institutions.


 * Provide syllabus/training to teachers at teacher training institutions, e.g. B.Ed. colleges using CIS-created material.


 * Create a project to adapt open-OCR technologies to support Indic languages (to be funded by WMF); Sudhanwa, Sumana, Dr. Pavanaja, Mrutyunjaya, Shantanoo,Omshivaprakash


 * We need to start monitoring new articles and assist new users develop their wiki editing skills. We lack volunteers taking up this task. - Ansuman, OR Wikipedia.


 * We lack users aware of Wiki policies and how to handle diff situations while editing. We need to find such users who can work around policies and let others aware of them. - Ansuman

continue

 * social media outreach: participate in things like @WeAreWikipedia (on Twitter); do the same in our own language.


 * Lesson from Kannada - use social media effectively. FB  KannadaWikipedia group has more than 6000 members. Announcements about  outreach program, onwiki projects, problems and solutions discussed in  this group


 * Create wiki-how (or similar) mechanisms to create HOWTO documents/videos/tutorials/presentations


 * Continue inviting Users on Social Media especially Facebook, which helped us getting few users who are consistent. Thanks to MKar and others for their great effort inviting users and make them Wikipedians.


 * I believe that we should let Odia Wikipedia grow on its own to a certain extent. Because Outreach hasn't help getting new users. And making students editing through Education Program is not something which come out out of interest. And we don't have users to TWEAK those articles and improve them. 9 out of 10 users are found elsewhere other than Outreach activities/Wikimedia workshops. - Ansuman, Odia Wikipedia

start

 * Revise notice/warning templates to be more welcoming and less threatening: refer to English wikipedia for guidelines -


 * Write articles according to the most-searched-for list


 * Use Wikimetrix to track users and follow-up with active editors


 * Refer to Most Viewed Articles on home wiki and English, strengthen content on those Articles and add content around them


 * Seek out media representatives and students of mass communication make them aware of vairous initiatvies on your project


 * Citizen Juornalism via NDTV, CNNIBN, . http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/


 * Create short articles, videos to be sent to media outlets


 * Mention established twitter handles for media outlets when tweeting wikipedia-related content.


 * To identify and collaborate on top 1000 articles we can use Wikiproject India  (Engage subject experts & community to come up with the list following is a template which is being worked on)

Wikiproject India(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_India)

Wikiproject Karnataka 1000 - > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Karnataka#Karnataka_1000


 * Restart wikipatrika; Volunteers - Dhaval, Mrutyunja, Darshan, Sumana, Omshivaprakash


 * Establish minium set of policies/guidelines on your wikiproject such as NPOV; No-copyright-violation, etc


 * Consider periodic admin conferences, (face-to-face/skype) to discuss topics to be taken to community for approval


 * Subscribe to tech-ambassadors mailing list to keep abreast of upcoming changes


 * Raise low bandwidth users considerations on the list


 * Request better documentation on WikiMetrix on tech-ambassadors mailing list-/


 * Instigate users on voting to create discussion and induce higher vote count; e.g., ask users if a minor change to the proposal would make them likely to vote for/against a given proposal.


 * Off-wiki group to partner with an editor to ensure exposure to activities


 * Organize a monthly/periodic hangout/voice conferences to showcase tools/scripts; invite non-wikipedian technical experts (e.g. from FOSS community) to collaborate on tools wikipedia projects need


 * Create a page for WMF funding guidelines to clarify what expesnes can be funded/covered as well as the procedure for requesting reimbursement

stop

 * imitating/copying policies verbatim from other Wikipedias. They may not be appropriate for our wikis; may be premature; may backfire and drive people away.

start

 * drawing inspiration and learning *critically* from policies of other Wikipedias: what do they do? why? Is it working for them? Would it work for us?  What changes should we make as we adopt and adapt it?


 * Select/nominate individuals as points-of-contact on embassy as well as mailing lists

Start

 * easy support for Outreach programs - Eg. Travel support, etc with less hassels (ml)+(te)


 * Reimagine GLAM as per Indian context (ml)+(te)


 * Evolve model of content absobtion for Tamil WikiSource. Affiliation model for Outreach. (ta)+(te)


 * start outreach in rural areas and centers. (bn)


 * Special attention for Hindi (official language of the Indian Union) and spoken by many. (hi)


 * Gender gap initiatives to be given concrete attention(ta and also if possible in other Indian communities) (te)

Stop

 * Leave Tamil Wiki alone (stop meddling). Concentrate on Sister projects eg Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc (ta).


 * Alienating New users and Aggressive policies. (te)

Continue

 * Collaborative projects (te)


 * Outreach (te)


 * off-line events (te)

Support Needed

 * Regular supply of swags and popularizing the brand Wikipedia - Wikimedia handbook, stickers, and so on... (ml) + (bn)+(te) + (ta)


 * Library and Resource Journals access to selected Wikimedians, like JSTOR, etc. for improving citations. Also find more Indian resources similar to journal libraries. (ml+bn)+(te)


 * OCR, TTS, spell checker and other Indic language computing related tools. (ml+bn)+(te) +(ta)


 * needs understanding with various organisations. Need help there. Support with Content acquisition. (ta)+(te)


 * Adopt affiliate organization model for Outreach. Eg. FSFTN, INFITT, (ta),  similar (hi)+(te)


 * Technical needs - OCR, Spell checker, TTS. Support for the IEG proposals from Tamil+Bengali+Malayalam. (ta+ bn+ml) + (or)


 * Support needed for WikiSource - need help with digitization. Need to grab invalubale books from Libraries. (bn) + (or) +(ta)+(te)


 * Support Outreach (bn)

Start

 * Tech-liason group (te)


 * Inter-wiki village pump (te, pan-India).


 * Frequent meetings need to be started (every month is good enough). (bn) + (hi)


 * Outreach events and more face-to-face meeting of contributors (Hi wiki)'


 * Indian community representation at Wikimania

Stop

 * identify factors that cause burn-outs of prolific contributors and eliminate those factors (te)

Continue

 * keeping the community in the same way is good enough. (ta)+(te)

Support Needed

 * Community health has been good. (ta)


 * Tutors, Manuals eg document on "help with making an IEG application" (te+bn).


 * Sofware related support (te+bn).


 * Low bandwidth solutions (ml)+(te)


 * Attention by WMIN / CIS (hi)


 * Education Program with help of Government (hi)

Policies and Procedures of the Network (between movement organizations) :: RELATING

Start

 * Wikipedia Zero to solve access issues (ml)+(te)


 * Recognition of various movement partners (more plurality and diversity) - Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat, Grandhashala sangam (ml)+(te)


 * Extensive policy on image needed. List of policies that are essential. Local communities can use it as seed resource and come up with their own policies. This can become quite an ordeal otherwise. (te).


 * Best practices for procedures: each and everything. (te)


 * Policy for having at least one active burocrat and 4 active sysops in all projects at any given point of time. (te)

Stop

 * Don't thrust changes on us. ULS was a good example of what shouldn't happen (ta) + (te)+(ml)


 * Any communication coming from WMF or other institution should be in local language (!). (te) Help will be provided for translation if needed.

Continue

 * IEG, PEG funding should continue (te).


 * Advance notice to any kind of policy changes (te). for instance: policy changes to admins.

Support needed

 * Offline events - Seek Human resource from WMIN or CIS-A2K for logistics, admin, Grant writing and reporting (Reduce Admin overhead by assigning Program Officers from CIS-A2K or WMIN on request) (ta) + (hi)


 * Stats have become stale for Indian language projects (te)


 * A comprehensive audited list of tools available at Wiki-tech. (make it more helpful to access these) (te).


 * Tools like pywikipedia should have support for Indic languages across all platforms (Currently Windows is not supported!) (te)

=
=====================

Community organizing, community health (BEING/on-wiki)
==Movement policies, procedur

Offline discussion
Shyamal: I had a little discussion with Bishakha and thought I should express something that I have been irritating others with for 10 years

One of the institutional actions that will help the Wikimedia movement is to amend the Copyright Act clause that grants Work of Government with 60/70 year copyright term.

Countries like the US make federally funded content "public domain" (not to be confused with open access). The UK has a new archive license.

The spirit of the RTI runs contrary to it and a PIL might be something to consider. The Chapter can hire PIL experts in making a case.

CIS does not have a history of PIL making either, so it needs a discussion on what tasks are chosen before Movement Partners are chosen.

I put this on record since this is not covererd in other discussions.

Comments welcome, apparently if this gets broad support, something can be considered.

+1 Shyamal (with my indiv contributor topi :-) )

Glad you raised this, Shyamal. An important issue, which will also need collaboration with other groups working on internet rights and law etc - eg Alternative Law Forum. Needs a big coalition. Bishakha

ALF/Achal sent me a draft in 2004 and I did suggest this. It is apparently not of interest to the elite interests. I think we need the community /chapter to find the means to work on it with PIL experts like perhaps Prashanth Bhushan.

misc
1) Wikimania selections - community should have voice - (viswa)

2)

http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/ICC2014Roadmap

Checking with folks here, if Sanskrit wikipedia group has also been participating .. and to check

TITLE: Condensed proposed roadmap for Wikimedia work in India

Three Fields of action
1. Programs/projects/activities -- what we are DOING out there, mostly off-wiki

2. Community organizing, community health -- how we are BEING in our communities, mostly on-wiki

3. Procedures, norms, and expectations in the movement network -- how we are RELATING to other movement actors -- individuals, communities, user groups, chapters, non-Wikimedia partners (e.g. CIS), the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).

Three directions - start/stop/continue
1. Start -- things we can/should start doing

2. Continue -- practices we agree are valuable and should continue or be strengthened

3. Stop -- practices or ways of being we find unhelpful and should stop engaging in.

Start

 * Focus on few subjects/programs of appropriate size, and see them to completion.


 * Owned: Language/project communities


 * Supported: community members, WMF, WMIN, CIS and other affiliated entities (allied organisations)


 * Deliberately cultivate new volunteers to do outreach and represent the community. Mentor them, train them


 * Ownership: Language communities, CIS, WMIN & Movement Partners opted by the community


 * Digital outreach - Site notices, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter)


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Support: From WMIN, CIS and WMF if needed


 * Consider using and publishing information about third-party visual editors for online and offline editing, e.g., LibreOffice ( libreoffice-wiki-publisher) - Formatting has known issues eg. Tables, offline mediawiki would be much better solution.


 * Ownership: Language communities + Aniket and Asaf to create a learning pattern on this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_patterns


 * Supported: Everyone


 * Reach out to universities and teacher training institutes to add wikipedia as a topic in syllabus.


 * Ownership: Chapter (in consultation with the community)


 * Supported: CIS (CIS will create this material in collaboration with the interested community members and other allied organizations like SMC)


 * National Mission for ICT's in Education and Spoken Tutorials project http://spoken-tutorial.org/ (Dr. Kannan Maudiga, IIT Mumbai)is a good project to Intervine . Spoken tutorials relicensed recently under CC-BY-SA-4.0 License


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:


 * National Museums and curriculum


 * Ownership: WMIN


 * Supported: With help from the community


 * Create a project to adapt open-OCR technologies to support Indic languages


 * Ownership:Communities


 * Supported: SMC, CIS, funded by WMF, training key by and for communities


 * Action Plan: create a Meta page for discussion on this issue


 * Start monitoring new articles and assist new users develop their wiki editing skills (Plase refer to https://metrics.wmflabs.org/ and wkitech.wikimedia.org for improvised tools to check )


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported: Other communities, WMF (for stats/data)


 * When conducting workshops, make sure audience is focused and interested (Train the Trainer programs should help to learn this)


 * Ownership: CIS, WMIN


 * Supported: Professionals, experts from communities and allied organisations


 * Library support network - for print only resources across India


 * Ownership: city-based groups


 * Supported: WMIN, WMF CIS (we are exploring this with our institutional partners and will update as and when there is development. E.g. Telugu University, Goa University, Goa City Central Library discussions currently in the pipeline)

(For journal subscriptions, try The Wikipedia Library: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library)


 * Create a core list of India related articles


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported:

Example: English Wikipedia for India related articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_India


 * Complement core list with language / culture specific core articles


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported: Communities?

Example: Kannada, Kannadiga & Karnataka: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Karnataka

Action plan: use Wikidata where needed or appropriate (eg. Calenders, Indian Railway specific details)


 * Projects for obtaining media - region specific photographs, obtain high-quality living people photographs


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported: via some initiatives, WMIN for Liaisoning


 * Promote expert involvement in editing (or even reviewing) Wikipedia


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported: Chapter can support logistics


 * Collect and disseminate best practices and failures on outreach programs


 * Ownership: Communities, WMF (learning patterns + other learning and evaluation materials + grants/program development)


 * Supported:


 * One successful GLAM partnership in the Indian context.


 * Ownership: Community (ML community has specific initiative currently, Check IEG proposals)


 * Supported:


 * Evolve model of content absorption for WikiSource


 * Ownership: Langauge Communities (to be initiated by TA, GU and ML)


 * Supported: Self Organised Communities (ML wikipedia have a successfull Model of Wikisource Digitization Contest which succeeded in generating 12500 pages digitized in one month), CIS (to a limited extent/focus lang areas)


 * Special attention for Hindi (official language of the Indian Union) and spoken by many. (grants/conferences/programs etc)


 * Ownership: Hindi community


 * Supported: WMF, WMIN, CIS (to a limited extent)


 * Gender gap initiatives to be given concrete attention (ta and also if possible in other Indian communities).


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported: WMIN, CIS

Stop

 * same people accepting invitations to do events on their own -- risk of burnout, and no experience sharing.


 * Indiscriminate bot-based stub creations.


 * doing outreach or other representative actions by people without sufficient community experience.

Owned: communities


 * Intervening in communities without community approval (e.g Tamil Wiki)


 * Making policies simpler for entry level editors so that they do not get alienated.


 * Owned: ONLY the Community

Continue

 * Collaborative projects.


 * Outreach initiatives.


 * Off-line events.


 * Outreach via SocialMedia channels like @WeAreWikipedia (on Twitter); do the same in our own language.


 * Create wiki-how (or similar) mechanisms to create HOWTO documents/videos/tutorials/presentations

Support Needed

 * With supply of swags or material for outreach and stuff to work on branding - Wikimedia handbook, stickers, and so on.

Owned: WMIN, CIS, WMF


 * Library and Resource Journals access to selected Wikimedians, like JSTOR, etc. for improving citations. Also find more Indian resources similar to journal libraries.


 * OCR, TTS, spell checker and other Indic language computing related tools.

Discussed above


 * Needs understanding with various organisations. Need help there. Support with Content acquisition.

Discussed above


 * Adopt affiliate organization model for Outreach.

Discussed above


 * Support for the IEG proposals focused on regional language communities, regional projects.


 * Support needed for WikiSource - need help with digitisation. Need to grab invaluable books from Libraries.


 * training on how to do PR and how to work with the media


 * training on public speaking


 * high-quality outreach material to adapt and translate

Start

 * Encourage translation of high quality.


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported:


 * Data analysis of contributions from India on enWP in line with privacy policy


 * Ownership: WMF


 * Supported:


 * Revise notice/warning templates to be more welcoming and less threatening


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported: WMF


 * Write articles according to the most-searched-for list


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported:


 * Use Wikimetrix to track users and follow-up with active editors


 * Ownership: Communities (Individuals with such capacity)


 * Supported: WMF


 * Refer to Most Viewed Articles on home wiki and English, strengthen content on those Articles and add content around them


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported:


 * Seek out media representatives and students of mass communication make them aware of vairous initiatvies on your project


 * Ownership: Chapter?


 * Supported:


 * Citizen Juornalism via NDTV, CNNIBN, Citizen Matters etc


 * Create short articles, videos to be sent to media outlets


 * Ownership:


 * Supported: Chapter


 * Mention established twitter handles for media outlets when tweeting wikipedia-related content to encourage media outreach


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported:


 * Identify and collaborate on top 1000 articles using Wikiproject India across all Indic Wiki's


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported:


 * Restart WikiPatrika


 * Ownership: Communities - (Omshivaprakash, Mrutyunjay, Darshan, Pavan Santosh, Sumana,Karthik,Dhaval)x


 * Supported:


 * Establish minium set of policies/guidelines on your wikiproject such as NPOV; No-copyright-violation, etc


 * Ownership:


 * Supported: CIS


 * Consider periodic admin conferences, (face-to-face/skype) for skills building and sharing, e.g. conflict resolution)


 * Ownership: Communities


 * Supported: WMF (grants)


 * Subscribe to tech-ambassadors mailing list to keep abreast of upcoming changes


 * * Raise low bandwidth users considerations on the list


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:


 * Request better documentation on WikiMetrics on tech-ambassadors mailing list


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:


 * urveyEncourage More Participation during framing policies or amending any


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:


 * Off-wiki group to partner with an editor to ensure exposure to activities


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:


 * Organize a monthly/periodic hangout/voice conferences to showcase tools/scripts; invite non-wikipedian technical experts (e.g. from FOSS community) to collaborate on tools wikipedia projects need


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:


 * Create a page for WMF funding guidelines to clarify what expesnes can be funded/covered as well as the procedure for requesting reimbursement


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:


 * Pan-India tech-liason group to help with technical needs of non-technical editors.


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:


 * Inter-wiki village pump for discussion of pan-India issues on the community organisation and community health.


 * Enabling regular face to face meetings for each regional language community.


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:


 * Working on fair representation at Wikimania and strengthening it.


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:


 * Identify factors that cause burn-outs of prolific contributors and eliminate those factors.


 * Ownership:


 * Supported:

Stop

 * Disallowing English (or other foreign) on Wikipedia


 * Indiscriminate bot stub creation without a committed group to expand them

Continue

 * Meetups - thematic + regional


 * Collaborations of the Month


 * Assessment of article quality


 * Keeping the community in the same way is good enough in some cases (Tamil Wikipedia for instance).

Support Needed

 * Tutorials, Manuals and HOWTOs.


 * Technology, tools and software related support.


 * In making available low-bandwidth solutions for users of lower-end devices, which seem to be the case with large number of users in India.


 * Active help from institutions within the country for projects (for instance: Hindi) and help with Education program with active participation of the government.

Start

 * Drawing inspiration and learning *critically* from policies of other Wikipedias.


 * Select/nominate individuals as points-of-contact on embassy as well as mailing lists


 * Strengthening Wikipedia Zero with active participation from regional communities to solve access issues.


 * Recognition of various regional movement partners (for more plurality and diversity).


 * Building an extensive generic pan-India policy on image uploads, work out licensing. Regional communities can derive from these and adapt them for their context.


 * Build Best practices for procedures.


 * Better practices and adapting fair methods to ensure active bureaucrats and sysops on regional projects.


 * Any communication coming from WMF or other institution should be in local language.

Stop

 * imitating/copying policies verbatim from other Wikipedias. They may not be appropriate for our wikis; may be premature; may backfire and drive people away.

Support Needed

 * Seek help via Human resource from institutions within the country (WMIN/CIS-A2K) for logistics, administration, grant-writing and reporting. Further help in reducing administration overhead by assigning Program Officers from CIS-A2K or WMIN on request.


 * Stats have become stale for Indian language projects. Help bring these back.


 * Make easily available a list of tools available through Wikilabs or Wiki-tech.