Grants:APG/Proposals/2019-2020 round 2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Progress report form/Preface

We are presenting A2K's progress report describing the programs and activities we have conducted between 1 July and 31 December 2020. Following the Wikimedia Foundation's guidelines and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India's instructions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we did not conduct or support any on-ground event in these six months.

Almost all the institutions, especially the educational institutions, we work closely with, were closed. You can see a direct impact on the metrics, especially in the Participants, Newly Registered, and Footprints categories. With no in-person event we considered counting digital footprint, however, we could not establish a proper method to calculate the same. With no national or regional in-person Wiki-events, staff travel and stay, our project budget was underspent in this period due to the pandemic.

However, this was also a time for us to restructure our support, re-imagine our program and re-assess our own capacity. In comparison to what we have done to arrange on-ground events and activities, we have a lot of scopes to explore the online platform for training and other Wiki-events. For more than last one year, we are pondering on the idea to provide more focus on online events. In these six months, we made some progress in this area and we were successful in working with the communities through different activities. For example:

1. In October we supported the celebration of Wikidata's Eighth Birthday in India, and hosted a series of webinars, and conducted a datathon.
2. We conducted a national proofread-a-thon on Wikisource in November where 280 Wikimedians from 11 communities took part.
3. We initiated a series of mini edit-a-thons and conducted two edit-a-thons till 31 December 2020.
4. A series of online training took place on various Wikimedia topics.
5. We continued our content relicense campaign, and more than 100 books and other content were relicensed in this period.
6. We worked with a tech-intern who revived a Wikisource tool.
7. Two Wikimedia case studies were published.

A2K is committed to serving the hardworking Wikimedians and the communities. Several team members of the A2K team are very active Wikimedians in their volunteer capacity also. Their direct experience, interaction, and collaboration with the communities help us to better understand the community needs. In the upcoming six months, we'll continue to work according to our proposal. We have also identified the following areas for further focus:

1. Remote programs: Currently we are preparing for Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021, an online Wikimeet that will take place on 19 – 21 February 2021. Other than this Wikimeet we'll continue to focus on conducting online events.
2. Tech development: We have developed one tool in these six months. We'll continue to work on tech-support for the Indian communities.
3. Wikimedia Strategy 2030: We will work with the communities and affiliates in the implementation phase of Wikimedia Strategy 2030.
4. Global engagement and knowledge-sharing: We have noted that the global communities mostly don't know about some of the best works of A2K in India. We have already started and we'll continue sharing our stories to the global communities. We believe that this knowledge-sharing will be helpful in global engagement and better program planning.