Grants:APG/Proposals/2015-2016 round 2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Impact report form
Purpose of the report
editThis form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.
Global metrics overview - all programs
editIn the following section, we are providing our Global Metrics for the last program year.
Overall
editMetric | Achieved outcome | Explanation |
1. # of active editors involved | 713 | CIS-A2K has been able to increase participation of female editors across its Focus Language Areas and has started collaborating with Non FLA and Global Wikimedians as well. |
2. # of new editors | 1767 | Our WEP initiatives have helped in introducing and retaining editors across FLA. |
3. # of individuals involved | 3642 | Public events held in FLA's has helped in increasing the reach of Wikimedia projects. |
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages | 4a) 2567 4b) 2857 |
A2K had aimed for a higher image addition and higher image utilisation metric. We have been unable in collating as many images as mentioned in the target. |
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects |
|
Thematic edit-a-thons anchored by A2K and collaborative work with other institutions has helped A2K to get more and more content. However our Wikisource performance has not matched our target. One of our FLA community has decided to re-confirm copyright status of the digitised books and hence the Wikisource work has been stalled. |
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects |
|
CIS-A2K has started cleaning the existing content on Wikipedia projects across FLA. |
Overview
editHere we are presenting the Global Metrics report in a bar graph:
Telling your program stories - all programs
editA2K key activities
editDuring this grant period CIS-A2K has organized and supported a number of events in collaboration with Indic Wikimedia community members. In the following table we are including some of the events conducted or supported by CIS-A2K, we feel were impactful for the movement:
How we measure success/ failure
editA2K team has used the following metrics to assess the success/failure of our work plan as proposed in our APG Round 2 2016-17 application.
Criteria | Degree | Remarks |
---|---|---|
Requests for support by Indian Wikimedians and communities approved and documented | Good | CIS-A2K request page has witnessed active participation by Wikimedians during this project period |
Volunteers involved in conducting outreach and other extension activities | Poor | Due to the scheduling of events during the week many active Wikimedians are unable participate |
Responses for the needs assessment conducted by CIS-A2K | Very Good | Over 90% of volunteers responded to the survey and questionnaire CIS-A2K circulated before formulating the annual plan for 2017-18 |
Total volunteers participated representing communities in events conducted by CIS-A2K during the last plan period | Very Good | Many new Wikimedians have represented their communities both in national and regional level events |
Frequency of conducting an event | Regular/ Successful | A2K needs to synchronise its events with community interest for better participation and avoid burn out of volunteers |
Activities conducted on demand | Scope for improvement | A2K relies heavily on requests received either on the Request page or in the Needs Assessment survey. |
Bridging the Gender Gap
editActivities undertaken
editIn the last year, CIS-A2K hired an independent researcher designated for gender gap bridging initiatives and awareness raising among Indic language communities. The work completed includes but is not limited to gender gap bridging events (edit-a-thons, workshops, training sessions), support, community Code of Conduct, and the development of a toolkit for the local movement. Additionally, an action research had been conducted through collecting interview data and survey questionnaires from female editors across different communities with varying skill levels. The research aims to provide more insights and nuance on the local gender gap bridging movement to further understand women’s experience.
In the past year, CIS-A2K had laid emphasis on pushing the movement beyond the level of conducting events. In other words, the grant year period of 2016-17 marked the transition period where CIS-A2K had mandated more built-in rules and awareness content in various events and training.
Higher awareness within and outside of the communities
In the 2016-17 grant year period, CIS-A2K has coordinated and supported more gender gap bridging events than the previous year, thanks to the partnership between the team and Delhi-based feminist NGO Breakthrough. However, numbers are not the sole improvement target, CIS-A2K had aimed to integrate the topic of gender-gap and the systemic bias into more programs and events to raise higher awareness.
For instance, apart from holding gender gap bridging workshops or edit-a-thons, CIS-A2K has also carried out awareness sessions in the WEP curriculum at Christ University as well as the annual Train the Trainer (TTT) event.
CIS-A2K's work on awareness building did not stop at the level of "issue identification." The team also considered the lessons on gender sensitization, safe space guidelines, and movement engagement. On gender sensitization and behavioral guidelines, since February 2017, CIS-A2K has published the community event Code of Conduct. The guidelines have been enforced strictly in events coordinated by CIS-A2K; events supported by or associated with the team are also mandated to follow the same. In terms of movement engagement, CIS-A2K team and interns have developed a South Asian context-focused gender gap bridging toolkit. The toolkit, containing tips in event conduct and advice on behavioural guidelines, aims to help community members better engage with and initiate gender gap bridging movements.
Event improvement
Besides raising awareness, CIS-A2K has also focused on improving the events and activities in the local gender gap bridging movements. More balanced gender ratio has been emphasized in most events (regardless of the event theme); events such as the Andhra Loyola College Wikisource proofreading workshop had secured 50% of female participation. Moreover, female tutors' presence has also been encouraged in all events if applicable to address the under-representation of women (or female tutors) in the communities.In the 2016-17 grant period, CIS-A2K is also connecting our local movements with global gender gap bridging initiative such as the Asian Women Month and BBC's 100 Women edit-a-thon.
However, CIS-A2K had also noticed the lack of discussion on the intersecting social identities of women - such as women in different class, caste, sexuality, or physical ability. To address such concern, CIS-A2K had held workshops in suburban and rural areas in our focus language communities, in the hope to raise awareness, provide opportunities, and understand their potential and experience in the Wikimedia movements. CIS-A2K will also continue to explore and reach to more diverse groups of women and LGBTQ communities.
Areas of future focus
edit- Localisation of guidelines
Creation of clear policy proposal procedure guide book/tutorials for community members
- Training session for gender sensitisation
Gender sensitisation training session for team members (held by professional)
- Collaboration between GLAM and NGOs
Edit-a-thons and follow up events in collaboration with GLAM and NGO partners that possess reference materials on women-related subjects
- Service during events and activities
Create a checklist of event venue facility and services that are necessary to ensure women participants' comfort and safety
- Balancing gender ratio in events and programs
At least 2 community events, regardless of themes, in each focus language area per year will fulfill the gender maximum rule that no more than 60% of attendees should identify themselves as the same gender
- Broader awareness
Participate in conferences and events outside of the Wikimedia community to raise awareness of the Wikipedia gender gap issue
- Recognition and tangible impact diagnosis
Send post-event automatic message to remind and encourage new Wikipedians to keep editing
- Strengthen Wikiwomen communities
Contact female Wikimedians in different cities to set up a contact network with other local Wikiwomen
Learnings
edit- Establishing partnership with feminist organization or institutions has been very helpful and essential to push the movement to the general public
- Gender sensitization is still much needed and gender gap bridging initiatives should be promoted in a way that men and women (and LGBTQ members) can all participate and contribute
- On new editor recruitment, ongoing community support (on and off wiki) and gratification are essential to keep female Wikimedians motivated
Challenges
- Training in the Indic language typing system often takes more time than the events allow, a pre-event training, online tutorial, and/or cheatsheets provided on the day of may be helpful
- Not every community or event has adequate female tutors, encouraging past events' participants to become tutors may be helpful
- Continuity in the gender gap bridging events in the 2016-17 period was still low, so was and retention. In the future, "programs" (instead of simply an "event") with more commitment requirements should be encouraged.
Skill building
editCIS-A2K has been collaborating with Indian Wikimedians towards raising their technical skills as well as to groom technical leadership. It has been established (through needs assessment surveys and feedback from previous workshops) that the majority of Indian Wikimedians are unaware of the tools and gadgets that have been in existence and used extensively by global Wikimedians. This problem is compounded due to the lack of effort in documenting these tools in Indian languages and the basic absence of technical training. CIS-A2K has been working to bridge this gap by bringing together Wikimedians who have shown interest in technical learning along with members from like-minded communities (such FOSS, Mapbox, Data{Meet}) and organise training and workshops to discuss, introduce and document the various tools, techniques and gadgets available to Wikimedians.
Activities undertaken
edit- Train the Trainer 2017
Train-the-Trainer (TTT) is an annual residential wiki-training workshop to groom leadership skills among the Indian Wikimedia community members. The participants, cutting across various South Asian wiki communities, are trained in different topics related to Wiki-outreach and other Wiki-activities. The first iteration of the workshop was conducted in 2013, which was followed by successful iterations in 2015 and 2016.
The fourth iteration of the workshop was conducted this year between 20- 22 February 2017 in Bengaluru. 19 members from 9 Indic Wikimedia communities participated in this workshop with one international participant from Bangladesh. The program schedule of TTT is decided based on a thorough analysis of the feedback provided by the previous years' participants in addition to a detailed needs-assessment. Following the needs-assessment. This year's program structure was revised to include more diverse topics, case studies and sessions. User:Elisachang conducted a session on gender gap awareness in Indic language Wikipedias. User:AshLin, respected English Wikipedian, was present for all three days of the program and conducted a session with all participants giving them feedback on their participation, future projects and their wiki journeys. He also conducted an external audit of the CIS-A2K team and provided us with constructive feedback for future iterations.
The table below presents the diversity of CIS-A2K TTT 2017 alumni and their subsequent WikiProjects:
Year | Number of participants | Communities | Activities conducted by participants |
---|---|---|---|
2016 | 15 | Bengali, Kannada, Maithili, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, | Wiki Loves Butterfly, Mini TTT and MWT Kolkata 2017, Photowalk at Mangalore etc. |
2017 | 19 | Bengali, English, Kannada, Maithili, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu | Wiki Loves Uniformed Services, Hindi Wikipedia outreach etc. |
- MediaWiki Training
The third iteration of the MediaWiki Training (MWT) was conducted between 24- 26 February in Bangalore. The first and second iterations of MWT were conducted in 2015 and 2016. 16 participants from 9 Indic Wikimedia communities participated in the workshop. The following graph shows the participation from different Indic Wikimedia communities. Respected Malayalam Wikimedian User:Viswaprabha attended the workshop in the capacity of resource person. On behalf of CIS-A2K, User:Titodutta and User:Ananth_subray served as the resource persons.
- Regional TTT and MWT
Train-the-Trainer and MediaWiki Training are the flagship national level events conducted by CIS-A2K. TTT attempts to groom leadership skills among Indian Wikimedians while MWT aims to groom their technical leadership skills. However, owing to financial and logistical constraints, it is not possible to have a large number of participants in these national-level workshops. In order to take these flagship events to communities and regions across India, CIS-A2K initiated regional iterations of these events. While retaining the rigour of the national-level event, these regional versions lay localised focus on reach, mentorship, and the scope for troubleshooting.
This year, regional iterations of TTT and MWT were conducted in two regions:
- Hyderabad
The 2016 iteration of mini Train-the-Trainer (TTT) and MediaWiki training (MWT) was conducted on 10 and 11 December 2016 in Hyderabad. In this year's Hyderabad Mini TTT and MWT, 15 Wikimedians from 4 cities of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana - Hyderabad, Vijayawada, West Godavari, and Visakhapatnam- participated.
"Even though we are conducting book festivals in other places, this event and discussion in it triggered Community interest and resulted in conducting Stall in Hyderabad Book Festival which started a week later" — User:Pranayraj1985
- Kolkata
A workshop was conducted in Kolkata between 7- 8 January 2017, in partnership with the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group. The two-day event was held at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. There were 20 participants at the event, of which 18 were male and only two female. The participants were trained in article enrichment and how to upgrade articles to Good category articles on Wikipedia. The participants learnt reference resources in detail in addition to discussing the different types of syntax required to apply the references meaningfully. The participants were also exposed to advanced search techniques on Google in order to gather relevant references.
Impact
edit- The impact of the Skill Building vertical can be seen in both the success of the training as well in the learnings that CIS-A2K has derived from conducting them. The Train-The-Trainer program remains a popular workshop in India for leadership grooming among Indic Wikimedians with applicants going on to conduct successful projects with collaboration from community members as well as fellow Indian Wikimedians. With the conducting of sessions of outreach, support structures and grants, many TTT alumni have become active Wikimedians with a greater number of grants being disbursed towards India. However, CIS-A2K recognises that the Return of Investment should be amplified. While there has been an attempt to bring participants together from all communities, this does not ensure quality participation. CIS-A2K has also not been able to conduct many follow-up workshops for technical needs. The MediaWiki Club initiated at the MediaWiki Training has also had teething troubles. In some cities, on-demand workshops have been more effective than others planned by CIS-A2K. For example, Wikimedians in Hyderabad felt that their regular meet-ups were becoming monotonous and hence, requested a larger workshop. This advanced workshop was a successful follow-up of a previous training program conducted in the same city in May 2016. The regular follow-up, meetings and the enthusiasm of the community members in a wide variety of topics have been key to CIS-A2K achieving editor retention in the city.
- Based on the interactions with participants during the Skill Building programs, CIS-A2K was strongly urged to consider a dedicated page for technical requirements of community members. To this effect, CIS-A2K launched a dedicated Technical Requests page where Indic Wikimedians file their requests on a range of technical issues.
- CIS-A2K has been able sufficiently convey to community members making requests the importance of timely reporting and documentation. Additionally, CIS-A2K has followed-up with community members and provided guidance in preparing reports and documentation. As a result, we have received event reports and financial details of almost all the requests we supported.
- A case study from the request page: on 19 December 2017, CIS-A2K received a request from Bengali Wikimedians. The community members informed CIS-A2K that they were planning to run a seven month-long proofreading contest on Bengali Wikisource as a part of the Bengali Wikisource project's 10th anniversary. CIS-A2K was requested to help with the arrangement of the prizes after the event. CIS-A2K found the idea to be interesting and decided to support the community members in their initiative. In the following months, CIS-A2K was in constant touch with the community and offered further help and support. In April 2017, CIS-A2K received an interim report email from them, which showed excellent progress with over 1000 proofreads and validations in three and a half months.
Areas of future focus
editCIS-A2K has revamped its program for the 2017- 2018 grant year into a Skill Building Initiatives vertical.
Request Page Activities and General service to Indic Wikimedia movement CIS-A2K project has a request page intended for Wikimedian/s from India to place requests for support from CIS-A2K. Between 1 July 2015 and 30 June 2016, CIS-A2K received 30 support requests (see 01 and 02).
Some of the Wiki-events/requests CIS-A2K has supported this year:
- Photo-walk in Mangalore (August 2016)
- Malayalam study camp in Kottiyoor, Kerala (September)
- OpenCon India, supporting Wikipedia sessions (November)
- Urdu-Ukrainian Community Collaboration Project (December)
- Creating an active Tulu Wikipedia community at the 4CCon (January 2017)
- Bengali Wikisource 10th anniversary 6 month long Proofreading Contest
- Wiki Takes Kolkata VI
- Hindi and Gujarati Wikipedia workshop
Learnings
edit- After multiple iterations, the program should have evolved more in structure, format, and specially participation selection criteria. However, we have felt that the scope and objectives of TTT are unclear to several communities and community members.
- Lessons learnt
- We conducted the MediaWiki Training (24-26 February) immediately after conducting the Train-the-Trainer (20-22 February). Because of this continuity some team members became tired during the last part of the event. We have learnt a lesson from here that as both are the workshops are very important, there must be some interval between these two events to get best performance and result.
- We have learnt that for small support requests, if the financial support is provided as reimbursement rather than advance, it better ensures timely event reporting. It also helps to decrease administrative workload as post-event we can have a clear idea of the actual expenditures and amount to be reimbursed.
- During this workshop, for the first time in Kolkata, we approached the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS or NUJS) as venue partner. As a result we got a conference room, including projector and microphone facility, in the institute for free. We have learnt this lesson that while conducting Wiki-event, we should approach such institutions. This does not only save money, but also increases reach to some extent.
Communication
editCommunications role revamp
editThe CIS-A2K team underwent a significant employee turnover with three team members leaving and two new members incoming between July to December 2016. This revamp was necessitated owing to CIS-A2K's staffing strategy being a combination of community consultations and suggestions along with the requirements to fulfill its program objectives. CIS-A2K has been working as a catalyst for the growth of the free knowledge movement and Indic language Wikimedias since 2013. Having gathered the right footing and networks of access over the years, the need for a dedicated communications vertical was felt. This role would be focused on telling not only the CIS-A2K program stories but also those of community members and communities through a structured media strategy. The impact of this exclusive role is envisioned to be a robust documentation process that helps all stakeholders learn about the ongoing efforts as well as draw lessons from them in order to innovate for the future.
External communications
editAccording to the Online Education in India: 2021 report, produced by KPMG and Google, 409 million Indians consume Internet services and a large percent of this population regularly posts on a wide range of social media channels across urban and rural areas. This gives cause-based organizations like CIS-A2K the opportunity to tap into a wide cross section of this audience and tell the stories of people who build the knowledge used by them on a daily basis. Fortunately for CIS-A2K that aims to tell the stories of the people and communities behind Indian Wikimedias, social media helps humanize the narrative behind a cause like the free knowledge movement and with the help of a communications program can better convey it in digestible and visually appealing posts.
CIS-A2K engages with communities, like-minded organizations, fellow chapters, affiliates and external stakeholders through our communications program. This is done through a combination of social media interactions, newsletters, press releases, blog posts, etc. This year, we have expanded from our traditional social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter to Instagram, Medium and LinkedIn as well. This expansion was to explore new mediums of communications as they cater to different sections of our target audience. As we continue to explore these new channels of communications, the impact of this over the second half of the grant year has been an increase in reach and engagement.
We also reach out using our monthly newsletter which is shared widely on 23 Indic language Village Pumps and 5 mailing lists. Through our newsletter, we inform communities of the work done over the course of the month and the press coverage we have received along with programmatic activities and announcements. In cognizance of the fact that we are dealing with communities and communities are made up of dedicated individuals, we also strive to keep personal channels of communications open with individuals. Participants at our events have maintained good personal rapport with team members through personal chats and WhatsApp groups. This has led to the formation of communities that encourage one another and inform one another of progress post the events. While there is a long way to go to build a healthy and inclusive community, CIS-A2K is glad to have made a head start in ongoing communications.
Internal communications
editWhile hiring a program officer for communications, the A2K team focused on internal as well as external communications. After the departure of staff members in the previous year, the team had come to the conclusion that working remotely required dedicated upkeep of internal communications. Hence, one of the best practices we have followed is to maintain records of all team meetings. This was taken a step further during our annual flaghip event, Train The Trainer 2017, wherein team members would send in their daily digest(a compilation of the day's challenges and scope for improvement) to be documented. This helped us reflect and calibrate our strategy for each day of the three day event.
In addition to the internal documentation practices, an external audit report was also requested from respected Wikimedian User:AshLin.
Learning Pattern
editHere is a learning pattern that you can use for in-event engagement.
Metrics
editMonth | Blog Posts | Facebook Posts | Twitter Posts | Instagram Posts | Total Social Media Engagement
(Reach & Impressions across Facebook and Twitter) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
December | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1693 | |
January | 4 | 1 | 9 | 8 | 4130 |
February | 1 | 5 | 132 | 14 | 27760 |
March | 5 | 4 | 20 | 2 | 5796 |
April | 19 | 6 | 3 | 0 | 4981 |
May | 3 | 2 | 20 | 0 | 416 |
June | 4 | 1 | 6 | 1 | 2247 |
Marathi
editActivities undertaken: Marathi
edit- Cultivating new editors through institutional partnerships
With the aim of conducting orientation sessions and edit-a-thons, periodic meetings with management members and faculty of institutions were conducted to develop an understanding of Wikimedia projects. In total, 12 such programs were conducted. The integration of Wikimedia projects with academic assignments has gathered momentum in these institutes. The Wikisource Internship project at New Law College, Pune was conducted systematically to evolve a standard module.
For meta pages of the events, see this table. The major partners are listed in the following table.
Name of the Institution | Location | Wikimedia Projects |
---|---|---|
Shivaji University | Kolhapur | Wikipedia, Commons, Wiktionary |
Dr.Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University | Aurangabad | Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource |
Bharati Vidyapeeth New Law College | Pune | Wikipedia, Wikisource |
Willingdon College | Sangli | Wikipedia, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource |
Vigyan Ashram | Pabal | Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource |
Mahatma Gandhi Mission Trust’s Institutions | Aurangabad | Wikipedia, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource |
Rayat Shikshan Sanstha Trust’s Institutions | Kolhapur, Satara | Wikipedia, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource |
CSIBER Trust’s Institutions | Kolhapur, Sangli | Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource |
Jnana Prabodhini | Pune | Wikipedia, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource |
Jalbiradari | Pune | Wikipedia, Commons |
Yashada | Pune | Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource |
Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited | Pune | Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource |
Language & Culture departments of State Government | Mumbai | Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource |
- Widening geographic reach
The goal of this activity was to spread awareness about Marathi Wikipedia in new cities across Maharashtra and Karnataka, where internet penetration is high and active Marathi community can be formed. (at least 3 cities Nagpur, Kolhapur, Bangalore). With the aim to widen the geographic reach of Marathi Wikipedia, many new cities were covered in outreach activities. New partnerships were also developed. Those institutes with dedicated academic courses in Marathi were selected on priority. While most active editors are from big cities like Pune and Mumbai, CIS-A2K attempts to involve editors from under-represented regions and communities as well. Whereas there is a need to focus on districts with predominantly rural population interested in the growth of Marathi Wikipedia. Such places were covered in outreach programs. These new cities include - Kolhapur, Sangli, Satara, Solapur, Aurangabad, and Belagavi.
- Capacity building of rural knowledge centres
Organization | Area of Work | Collaboration with CIS-A2K |
---|---|---|
Vigyan Ashram | Building human resource in rural areas; technical education | Wikipedia |
Sterlite Tech Foundation's Jeewan Jyoti Women Empowerment Centre, Ambawane | Women's empowerment | Wikipedia |
Jnana Prabodhini, Pune | Women's empowerment | Wikisource and Wiktionary |
These workshops have resulted in creation of new articles on about 55 villages, 300 articles on birds and native tree species. At Vigyan Ashram, a team is trained in Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. The future plan is to train these volunteers in digitisation activities at various libraries and museums across Maharashtra. The scanning of various old encyclopedias in Marathi has also been proposed for Wikisource and Wiktionary project.
- Thematic workshops
Concrete relationship with dedicated organisations working on Water, Biodiversity, Rural development and Women's issues has been developed through focused group discussions on thematic areas. Training sessions of small groups as well as edit-a-thons were conducted. The program locations include - Satara, Kolhapur, Aurangabad, Pune and Sangli. In all 5 thematic programs were conducted. For meta pages of the events, see this table.
- Mass awareness and demonstration programs
Marathi Wikipedia Demonstration Stall in Maha-Agro Exhibition at Aurangabad during 24th to 27th December 2016 in collaboration with Jalbiradari resulted into contact of 500 enthusiastic persons from various sectors in Marathwada region. Through these demo sessions, Marathwada University department faculty, MGM(expand) Trust's faculty and several NGOs were connected to Wikimedia movement.
Interviews on Marathi Wikipedia were recorded and broadcasted by AIR Kolhapur, Sangli and Solapur. In 30 minutes program, first 15 minutes were spent in question-answer session. In next session, an innovative live tutorial was conducted on - How to become Wikipedian and contribute? Actual demonstration was conducted in the studio with 2 participants involved in executing the instructions. While broadcasting, we appealed to listeners to do the operations on smartphone/tablets/laptop/desktops step by step. Promos were planned a week before to set the tone and ready the gadgets for the event. We got good response in the form of phone calls, emails and actual new editors on Wikipedia.
- Engaging with eminent personalities
Wikipedia in education has not been wholly embraced by Indian academicians. Thus, with a view to changing this attitude and enabling conversations within academic circles, CIS-A2K approached eminent and influential personalities in various sections of the society to bring Wikimedia platforms in discussion and action. These eminent personalities have helped CIS-A2K access new partnerships and collaborate with like-minded organizations and individuals. Few of them participated and guided in our workshops and important meetings. Many long term programs are initiated after these interactions like - collaboration with Organisations working on water, science & biodiversity,state government departments on language & culture and educational institutes. These persons have persuaded many organisations to integrate Wikimedia projects into their projects for more democratic outreach and capacity building. Some of the persons we have worked with are listed below.
Name | Area of Work |
---|---|
Prof. Madhav Gadgil | Ecologist |
Prof. Jayant Narlikar | Astrophysicist |
Prof. Mangala Narlikar | Mathematician |
Dr. Rajendra Singh | Water Conservation |
Dr. Sadanand More | Writer and Head of State language committee |
Prof. A.P.Deshpande | Founder of Marathi Vigyan Parishad |
Dr. Tara Bhawalkar | Scholar and writer in folk literature |
Prof. Dilip Karambelkar | Chairman of Marathi Vishwakosh Mandal |
Dr. Anand Limaye | Director of Yashada, State Officers’ Training Institute |
Dr. Iresh Swami | Ex-Chancellor of Solapur University |
Dr. Sudhirkumar Goyal | Retd. Secretary of Agriculture, Govt. of Maharashtra |
Pradip Rawat | Open knowledge |
- Wikisource Projects
- MGS Project- With MKCL's support, scanning of 2600 old and rare books is completed. The books are divided into different categories from copyright aspects. About 900 books are uploaded on Internet Archive. The copyright free books after scrutiny and community consultation, are being uploaded on Commons. As of now, 65 books are brought on Commons and 10 books are uploaded on Wikisource with unicode text conversion through OCR.
- Wikisource workshop resulted into networking of 15 libraries and State govt.language departments. The technical hands on training was imparted by experts. The process involved from scanning to OCR. By running OCR4Wikisoure program, community members were successful in converting 10 books (@2500 pages)into unicode text on Wikisource. The further activity of proof reading, validation and publishing is being carried out through internship programs of students.
- Collaborations - MKCL,Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha, Vigyan Ashram, Marathi Vishwakosh Mandal, and 15 libraries.
- GLAM: Structured Approaches
Marathi language GLAM efforts for the grant year focused primarily on Libraries and Archives. This was made possible owing to a combination of factors such as community needs assessment, presence of an active & collaborative network and interested institutions. Thus, in order to create credible impact, a multidimensional approach was taken wherein various stakeholders were involved right from the government to institutions to students. CIS-A2K was able to leverage its network of librarians and archivists and work with those most interested in collaborating with Wikimedia projects. Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha, the state government of Maharashtra’s language department collaborated with the project as well. Discussions with the department helped define the metadata structure for digitized books for all libraries as well as listing rare, old, and copyright free as well as digitized books across Maharashtra. The department also helped disseminate unicode information and methodology. The involvement of technically skilled people helped with using OCR more efficiently while internships conducted for students enabled a new generation of Wikimedians to familiarize themselves with the free knowledge movement.
The series of events are as follows :
- Feb 2017 - Marathi Wikisource & Digitisation Workshop on 17-18th February 2017
- Feb-March - Internship project at New Law College, Pune
- 18th March - Meeting with Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha in Pune: Collaboration with State Govt.
- 3rd April - Digitisation, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource Orientation Workshop at Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, Dist.Pune
- 29th April - Symposium on Marathi Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wiktionary Projects at Gokhale Institute Of Politics & Economics
- 26th May - Meeting with GLAM related people in Fergusson college, Pune.
- May-June - Capacity building of team working on OCR process. Guidance from Marathi Wikisource admin Mahitgar, Bodhisattwa & T.Sriniwasan
- Media coverage
Enabling visibility of activities has been an important part of the Marathi Wikipedia efforts. The popularity of Marathi language regional newspapers is high as they cater to both urban and semi-urban areas. Such visibility in newspapers allows those with pre-existing knowledge of the language to learn about the existence of Marathi Wikipedia as well as the local activities taking place in their cities and towns.
Impact
editAs a result of new institutional partnerships, these institutes have included the Wikimedia activity in their annual academic schedule and syllabus enabling a new generation of Wikimedians to learn along with their curriculum. This effectively engages Wikipedia in education. Widening the geographic reach of Marathi Wikipedia was also important to representing the diversity of the language in non-urban areas. The outreach to semi-urban and rural areas not only helps raise awareness about Wikimedia projects but also enables the representation of voices that are required for a more balanced view on Wikipedia.
Areas of focus for the future
edit- Institutional partnerships
CIS-A2K aims to continue partnering with our institutional partners in order to enable new editors to join the movement as well as to incorporate Marathi Wikimedia projects into academic syllabus at schools and colleges. CIS-A2K would also work towards introducing Wikimedia projects to institutions in different cities of Maharashtra, such as Pune, Kolhapur, and Aurangabad with the aim of generating content on different subjects as well as to enroll students in partner institutions with the Wikipedia Education Program
- Thematic workshops
CIS-A2K would also attempt to hold events and create pages on Marathi Wikipedia on specific themes that are aligned with local NGOs' work, and to combine the strength of grassroots organizations with the free knowledge movement
- Exploring new localities
With the fledgling attempts already having been made in non-urban centres, CIS-A2K aims to spread awareness about Marathi Wikipedia in new localities across Maharashtra (including Nagpur, Ahmednagar, Satara, Kolhapur, Sangli, Ratnagiri, and Aurangabad), as well as Goa and Karnataka, where internet penetration is high.
- Capacity building events
Working with knowledge centres, CIS-A2K would aim to stimulate higher editor retention rate and article quality improvement through strengthening community members' skills and inter-community bonding
- GLAM
With the strides made to engage with eminent personalities as well as libraries, CIS-A2K plans to enrich Marathi Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons with re-licensed books and multimedia resources.
Odia
editActivities undertaken
edit- WikiTungi: Building & Strengthening Communities
WikiTungi, Odisha's city based Wikimedia communities, were formed to train both existing and new community members in the broader Wikimedia Movement and its projects. Such offline groups enable Wikimedians to interact with fellow community members and create healthy, encouraging environments for building sustainable communities. The WikiTungi has been a common platform for Odia Wikimedians in Bhubaneswar and Puri to share and gain knowledge regarding Wikimedia projects. The concept of WikiTungi was coined with the formation of the Nalco WikiTungi, followed by the one in Puri and another in Bhubaneswar. CIS-A2K has been supporting the two city WikiTungis(Bhubaneswar and Puri) and their activities for over two years. The Tungi members in Bhubaneswar meet once in every month, while the Tungi members in Puri meet bi-monthly. The formation of WikiTungis has helped increase participation of Wikimedians in offline meetups as well as contribute to an increase in the reach of Odia Wikimedia projects. Gatherings like WikiTungis help in conducting brainstorming sessions with Wikimedians which result in collaborative projects and their planning and execution across different Wikimedia projects. Over the years the WikiTungi program has catered to over 20 active Wikimedians and over 50 individuals at its meet-ups.
- Advanced Wikipedia Training
Advanced Wikipedia Training is a higher level training for Wikimedians to acquire skills such as learning tools, finding a dead end, non-wikify, orphan pages, etc. With the help of these resources, Wikipedians improve the quality of articles on Odia Wikipedia. The advanced program also includes training the Wikipedians on how to do outreach programs, approach institutions and collaborate with the institutions.
- Image-a-thon
Image-a-thon is a quality improvement measure on Odia Wikipedia, wherein images are added to articles with the aim of "at least one image in one article". The first phase of the Image-a-thon was organized at the Puri WikiTungi where 7 Wikimedians took part, and 150 images were added to Odia Wikipedia articles.
- Wikidata
Odia Wikipedia was one of the first four Wikipedias to have article place holder extension with the help of MKar. A series of Wikidata translation events have been organized since in order to translate Wikidata labels to Odia. A Wikidata label-a-thon event was organized during the 7th Puri Tungi meetup; eight Wikimedians from the city joined for the edit-a-thon and translated 220 labels to Odia. The event was focused on International Women’s History Month and the labels translated were related to the articles created thus far in Odia Wikipedia’s WHM edit-a-thon. Wikipedians were taught about the Wikidata game and other helpful tools on Wikidata.
- Planning and Execution
WikiTungi helps CIS-A2K and community members to meet offline and plan for future events and activities. These plans are discussed with the local community members, and tasks are distributed accordingly. Over the last one year, community members have helped in localising global projects such as BBC 100 Women, Euro-Vision, etc.
The space for WikiTungi meetups was initially provided by long time Odia Wikimedian Subas Chandra Rout. However, since March 2017, the Sambad Media Group have housed Bhubaneswar WikiTungi meetings. On 10 February 2017, community members gathered to celebrate the volunteer participation of Bhubaneswar WikiTungi for over one year. Tanveer Hassan, CIS-A2K Program Manager was also part of the anniversary celebration; the community interacted with CIS-A2K and planned to adopt new action points for the future in the Tungi Program:
- Tungi members will invite one of the global community leaders for a Skype or Hangout session.
- Tungi members will discuss global best practices and hold discussions with the wider community.
- Updating the minutes of the meeting and sharing them with the other community members.
- Updating the learning and evaluation team about new learnings of the community every month.
- The community will also send postcards as souvenirs to the participants of the global community for taking time out for the online sessions.
- Cultivating new editors through workshops
Increase in the number of editors from diverse fields of work will help increase diversity of content on Odia Wikipedia. The community members and the CIS-A2K program have identified institutions to bridge this gap on Odia Wikimedia projects. The A2K members along with the community members have organized workshops in institutions in different regions of Odisha. In the last work plan, the A2K program approached two institutions in Western Odisha, one in Central Odisha and two in Coastal Odisha to increase the number of editors as well as diversity among the Wikipedia editors in the Odia Wikimedia projects.
- Workshop at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication
The Odia Wikipedia community has collaborated with the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal since 2013 for reaching the students of mass communication and enabling them to join the Wikimedia movement. On 31 January 2017, a Wikipedia workshop was organised at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication for the Wikipedia workshop. Over 45 students from both Odia and English departments of the institution took part in the introductory workshop.
- Orientation Program at Imperial College
An orientation program was organised at Imperial College, Bargarh to introduce 60 students from the college to the Bargarh Digitisation Project as well as to Odia Wikipedia in general. The event was the second program in Western Odisha.
- Workshop at Sambalpur University
Considering the fact that 196 colleges are affiliated to Sambalpur University across seven different districts of Western Odisha, a workshop was planned at the University to raise awareness about the Wikimedia movement and establish networks in the region. An orientation and workshop event was initiated by the Odia Wikipedia community which was for students of Computer Science and Application Department and the Odia Department of the University. The 57 participants, including 5 faculty members, consisted of 30 male and 27 female participants. The event was the first workshop held in Sambalpur University and the second one in Western Odisha after three years.
Over the course of these programs in various institutions, Odia Wikipedia community members and A2K have identified some common barrier for the failure in editor retention or interest after the program: often it is difficult to follow-up with institutions due to the rigorous academic calendar of the institution and nearly 70% of the participants do not know how to write in Odia language on the Internet or on Odia Wikipedia.
- Bridging the gender gap in content
The Odia community and CIS-A2K recognized the need for resources in order to improve articles on women personalities on Odia Wikipedia. Having identified this need, archival houses, like Sambad, one of the most widely circulated newspapers and media house in Odisha, were approached for content. The Sambad Media Group partnered with the Odia Wikipedia community and CIS-A2K to organize a two-day 100 Women Edit-a-thon in the month of March. The event drew inspiration from BBC’s 100 Women series and edit-a-thons with the same name in December 2016 wherein BBC opened up its archives to Wikipedians to improve articles on women personalities.
The edit-a-thon at Sambad was spread over two days, with over 20 female journalists from the organisation taking part. These journalists later edited and improved Odia Wikipedia articles on "Women achievers" with the help of content donated by the Sambad Group. For most of the journalists, editing Odia Wikipedia was a new platform to work on, and hence on the first day, the journalists were introduced to basic editing on Wikipedia. On the second day, the journalists edited articles on Odia Wikipedia. After the main event, the community members have organised one follow-up event and plan to organise more follow-up events in the future.
- Edit-a-thons to Enrich Odia Wikipedia
Thematic edit-a-thons have always proven to be successful on Odia Wikipedia. These edit-a-thons help increase content on particular topics or events that are generally under-represented on Odia Wikipedia. The A2K team has supported the community members in planning and organising two such thematic edit-a-thons: International Women's History Edit-a-thon and Asian Athletics Championship Edit-a-thon. During the Women's History Edit-a-thon, 13 Wikimedian from the community added 233 articles to Odia Wikipedia, while 14 Wikimedians and new editors added and improved 12 articles in English and Odia during the Asian Athletics Championships Edit-a-thon.
- Digitisation project
Availability of digital resources in Odia is sparse on the internet. With the help of digitization, Odia community members are making Odia Wikisource a key platform for the availability of copyright free Odia books on the internet which not only creates a digital archive for these books, but also helps improve the content on Odia Wikipedia in terms of both information and citations. CIS-A2K has supported two digitization projects of the Odia community members: the Pothi project, a project by Wikimedian Prateek Pattanaik to digitize to collect and digitize rare, out-of-copyright Odia-language books, and digitization work in Parija library in Utkal University where Chinmayee Mishra is digitizing the copyright free books available at the library and uploading it on Odia Wikisource. CIS-A2K has provided a scanner to Chinmayee to scan the books at Utkal University. A2K also initiated a digitization project in a 300-year-old temple in western Odisha to digitize old manuscripts of the temple. Two orientation programs were organised for the temple administration, but the digitisation project failed due to the problem in availability of electricity and lack of existing community members in the area.
- Rathajatra GLAM
Rathajatra is a 1000-year-old festival in Odisha celebrated over two months which involves making chariots for the deity of the state, Lord Jagannath, culminating in the chariot festival. Ratha Yatra GLAM was an activity carried out by WikiTungi Puri, where Wikimedians from Puri documented the process of chariot making for 22 days during the Ratha Yathra Festival in the city. The Wikimedians spent over three weeks to document the various processes of this ancient festival at Rakha Khala where the chariots are made. The project was the first GLAM activity conducted by Odia Wikipedians. Due to uncontrollable issues, the project was initially delayed by 15 days. This documentation work from Wikimedians in Puri helped in making the largest Open Knowledge resources available on Jagannath culture. As a follow-up, a month-long edit-a-thon was organised where participants created and improved 60 articles on Odia Wikipedia.
Impact
editCIS-A2K was able to forge new partnerships and collaborate with like-minded organizations to increase the content as well as the participation of new editors on Wikipedia. CIS-A2K has increased the reach of Odia Wikimedia projects by organising workshops on Odia Wikipedia in different parts of Odisha without solely focusing on the main centres such as Bhubaneswar and Puri. CIS-A2K has also made fledgling attempts to bridge the gender gap in the content of Odia Wikipedia and increase participation of female Wikimedians in outreach activities. In addition to these, the GLAM activity conducted by the Puri community has successfully documented the ancient practice of Jagannath Rathayatra while CIS-A2K has also helped Odia Wikipedian Chinmayee Mishra in initiating the digitisation project at Utkal University
Areas of Focus for the Future
edit- Over six months, the inactivity in Odia WikiTungi has increased and in order to retain the interest of Wikimedians in WikiTungi programs, CIS-A2K will try to restructure WikiTungi format.
- CIS-A2K will work with volunteers to approach new institutions and increase the reach of Odia Wikipedia. CIS-A2K team will create new tools and learning videos for new editors to learn to edit Wikipedia from YouTube and Commons. Awareness in FOSS programs will help the volunteers to create new tools for Odia language and CIS-A2K aims to focus on it.
Learnings
edit- Involving Wikipedians has helped in increase in participation of Wikipedians in both on-Wiki and off-Wiki programs;
- Re-structuring the WikiTungi program, to increase the participation of Wikipedians in the WikiTungi activities.
- Due to less/no availability of input tools and lack of skills of Odia language typing skills, inactivity tends to set in causing fewer editors to be retained.
Activities with Educational Institutions
editName of the Institution | Approached | Number of activity | Follow-up Activity | Activity |
---|---|---|---|---|
Utkal University, Bhubaneswar | Yes | 2 | Yes | Digitisation Activity by Chinmayee Mishra |
Sambalpur University , Burla | Yes | 1 | No | Orientation program in Sambalpur University |
Centurion University of Technology and Management | Yes | No | Meetings with Authorities of the institution to run digitisation drive in their Parlakhemundi Campus. |
Kannada
editActivities undertaken: Kannada
editWith the non-availability of a Community Advocate, it has been difficult for the team to organise outreach events. In the past program period, CIS-A2K team has been able to coordinate activities with other stakeholders in the open knowledge domain. These activities can be classified into three categories:
- Skill Development activities: A2K team has increased the depth and impact of its work with the Kannada community by working closely with students of Christ University. The WEP at Christ University has increased not just the content on Kannada Wikipedia but has also improved the quality of the content that already exists. This activity has had a positive impact in the quality of articles that have been added to Kannada Wikipedia under the WEP project. Similar measure of success can be seen in the Kannada Wikisource activity which has seen a drop in instances of vandalism and a higher rate of proofreading and validation of pages compared to previous years.
A2K facilitated an internship program for the students of Christ University. These students have continued to engage with Wikimedia projects even after WEP. The objective of this initiative was to train the student volunteers about the quality improvement process of Kannada Wikipedia projects. Interns worked towards removing junk articles that were created by students under WEP and added references to articles that did not have adequate references in addition to adding inter-Wiki links. This program aims to sustain interested student volunteers who have shown interest in Kannada Wikimedia projects even after the WEP comes to an end. A2K believes that such focused mentorship will lead to increase in the number of editors and immensely help the creation of quality content.
In order to align WEP activity with A2K’s mission of increasing quality content and reducing acts of vandalism on Kannada Wikimedia projects, the Campus Ambassador Program has been re-introduced. While the Program Associate co-ordinates with the faculty members of Christ University, Campus Ambassadors help the students in understanding the objective, purpose and method of participating in WEP assessment. This initiative will have direct bearing on the Return of Investment for CIS. While CIS has minimal financial expenses in conducting the WEP at Christ University, the intensive human resource required to conduct WEP at such a large scale had proven to be counter-productive. With Campus Ambassadors and faculty members becoming larger stakeholders in the evaluation and coordination, A2K team would have the opportunity to document its learnings from this WEP initiaitve.
A2K has also conducted Template Importing and Tools Awareness Workshop in collaboration with Karavali Wikimedians User Group. This workshop served the dual purpose of introducing important tools to Karavali Wikimedians that would help in the growth of Tulu Wikipedia. Templates were also imported for their use. The importing and localisation of templates in this workshop will further boost the productivity of Tulu Wikimedians.
- Building of roadmap and strategy for the growth of Kannada Wikimedia projects: While the other Focus Language Areas associated with A2K were program-heavy during the last program period, Kannada Wikimedia projects were idea-heavy in its course.
A2K team has conducted a series of meetings with many important institutions, individuals and has developed a road-map for the future development and engagement of Kannada Wikimedia projects.
- Awareness and reach: CIS-A2K reached out to many like-minded organisations and conducted awareness activities thus expanding the reader and user base of Kannada Wikimedia Projects. Some of the organisations that we have collaborated with are:
Name of the Organisation | Projects Discussed | Outcome/Follow-up | Comments |
---|---|---|---|
Photographic Society of Bangalore, Bangalore | Wikimedia Commons | Conducted Photo-walk activity | Uploading of images of the society needs to be taken up |
Regional Institute of Education, Mysore | Wikiversity | Symposium to be conducted for uploading Learning material for Physics (basic level) upto class 10 | Training for teaching faculty needs to be scheduled |
Kannada University, Hampi | Wiktionary, Wikisource | - | Digitisation workshop ‘Dravida Vyakarana’ Book needs to be scanned and digitised |
Educational Institutions in Sagara, Davanagere and Chitradurga | Wikipedia | - | Training workshops were not conducted |
Central Library, Mangalore | One Lib-One Reference and Service to the Movement | Introducing Wikimedian in Residence | Free internet and reference facility has been made available for Wikimedians based in Mangalore |
Navakarnataka Publications, Bangalore | Wikipedia (adding content and improving references) | - | By making use of local file upload, creating articles will improve content |
Impact
editCIS-A2K has observed positive developments in the progress of WEP activities. The emphasis on quality improvement (though difficult to implement) has motivated students to carefully compile references and enabled the faculty in taking larger responsibility in the evaluative process.
A2K team has been able to secure institutional support and privileges both from governmental agencies and corporate houses for the benefit of Kannada Wikimedians. CIS-A2K, along with the help of Ms. Harriet Vidyasagar, respected Konkani Wikipedian, has arrived at an agreement with Central Library, Mangalore to provide free use of Internet and reference facilities for Wikimedians in Mangalore and surrounding areas. Our interventions with Konkani Sahitya Academy, Mangalore has resulted in securing of space for meet-ups and discussions hosted by Wikimedians in Mangalore.
Our efforts towards attempting to bridge the gap between Kannada Wikimedians and CIS-A2K has been facilitated by the needs assessment conducted by CIS-A2K. The needs assessment form contained questions and collected responses regarding community support, skill building initiatives and conflict resolution with community members.
Areas of Focus for the Future
editThe work period between July 2016-June 2017 has been a difficult one, with community members expressing their displeasure about the community advocate. CIS-A2K would like to regain the trust and confidence of the community members. CIS-A2K would also continue to invest in building skills for Kannada Wikimedians and facilitate interactions between Kannada/ Tulu community members and global communities in the form of participation in discussion on mailing lists, applications for funding requests and participation in global events.
It has been made clear to CIS-A2K during its needs assessment that CIS-A2K must attempt to bring coordination between other open source communities and government initiatives that have similar goals i.e. to collaborate or enrich Kannada Wikimedia projects. CIS-A2K intends to build such partnerships and fulfill the requests of the community.
Learnings
editOur learnings from the past program year have been of four-fold:
- In order to maintain the community’s trust, on-time reporting is a must; timely intervention during situations of conflict will lead to amicable solutions, thereby not taking away program resources;
- Skill building initiatives should not be imagined as a one time exercise but as an activity which shall be staggered in approach and integrate hands-on learning sessions for participants;
- Institutional partnerships must have a clear set of deliverables and a timeline for activities; these partnerships should involve Wikimedians as resource persons and CIS-A2K should provide learning and monitoring support;
- Institutional partnerships must be reviewed annually along with community members; an exit clause must be included if deliverables have not been fulfilled.
Telugu
editActivities undertaken
edit- Village Articles Project
In collaboration with Madhav Gadgil, Subodh Kulkarni and Prasanth Pawar, CIS-A2K initiated a project to improve and upgrade village stub articles to start class articles with the help of the Census 2011 data. CIS-A2K conducted discussion forums with Madhav Gadgil, Telugu Wikipedians and other like-minded enthusiasts. Discussions about the data available as well as the desirable style guide for the article took place online. Telugu Wikipedian User:Bhaskaranaidu and long time contributor to Telugu village stub articles found this project interesting and useful for knowledge regarding rural areas in the region. He is currently improving village articles of Chittoor District.
- Google Translated Articles Prioritisation Exercise
The Google-translated Telugu articles prioritization is an online exercise intended to prioritize and improve over 1,900 machine-translated articles on Telugu Wikipedia. The Google Translation Project in Indian language Wikipedias, initiated by Google in 2009, resulted in 1900 machine translated articles which mostly are considered to be of poor quality. Some Telugu Wikipedians tried to improve Google Translated articles from 2010-11. Jointly organised by the Telugu Wikipedia community and CIS-A2K, this renewed exercise saw the participation of 4 Wikipedians.
- Collaboration with Communities of Interest
CIS-A2K's pilot project of targeting interest groups by conducting workshops with individuals and groups of experts in various fields like sports, science, literature, films, etc., has been an attempt to cultivate new editors and improve quality content in Wikimedia projects. This has continued across the Telugu community this year. Online and on-site mini-workshops have been conducted for communities of interest in Geology and Film Studies. Workshops were conducted in Educational institutions located across Andhra Pradesh, reaching out to areas like Guntur and Rajamahendravaram. Workshops were also conducted at Jagarlamudi Kuppuswamy Chowdary College, Guntur and Adikavi Nannaya University, Rajamahendravaram.
- Content Donation
CIS-A2K's content donation drive started in June 2016 lasting over two months. This resulted in the free-licensing of 17 books. In collaboration with the Manasu Foundation and Andhra Loyola College(ALC), CIS-A2K conducted a scan-a-thon where Dr. Kola Sekhar scanned 12 books free-licensed out of a collaboration with ALC. The Telugu Wikisource proofreading sprint started with a workshop held between 18- 20 November 2016. At the event, students learned OCR and to proofread the OCR-generated text in Telugu Wikisource. Telugu Wikisource Workshop which was initially planned for the grant period was postponed to July 2017.
- Strengthening Existing Community
As per the suggestions of Telugu Wikipedia Community, CIS-A2K carried out small scale workshops at theHyderabad Monthly meet-ups. Participants were trained in tools like Prep-Bio, Twinkle, and Wiki-to-do. Some of the community members who requested for specific and individual training were given such training on aspects that they felt they needed to improve in order to increase their Wikipedia Contributions (like editing using visual editor, etc.,). User:Nrgullapalli who asked for one such training stressed the importance of individual training to very active Wikipedians since they constantly contribute to Wikimedia projects and will continue to do so if such rigorous one-on-one sessions are conducted.
- Meet-a-Wikimedian
The Meet-a-Wikimedian initiative to visit a Wikimedian and provide training, engage in project discussion and explore areas of collaboration went well. Telugu Wikimedia community members welcomed this personal approach. This enabled Wikimedians like User:Nrgullapalli to learn about policies and guidelines on how to provide inter-wiki links in a better way using the visual editor, User:Bhaskaranaidu to collaborate in village articles project and User:స్వరలాసిక to get necessary resources. At the programmatic level, this initiative helps CIS-A2K understand needs, issues, views and vision of various community members.
- Video Resources
A project to create and popularize video resources for Telugu Wikipedia Project was launched. The explanatory screen-capture videos were created by User:Pavan santhosh.s and User:Chaduvari. Efforts to coordinate this screen-capture video resource creation was done using a project page. These have been widely popular across social media.
Activities Planned and Conducted
Proposed Program | Actual |
Small City Outreach | Took place in Rajamahendravaram with a workshop at and a Telugu Wikipedia representation at the Rajahmundry Book Festival |
Improving diversity in Telugu Wikipedia | Not actualised |
Outreach in Telugu-speaking areas (other than Telangana and Andhra Pradesh) | Not actualised |
Training at Monnthly Meet-ups | In addition to Community Meet-ups, Individual and Group training sessions were also conducted |
Wikimedia Educational Programme | Workshops, Digitization sprints, Awareness sessions and Scan-a-thons took place |
Qualitative Measures | Resource Exchange Program and cleaning up Machine Translation Project took place; designed and rolled out prioritisation exercise for cleaning up machine translated articles |
Supporting Digitization | Scan-a-thon and proof-reading sprint took place with the digitisation of around 3000 pages on Telugu Wikisource |
Content donation | Content donation drive took place; in, February events were conducted to improve awareness about free-licenses. |
Advanced Wikisource User Session | Not actualised during the grant period; took place in July 2017 |
Impact
edit- Content Generation
To complete my 100Wikidays these resources have been useful, apart from that I thoroughly enjoyed creating articles on History & Personalities of Drama in and around Tenali and I thank (you) for providing me the resource
Providing resources to Wikipedians helped improve content on Telugu Wikipedia in addition to helping two Telugu Wikipedians, (User:Pranayraj1985 and User:Meena gayathri.s) to successfully undertake and complete the 100 Wikidays Challenge.
During 100 Wikidays, Participants will experience a fear of running out of ideas and material apart from fear about not having time. Even that fear will prevent people from taking up such a committment. For me, having resources on hand helped me to get out of the fear and to commit for the challenge. Anyway after starting, I successfully completed it twice and lost once
- Telugu Wikisource
CIS-A2K conducted Wikisource workshop for student Wikimedians at Andhra Loyola College where they learned about OCR and the process of proof-reading Wikisource pages. Later, these student Wikipedians began contributing to Wikisource every day after college hours and proofread nearly 3,500 pages in Wikisource. This Wikisource sprint was encouraged by the Principal of the college as well as the staff. At an event conducted to raise awareness free-licenses, authors who had free-licensed their books felicitated these student Wikimedians.
Guidelines and criteria were developed for re-licensing and digitising works. A pattern of prioritisation was developed. According to these guidelines, content can be grouped into three broad categories: referenced/ encyclopaedic content, classics/ popular works and content that falls into neither category. Priority in content donation using these categories will be decided through Wikisource Village Pump discussions. The action points are grouped according to whether these texts exist in unicode, scanned copies or printed work. Accordingly, the responsibility of digitising is decided i.e. whether an individual can digitise or it must be a community/ CIS-A2K effort.
- Improving Quality
The Telugu Village Project improved the quality of content available in more than 300 village articles. Village articles that were improved now contain information on education, infrastructure, government and private health facilities, drinking water, sanitation, communication and transportation facilities, markets and banking, health, nutrition, recreation, electricity facilities, irrigation, land Use and manufacturing. With the coming together of community members, technical experts, and free knowledge enthusiasts, Open Data is being utilised as a source to improve Telugu Wikipedia as a knowledge base.
- Cultivating New Editors
CIS-A2K initiated a pilot project for conducting mini workshops for "Communities of Interest", i.e. group of experts in a particular subject. Learnings of this activity helped identify potential Wikimedians with expertise and interest in their respective fields.
The workshop at JKC College was followed-up on a WhatsApp group(a popular mode of engagement among community members in India) which consists of newly registered student Wikimedians and active Wikipedia editors from the community. But the attempt was a failure in engaging student Wikimedians in Wikimedia-related discussions. Equipped with the learning from this failure, a WhatsApp group with participants of the Telugu Wikisource workshop was created. This group consists of a mix of existing Wikipedians and new Wikipedians who show interest towards the project. The collaboration on this new group turned out to be better.
The Wiki Loves Mayabazar event aimed to increase participation and content by bringing together cinematic arts enthusiasts in the Telugu-speaking region. The event, a commemoration of the classic film, Mayabazar, was an attempt to document the film on the various Wikimedia projects. Calls to action were posted on social media. Offline event and online edit-a-thons were featured prominently by reputed Telugu media houses and created a buzz on social media. The snowball effect of this could be witnessed when prominent writers with thousands of followers shared these posts. However, the event resulted in more social media engagement on-wiki activity.
Areas of Focus for the Future
edit- Sustainability: In order to achieve sustainability in existing programmatic activities, CIS-A2K has identified that efforts in government and like-minded non-profits should be involved in these efforts. Care should be taken in order to engage the community in planning, execution and other aspects of the program. The learnings of the programmatic efforts and strategies behind activities are being shared with community members both on-wiki and off-wiki. One of the events (Wiki Loves Mayabazar) was conducted with nearly complete in-kind support to ensure more ways to find funds in future activities.
- Creating models to take up: CIS-A2K, along with community members, tries to work in such a way that interested volunteers from the community will pick up models. For example, for past one year, CIS-A2K worked on creating semi-automated articles out of standard data. CIS-A2K discussed the format and content with the community members to decide upon an acceptable style guide and assign articles to interested volunteers in order to improve village articles. The idea for the current year is being taken forwarded by community leaders; and now that they are leading the process, tweaking models, connecting community members and technical persons, CIS-A2K is glad to be supporting their efforts.
- Creating platform to bridge community efforts with larger movements and opportunities: CIS-A2K recognises that there is a vast scope for collaboration amongst Telugu language enthusiasts, the Wikimedia movement, digital knowledge spaces, and other open source movements. There is a lot of scope for collaboration and opportunities which can make Telugu Wikimedia community efforts more fruitful and vice-versa. These mutually beneficial connections can come up with content about Wikimedians, social media engagement on trending topics and enabling literary figures to engage with the movement.
Learnings
edit- Spending programmatic time and effort on individuals and groups who are already pursuing their wiki interests and working on digital platforms will help cultivate more editors and can solve the problem of editor retention that CIS-A2K has faced in the past. A learning pattern on the same can be found here.
- In undertaking content donation by programmatic intervention, CIS-A2K has created an internal guideline. The process considers 3 factors - format (availability of Unicode version, scanned version, and print version), content (referenced/encyclopedic content, classic/popular works, and neither referenced material nor classic work), participation (copyright holder/others interested in learning Wikisource and volunteering to digitise). Content will be prioritised through community discussions.
Revenues received during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)
editPlease use the exchange rate in your APG proposal. Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.
- Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan Wikimedia Foundation INR 10,500,000 6,123,045 4,373,844.5 10,496,889.5 CIS-A2K received 100% funding as per the recommendation of FDC. We received INR3110.5 less than the anticipated amount due to the fluctuation of USD and INR Conversion rate.
* Provide estimates in US Dollars
Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.
- Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan Volunteer support INR - 40,000 50,000 90,000 1,313.1 We have calculated the support provided by A2K's institutional partners and other donors to support volunteer activities Travel & Stay INR - 41,000 - 35,000 76,000 1,108.84 On a few occasions travel and stay of both the Volunteers and A2K staff has been sponsored/supported by partner institutions Event organization and logistics INR - 68,500 - 25,000 93,500 1,364.16 This takes into account the support we have received in conducting events
* Provide estimates in US Dollars
Note: A2K has been able to calculate the in-kind support half yearly. hence figures are available for Q2 and Q4 respectively.
Spending during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)
editPlease use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.
Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.
- (The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan Staff Cost INR 3,600,000 1,069,769 838,261 612,396 1,064,450 3,584,876 52,524 52,303.34 99.57 Due to staff transition our overall salary budget has come down[2] Staff Travel & Stay INR 400,000 41,938 121,907 168,996.16 72,698.24 405,539.4 5,836 5916.8 101.38 Only local travel (within India) was budgeted but A2K sent a representative to WMCON 2017 Volunteer Support INR 2,578,000 346,880 426,784 853,227 833,508 2,460,399 37,613.02 35,897.22 95.43 A2K team witnessed a surge in requests for support on its request page Events and Meetups INR 818,000 6,324 171,090 764,247 226,739 1,168,400 11,934.62 17,046.95 142.83 A2K team increased the number of particiapants attending TTT and MWT along with provision for International participants Assistant/Intern INR 216,000 50,000 60,000 3,600 90,887 204,487 3,151.44 2,983.46 94.66 A2K team offered internships to volunteers from partner WEP institutions and The WB National University of Juridicial Sciences Miscellaneous INR 48,661.99 4,286 3,422 12,995 18,465 39,168 709.97 571.46 80.49 These are expenses incurred for fun activities. Birthday celebration of Wikimedia projects, A2K team members and Visiting Wikimedians Digitization, Consultant & Consumables INR 270,000 98,508 69,134 - - 167,642 3,939.3 2,445.90 62.08 We depend on external support for preparation of Utilisation certificates, audit documents and other administrative expenses General Service & Support to the movement INR 1,584,792.56 53,374 30,343 220,544 1,068,892 1,373,153 23,122.12 20,034.30 86.64 A2K provided Wikimania Scholarship to two Indic Wikimedians. Requests for travel assistance, resource exchange by the Indic Wiki communities and from like minded organisations in India are deducted from this line item. Institutional Development INR 954,545.45 209,000 286,500 298,820 159,100 953,420 13,926.81 13,910.39 99.88 Institutional Development fee TOTAL INR 10,469,999.01 1,880,079 2,007,441 2,934,825 3,534,739 10,357,084.4 152,757.28 151,109.82 98.92 We have fully utilised the grant, and are waiting for a few vouchers from vendors. A comprehensive financial statement will be provided with the financial report
* Provide estimates in US Dollars
Note:
- A2K team has utilised funds that were excess in salary section (due to transition of team members) towards volunteer support, events and meet-up and general support and service to the movement line items.
Compliance
editIs your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?
editAs required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
- No changes from the grant agreement
Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
- Yes
Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
- Yes
Signature
edit- Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.
- Lahariyaniyathi (talk) 16:54, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
Resources
editResources to plan for measurement
edit- Global metrics are an important starting point for grantees when it comes to measuring programmatic impact (Learning Patterns and Tutorial) but don’t stop there.
- Logic Models provide a framework for mapping your pathway to impact through the cause and effect chain from inputs to outputs to outcomes. Develop a logic model to map out your theory of change and determine the metrics and measures for your programs.
- Importantly, both qualitative and quantitative measures are important so consider both as you determine measures for your evaluation and be sure to ask the right questions to be sure to capture your program stories.
Resources for storytelling
edit- WMF storytelling series and toolkit (DRAFT)
- Online workshop on Storytelling. By Frameworks institute
- The origin of storytelling
- Story frames, with a focus on news-worthiness.
- Reading guide: Storytelling and Social change. By Working Narratives
- The uses of the story.
- Case studies.
- Blog: 3 Tips on telling stories that move people to action. By Paul VanDeCarr (Working Narratives), on Philanthropy.com
- Building bridges using narrative techniques. By Sparknow.net
- Differences between a report and a story
- Question guides and exercises.
- Guide: Tools for Knowledge and Learning. By Overseas Development Institute (UK).
- Developing a strategy
- Collaboration mechanisms
- Knowledge sharing and learning
- Capturing and storing knowledge.