Grants:APG/Proposals/2020-2021 round 2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Progress report form
The Access to Knowledge (A2K) program of the The Centre for Internet and Society is submitting a progress/interim report after completing the first six months of the grant period 1 July 2021 – 30 June 2022. A2K received an annual grant from the Wikimedia Foundation for the mentioned program year. This progress report includes four sections, addressing grant metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance.
Program background
Centre for Internet and Society: The Centre for Internet and Society (or "CIS") is a registered non-profit research organisation in India that undertakes interdisciplinary research on the internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. Research at CIS is located under different thematic areas or verticals, such as accessibility for persons with disabilities, openness, internet governance, telecommunication reform, intellectual property rights, digital privacy, cybersecurity and research on socio-material and cultural aspects of the internet. The organisation's official website may be seen at cis-india.org. Annual reports of the organisation may be seen at cis-india.org/about/reports.
Access to Knowledge: Access to Knowledge (or "A2K") is a program at CIS which supports and facilitates the work of Indian Wikimedia projects and communities located across various languages. A2K's primary objectives are: supporting and serving the Indian Wikimedia communities in all possible ways, building institutional partnerships, bringing more content under free license, designing and executing projects with community participation, strengthening the Wikimedia volunteers, fostering and enabling an appropriate legal and technological ecosystem. The earlier proposals and reports of the A2K program may be seen at CIS-A2K/Reports. Please see the most recent annual proposal here.
Introduction
Namaskara,
In this document we are reporting A2K's programs and activities conducted (and supported) between 1 July and 31 December 2021. This program year we have continued our work to support Indian Wikimedia projects and the communities. We have continued our work on Wikisource as a focused project. Some of the highlights of our work done in these six months are:
- The third national proofread-a-thon was conducted in August 2021. 198 Wikimedians from 12 language communities participated in the event and proofread 39,783 pages.
- We are currently supporting work on the creation of a Wikisource App.
- We have conducted two mini edit-a-thons (Mahatma Gandhi edit-a-thon and Festive season edit-a-thon).
- We have continued content relicensing work over this period, and a total of 95 books & 420 images have been re-licensed and uploaded on Wikimedia Commons from July to December 2021.
- We have been working with different institutional partners such as National Digital Library of India, Goa University, Lek Ladki Abhiyan & Satara Public Library, Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir Library, H. V. Desai College, Tarun Bharat Sangh and PAH Solapur University.
- A series of online training sessions have been conducted with various partners. We have also conducted Maryana's Listening Tour ― South Asia call and a couple of other similar online events.
- In 2021, the A2K team continued work on the research component and three studies are being undertaken. The studies are on Exploring Knowledge Repositories on Water Resources in India, Mapping Repositories on Gender and Sexuality in Indian languages, and Study on Infrastructural Needs of Indian Language Wikisource Projects.
Metrics
Metric | Proposal | Achieved outcome | Explanation |
---|---|---|---|
Participants | 2,900 | 625 | In-person event (workshop, meeting etc.) was not conducted. As partner institutions were either mostly closed or operating remotely. Hence, we have fewer participants and newly registered Wikimedians |
Newly Registered | 1,000 | 130 | |
Content Pages |
|
On Wikipedia
On Wikisource
Relicense
On Wikimedia Commons 25 books Relicensed, scanned & uploaded.
|
Wikisource proofread-a-thon and the mini edit-a-thon was helpful to bring a lot of content on. |
New Partnerships | 6 | 4 |
|
Learning-Evaluation/Knowledge Sharing | 10 | 2 | The first writing in this series was published in the beginning of the program year. Work in this portal has been slow in the first six months. We will specially focus in the upcoming months to produce high-quality outputs under this. Writings, learning modules and documents will be documented under CIS-A2K/Academy. |
Program stories
Metric | Target | Last year (if applicable) | Progress (at end of Q2) | Projected (end of year) | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Participants | 2,900 | - | 625 (21.6%)
|
2,900 | ||
Newly registered | 1,000 | - | 130 (13%)
|
1,000 | ||
Content pages | 40,000 | - | 52,982 (132.4%)
|
60,000 | ||
New Partnerships | 6 | - | 4 (66.7%)
|
6 | ||
Learning-Evaluation/Knowledge Sharing | 10 | - | 2 (20%)
|
10 |
Indic Wikisource proofread-a-thon
editCIS-A2K conducted the 3rd all India level online Indic Wikisource Proofreadthon in August 2021 to enhance awareness and skills related to Wikisource projects, and encourage Indian language contributors to work on them. This was a fifteen day online event, where the participants contested from their language-specific projects, on an all-India basis.
We have 12 Indic language-based Wikisource projects, and all of them participated in the event. Not all communities have experience in conducting or engaging with an online proofreadthon however, as they have not organised such an event earlier. Therefore, CIS-A2K conducted an all India level online proofreadthon to support the community and facilitate its growth through capacity-building and developing awareness. There are certain challenges with work in this area, as every language community has a different standard of quality, strategies of content creation and growth as per their policies. Most of the Wikisource communities in India are still at an infant level compared to others in the global context, particularly with respect to proofreading ( for example: MOS of layout and check the error of OCR output). So this online edit-thon has helped communities to engage with each other, compare quality standards, best practices and protocols, and rectify to set a proper standards as per Wikisource projects.
This session was conducted as per a new format which was announced to communities as well. Changes include a) increasing the number of winners from each community to 10, so as to encourage healthy competition and provide more space for recognition of work, b) setting the minimum threshold point at 350 for winning any prize. Each community selected the books to be proofread by the 198 participants. A total of 186 books were proofread in this edition of the contest. A total of 39,783 pages and 10,779 pages were proofread and validated respectively. Below are graphs illustrating some of the key statistics of the contest.
Some of the observations and learnings are:
- There is only one tool that may be used to measure progress of work during the contest,indic-wscontest;this is still in developing stages, and another wscontest tool is not working properly. So it is quite difficult to show and compare the real-time statistics and progress of each community.
- Before the August 2021 edit-thon, The IndicTechTeam developed/improvised a good contest tool that is feasible for the contest, but it also has some issues and limitations.
- The statistics are not updated spontaneously or in real-time mode (as other Wikipedia contest tools like [fountain]), because the Wikisource data schema is different from Wikipedia.
- Co-ordination between 12 language communities is also a complex and time-consuming effort. Every community has unique issues regarding each section, like the selection of books, reviewer action, maintaining the quality of text that has been proofread etc.
- Maintaining a control on quality of Wikisource content was a major concern during the contest in every iteration.
Future plan: Drawing upon these learnings, we will continue this event and will plan to conduct the 4th Indic Wikisource Proofreadthon March 2022 in this year.
Mini edit-a-thons
editIn 2020–2021, A2K initiated a series of mini edit-a-thons. These edit-a-thons engage the community members for a brief period (usually not more than two days), and general but interesting and important topics are selected as the theme of the event. This program year, we have continued this mini edit-a-thon series and conducted two such events between 1 July and 31 December 2021.
After the 2020 mini edit-a-thons series, A2K conducted a survey to get feedback from participants. We received responses from 13 contributors and this helped to shape the current year's mini edit-a-thon series.
- Mahatma Gandhi 2021 edit-a-thon was a two-day event conducted on 2 and 3 October 2021. The event focused on creating or developing content related Mahatma Gandhi, his works, and also onIndian Independence movement in general. 32 Wikimedians created content during this content creation event and 98 articles were created in different Indian languages. We saw participation from 12 languages or communities such as Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Santali, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
- Festive Season 2021 edit-a-thon was conducted on 11 and 12 December 2021. The purpose of conducting this event was to celebrate the festivals of India, by creating or developing content related to Indian festivals on Wikimedia projects. 11 Wikimedians participated in this event and 46 Wikipedia articles were created. Other than Wikipedia, a few editors edited Wikidata for labels and descriptions. User:Ssgapu22 added one item related to Festive Season 2021 edit-a-thon (d:Q110061212). User:Vijay Barot made more than 100 edits on Wikidata. A Wikimedian uploaded 8 files on Wikimedia Commons related to festivals. User:Dugal harpreet, a Wikimedian co-hosted this specific edit-a-thon alongwith User:Nitesh (CIS-A2K).
Future plan: Over the next six months, we plan to conduct at least one more such a mini edit-a-thon, where we will engage Wikimedia volunteers in organising the event as well. In future we have plans to conduct mini edit-a-thons in other formats such as on a regional level, instead of a national scale only.
-
Picture clicked during the edit-a-thon
-
Mahatma Gandhi 2021 edit-a-thon poster
Relicensing
editCIS-A2K has been facilitating the process of relicensing Indian language content in Maharashtra for the last four years. Due to consistent efforts and support set up for digitisation, the authors, copyright holders as well as organisations approach us on regular basis on aspects related to relicensing and content donation. A simple step-by-step manual for executing the OTRS process has made the procedure convenient for them. During this program period, a total of nine copyright holders released 71 books by completing the OTRS process. Some of the authors include - P. G. Sahasrabudhe, Purushottam Pandurang Gokhale, Subhash Khardekar, Nalini Mahadik etc. The books are being uploaded under the respective categories on Commons after the digitisation process at Vigyan Ashram, Pabal.
Relicensing efforts with institutional partners are also in progress. One of these partners in the digitisation program, Public Library Satara also released two valuable memoirs published on the occasion of 100th and 150th anniversary of the library.
CIS-A2K is facilitating the Wiki Project on Goa Liberation Struggle with some institutions in Goa. As a part of this, Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust has partnered with us to enrich the content. 'Bharat' the bilingual weekly newspaper in Marathi and Portuguese was published by Bharatkar Govind Pundalik Hegde Desai during the period 1912 to 1949. For 36 years, Bharatkar courageously protested the Portuguese occupation, and relentlessly advocated radical and progressive social reforms. The two volumes of editorials from 'Bharat' were also published by the trust. The trust has released these volumes and were uploaded on Wikimedia Commons.
Future plan: The community and institutions will be involved in the development of a database of potential copyright holders who may be interested in and approached for collaborations on content donation. Promotional material for these efforts, in the form of a booklet and a short video featuring the authors who released their works would be prepared.
Wikimedia Commons workshops
editDocumentation of floods: Selected organisations working in flood relief were trained in documenting natural disasters on Wikimedia Commons. A total of four members were trained in an online session. The images from Satara district were uploaded by Lek Ladki Abhiyan volunteers.
-
Devastated house in Humbarli floods
-
Landslide during the floods in Patan block, Satara
-
Destroyed agricultural fields due to floods in Humbarli village
Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) in Maharashtra: CIS-A2K promoted WLM 2021 amongst photographers, students and journalists, with the objective of encouraging them to document local cultural heritage. Our institutional partners, PAH Solapur University and MGM University took the initiative to organiseonline sessions on Wikimedia Commons. Photographers from Solapur, Sangli and Aurangabad and students of MGM college of Journalism participated in these events on 24 and 29 September 2021. The contributors were also supported through online follow-up sessions. In these sessions, photography experts - Dilip Nerlikar, Baiju Patil and WLM 2017 winner Prashant Kharote guided the participants.
-
Bibi ka makbara, Aurangabad
-
Soneri Mahal
-
Mehrangarh Fort
-
Intricately carved Ellora cave temple
Jalbodh project: Workshop on Agrani River basin
editCIS-A2K has been facilitating the Jalbodh project to build content related to water and rivers. Tarun Bharat Sangh and it's India level network of Jal Biradari groups have taken the initiative to document all the river basins in India. The activists working in the Agrani river basin in Maharashtra organised a workshop on 17 & 18 November to create the basic structure and category tree for the river basin. They have started uploading images of these river basins beginning at the village level. The structure of articles and Commons categories will be replicated for other river basins in Maharashtra state as well as other states. hree coordinators participated in this workshop. The issues discussed were - Wiki pillars, copyright laws, licensing of content and categorisation. The hand on activity for uploading on Commons under the Category:Agrani River Basin category was also conducted.
Future plan: Bimonthly follow-up sessions with the Jal Biradari volunteers are planned to upload the content on Wikimedia Commons.
-
Activists - Narendra Chugh, Ravindra Vora, Vilas Chouthai - & Subodh (CIS-A2K) involved in developing structure for documentation
Share Your Struggle: CIS-A2K collaborated with various organisations to document important social struggles on Wiki during Share Your Struggle 2021 (15 August 2021 - 15 September 2021), a public photo competition on Wikimedia Commons. A session on Wikimedia Commons was conducted on 9 September 2021 to explain copyrights, CC licenses, the objectives of SYS2021 and the uploading process. In this session, 11 volunteers of organisations - Narmada Bachao Andolan, Loksangharsh Morcha, Amhi Amchya Arogyasathi, MVSTF Nandurbar, Lek Ladki Abhiyan & Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal - actively participated and uploaded the images related to important struggles such as social movements, natural disasters and public health crises in India.
Images uploaded by different organsiations may be seen here:
- Uploads by Lok Sangharsh Morcha
- Uploads by Narmada Bachao Andolan
- Uploads by MVSTF, Nandurbar
- Uploads by Amhi Amachya Arogyasathi
- Uploads by Lek Ladki Abhiyan
- Uploads by Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal
Future plan: The participant organisations possess extensive documentation of struggles and movements related to water resources, in the form of images, books, reports, posters, videos etc. Some of them have shown keen interest in archiving this content on Wiki. A specific project related to this topic would be developed with one organisation, in the next program period.
-
Tribal women farmers from Maharashtra participating in farmers protest
-
Livelihood struggle in forests
-
Flood affected families collecting grocery kits for survival
-
Struggle for drinking water
Partnerships with institutions in Goa
editA series of meetings with various institutions in Goa to build partnerships were conducted between 11-13 October 2021. Field visits to some monuments in South Goa which are important landmarks in the Goa Liberation struggle, were conducted with facilitation by Prof. Vinay Madgaonkar of Goa University. He is with the Marathi department, and leads the Project - Goa Liberation documentation on Wiki and coordinator for Bhakti Dnyan Marg Sadhan Sanstha, Shivoli and is active in socio-cultural heritage documentation projects. In order to relicense books available with the participant organisations, a meeting with the trustee of Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust, Adv. G. K. Hegde Desai at Quepem was organised. The listing of books related to the liberation struggle and archives was started with the help of a few journalists.
A meeting was conducted with librarian and HoD of library science, Dr. Carlos & Prof. Mhamal on the proposed Goa books project in collaboration with the university and other libraries in Goa. In this context, a meeting with key persons from Goa Central library was also conducted.
Future plan: The further process of these digitisation efforts with Goa University, Bharatkar Trust and Goa Central Library will be continued in the next quarter.
-
Freedom Fighters' names displayed at Goa Freedom Fighters' Memorial in Cuncolim
-
O Bharat the bilingual weekly newspaper run by Govind Pundalik Hegde Desai in Goa
-
O Bharat the bilingual weekly newspaper run by Govind Pundalik Hegde Desai in Goa
Lek Ladki Abhiyan & Satara Public Library
editThe Digitisation centre at Lek Ladki Abhiyan's Muktangan Training facility in Satara was launched on 15 August 2021. The 150 year old Shri. Chhatrapati Pratapsinh Maharaj (Thorle) Nagar Wachanalay, a public library in Satara is collaborating with CIS-A2K to enable better access to public domain books. The skill building of six persons was conducted at Vigyan Ashram, Pabal on 6 August 2021. A gathering of organisations, authors and librarians from Satara district was also held to spread the word about free knowledge and digitisation processes. The volunteers demonstrated the scanning and post processing steps as well.
A session on copyrights, re-licensing process, Wikisource projects and the larger free knowledge movement was conducted. The authors and librarians discussed various issues regarding these aspects. After the event, three women authors have relicensed their books. The books are being uploaded in a separate category on Wikimedia Commons. We hope, this scanning centre will cater to the needs of the content coming from Western Maharashtra districts.
Future plan: The standard process of selection of public domain books from the library and logistics will be streamlined. Other libraries and institutions in the city will be contacted to encourage contribution of more books towards these efforts in the near future. The relicensing process in the district will be planned systematically.
-
Demonstration of digitisation process by Pooja Jadhav from Vigyan Ashram
-
Demonstration of scanning process at Lek Ladki Abhiyan on 15 August 2021
-
Lek Ladki Abhiyan volunteers practicing with the scanning work
Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir Library
editCIS-A2K has been working with the 175 year old Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir Library to facilitate the scanning and uploading process in their digitisation set-up. CIS-A2K is supporting the digitisation process, right from selection of books till uploading on Wikimedia projects.
After the initial meetings with the trustees and staff, the first training session on Wikimedia projects was conducted on 23 & 24 November 2021 in the library. The copyright law, different licenses and scope of bringing content on Commons were discussed in detail. A hands-on activity for uploading books was also conducted. The digitised books are being uploaded in the specific category on Wikimedia Commons. As on 31 December, 85 books have been uploaded.
Future plan: The volunteers from the library will be trained in bringing books on Wikisource and running OCR on the same. The metadata of books will be prepared and the integration with Wikidata would be done. We have planned to upload at least 500 books till June 2022.
-
Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir library established in 1848
-
Training session for the members of Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir
-
Inside view of Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir library
-
Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir digitisation set-up
-
Scanning of book at PNVM digitisation set-up
-
Scanning pages of separated books at PNVM digitisation set-up
PAH Solapur University
editPunyashlok Ahilyabai Holkar Solapur University, Solapur (PAHSUS) has developed an education program with CIS-A2K to enrich the content on Wikimedia projects with the involvement of students.
The workshop on Wikimedia projects was an attempt to start the process of online assignments in the university curriculum. In this workshop, a total of 30 students participated to learn basic Wikipedia editing and image uploading on Wikimedia Commons. The topics for the assignments were selected under the guidance of faculty. The students have started developing the articles using Google Docs. The orientation about reliable and verifiable referencing was done in the library along with exploration of reference material like books, gazettes, reports, thesis etc. This exploration in the library was very well appreciated by the students. The librarian and the staff will also be involved in the content creation process and to oversee quality of content.
Future plan: The articles in the Google Doc will be reviewed by the faculty and they will be uploaded initially on sandbox to learn Wiki formatting and other aspects. Quarterly follow-up workshops have been planned to complete this project.
-
Students exploring reference material in the library
-
PAH Solapur University Students editing in Wikipedia workshop in Dec 21
-
Students exploring reference material in the library
History Project with H. V. Desai College
editH. V. Desai College, Pune has taken the initiative to form a 'Heritage Club' under the history department. They have designed a project to document the history of Maharashtra State and Pune district. Content enrichment on this topic will be done on various Wikimedia Projects through students and faculty. The program support is given by CIS-A2K. The first session on 'Introduction to Wikimedia projects' and a Wikimedia Commons workshop was conducted on 21–22 December 2021 for students of H. V. Desai College, Pune.
The institution has integrated the Wiki content creation with the academic assignments. Hence, the topics of interest were finalised after the discussions with faculty. The students will upload the images on their topics and then connect the same with the relevant Wikipedia articles. To review the work and track the progress, an event metrics has been created.
Future plan: A coordinator has been selected from the group of students to keep track of activity through social media groups and online follow-up sessions once in two months. A Wiki cell would be established in the college to give regular access to computers & internet for the participants. A reference library would also be developed in the institution.
-
Wikimedia Commons workshop in H. V. Desai College, Pune on 21-22 December 2021
-
Wikimedia Commons workshop in H. V. Desai College, Pune on 21-22 December 2021
-
Wikimedia Commons workshop in H. V. Desai College, Pune on 21-22 December 2021
-
Wikimedia Commons workshop in H. V. Desai College, Pune on 21-22 December 2021
-
Wikimedia Commons workshop in H. V. Desai College, Pune on 21-22 December 2021
Wikisource Apps
editCIS-A2K is working along with Tamil Wikimedians to create an application to access Wikisource on smartphones i.e. Android, iOS. With the advancement of mobile and other pervasive digital technologies, many readers are currently accessing the Wikimedia projects on smartphones and similar handheld devices.
There are many apps on various platforms (Android, iOS, Windows, …) for Wikimedia projects (Commons, Wikipedia), to enourage reading and editing on these platforms and devices. But no apps are available for Wikisource (read, contribute, …). CIS-A2K has initiated this app in 2021 as Wikisource is a project of focus for the program. In the 2017 Community Wishlist Survey, a wish was for a Mobile app for sister projects and it got 46 votes. CIS-A2K realised that we should therefore work on this application. This might be more or less related to phab:T165495, but its was fixed and closed without creating a Wikisource app. There is a need for effort in this area in terms of building better technological infrastructure for access and use of Wikisource projects in India.
-
Option to open three language books and also open book by URL.
-
Tamil book top view.
-
Tamil book bottom view.
-
Bengali book top view.
-
Bengali book bottom view.
-
English book top view.
-
English book bottom view.
Request Page
editCIS-A2K provides support to the Indic language communities throughout the year and the request page is open on Meta-Wiki for the community to post requests. In this period we have received a total of 16 requests out of which six are internet-support requests. Some of the requests received are:
- Gujarati Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: On the occasion of International Gujarati Language Day, the birth anniversary of noted poet Narmad, and the 125th birth anniversary of noted writer Jhaverchand Meghani on 28th August, 2021, Gujarati Wikipedia conducted a two-day edit-a-thon to enrich the content related to Gujarati language, sociology, psychology, science and technology.
- Library membership support: This request was to provide support to the Gujarati Wikisource community with the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad library membership. This would help the community members to use the books present in the library as reference material to Wikipedia articles and also use them on Wikisource for proofreading.
- Share Your Struggle 2021 Campaign: Share Your Struggle 2021 was a public photo competition on Wikimedia Commons. The motivation of the project is to improve coverage of free usable media files related to various struggles, such as social movements, natural disasters, health crises etc. During this competition, 50 participants took part and uploaded 623 images to Wikimedia commons.
Maryana's Listening Tour ― South Asia
editIn January 2022, Maryana Iskander joined Wikimedia Foundation as the Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Katherine Maher. Before joining Wikimedia Foundation Maryana attended a series of meetings (mostly virtual) to interact with different Wikimedia communities, and other stakeholders. A2K organised the South Asian call in this series.
The South Asia call was organised virtually on 26 November 2022. Around 34 Wikimedians[1] participated in this call. The participants discussed their projects, Wiki-activities, challenges faced, and interest areas. Other than the project discussions some of the other topics discussed during the call were: how internet accessibility becomes challenging for South Asian communities, community and editor retention etc.
Future plan: A2K will continue to focus on remote events and programs, and will conduct similar online calls on important topics.
Internet support for Wikimedians in India
editIn the beginning of the program year, we noticed an increased number of internet support requests (i. e. reimbursement of internet connectivity or device purchase expenses) being with A2K on the dedicated request page. So, we temporarily moved this out of the request page and started Internet support for Wikimedians in India. The support was open from 1 July to 31 August 2021 and 55 Wikimedians were supported in this period. We conducted an internal analysis and found that most of the applicants who received internet support under this program, edited Wikimedia projects after getting the support. After 31 August this dedicated project was closed, and we continued to support general requests at the request page.
Future plan: Depending on the number of requests, we may re-open this internet support option in the future.
Research
editThe research component of CIS-A2K's work was initiated in 2019, with the objective of collaborating with other programs at CIS and drawing on this work and expertise, as well as building additional capacities and skills within the team. In addition to identifying and studying persistent knowledge gaps in areas such as content creation, participation, access, and outreach, the work under this component also looks at possible ways to address them through strategies and recommendations. A series of six short-term research projects on diverse topics related to Wikimedia projects such as content creation and open access, multilingual pedagogy, gender bias/gap, and study of specific projects and campaigns were completed over the last couple of years. A compilation of these reports is now available on Wikimedia Commons as well.
In 2021, the A2K team continued work on this component, to explore and map areas of development and challenges within Indian language Wikimedia communities, based on learnings and reflections on work undertaken over the previous years. The three studies undertaken this year are as follows:
- Exploring Knowledge Repositories on Water Resources in India: This project aims to understand the impact of the digital transition on resources related to rivers in India, and possible ways to build their digital documentation for better public access. The methods for the project comprise semi-structured interviews with selected organisations working in key thematic areas such as - awareness, training, planning/designing of projects, execution on ground, monitoring & evaluation, documenting/building archives related to water resources in India. Eight organisations, Advanced Centre for Water Resources Development And Management (ACWADAM), Action for Agricultural Renewal in Maharashtra (AFARM), BAIF Development Research Foundation, Manavlok, South Asia Network of Rivers, Dams and People (SANDRP), Tarun Bharat Sangh, Water and Land Management Institute (WALMI) and WOTR were shortlisted, and online introductory sessions were held with some of them. A detailed interview was conducted with ACWADAM, and conversations on content donation were also initiated. Data collection, largely through online meetings, is to be completed over the next few months, and will be followed by analysis and report writing.
- Mapping Repositories on Gender and Sexuality in Indian languages: This study is an effort to continue the work initiated by programmatic and research work undertaken under the broader area of bridging the gender gap on Indian language Wikimedia projects. While there are significant ongoing efforts in this area, undertaken by communities primarily, the objective of this research study is to understand the larger, mainstream discourse around gender, sexuality and feminism online, in Indian languages. Through conversations with organisations and individuals working in the above areas, the project seeks to understand the process of content creation and knowledge production related to gender, sexuality and feminism, and possibilities of bringing them online through open knowledge platforms such as Wikimedia projects. Key tasks such as finalisation of research design, developing questionnaires and selection of respondents were completed over the first four months, until December 2021. Interviews are currently underway as part of this project, which will be followed by review of data and report writing.
- Study on Infrastructural Needs of Indian Language Wikisource Projects: This is a pilot study on infrastructural needs of Wikisource platforms in India, with a focus on identifying current challenges and knowledge gaps in technological capacity, resources and training. The study will aim to present a set of learnings and recommendations on potential strategies to address these gaps, including through collaborative intervention and training. The project currently looks at three Indian language Wikisource projects – Tamil, Assamese and Malayalam, following a mixed methods approach comprising surveys, interviews with key community members and review of discussion pages and statistics over the last two years. Presently, the research design has been finalised and shared for internal and community feedback. Questionnaires and survey forms have been developed, and respondents have been identified from the three focus languages. Data collection is due to commence shortly on this project, and will be completed over the next couple of months. This will be followed by analysis and compilation of learnings in the form of a final report.
Research Dissemination
In addition to the specific research projects mentioned, the team also worked on sharing the research undertaken and earlier outputs produced as part of this component at various forums, including Wikimedia communities and with other related stakeholders. We have been working on a strategy for better dissemination of research work as well. Some of the key events where research work was presented include:
- Creative Commons Global Summit: Presentation on learnings from the study on 'Mapping GLAM in Maharashtra, India' and related research at CIS on open access to digital cultural heritage and digital humanities, with a focus on mapping larger challenges and best practices for GLAM in India.
- #CultureForAll Conference on Cultural Mapping: Presentation on the A2K research, with a focus on learnings from the completed research projects and an overview of the ongoing work for 2021-22.
- Wikisource Eighteenth Birthday Celebrations: Presentation on the ongoing study on 'Infrastructural Needs of Indian Language Wikisource Projects'.
Work is also underway on developing a research dissemination strategy, in order to effectively share the outputs from these projects among the Indian language Wikimedia communities, but also a larger group of stakeholders and a general audience. The strategy outlines aspects such as communication channels, forms and formats, language and expertise among other factors that may facilitate better circulation of research work and encourage a discussion on these topics. The work is being led by the research associate, and a draft of this strategy has presently been shared for internal feedback within the team.
Revenues
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.
* Provide estimates in US Dollars
Spending
- Please see a copy in spreadsheet here.
Compliance
Is 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.
- Yes
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
editOnce complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.
- With regards, as a member of CIS-A2K, --Tito (CIS-A2K) (talk) 13:45, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
Footnotes
edit- ↑ In a virtual call, it is difficult to count the exact number of participants because there are different entry and exit points. Maximum number of participants at any specific moment at the call was 34. This includes the speaker, moderators, and organisers.