Wikimedia Foundation elections/2021/Candidates/Pavan Santhosh Surampudi
Pavan Santhosh Surampudi (Pavan santhosh.s)
editPavan santhosh.s (talk • meta edits • global user summary • CA • AE)
Candidate details |
| |
---|---|---|
statement (Not more than 450 words) | My work in community building, governance, and partnerships in a country like India with diverse opportunities entangled with complex issues helped me to have a unique experience and insights that will be helpful for me in my work as a Board member.
I am from the southern part of India and started my involvement with the Wikimedia movement by editing Telugu-language Wikipedia in 2013. Right from the beginning, I am involved in improving content, working towards community growth, planning and executing projects, and movement governance. I have created 750+ new articles and substantially improved over 800+ articles in Telugu Wikipedia with over 49,000 global edits. During my early months of contribution, I participated in Telugu Wikipedia 10th anniversary which gave me insights into the community and its goals. It led me to collaborate and initiate several on-wiki and off-wiki activities. One of the notable projects is to create an on-Wiki catalogue of Telugu books present in the Digital library of India which was further used as a resource for content creation. Later on, I joined the Centre for Internet and Society - Access to Knowledge as a community advocate for Telugu language Wikimedia projects. My key responsibilities during this period were to improve content & quality, work towards community growth, build and manage new partnerships, and build capacity in the community. My initiatives resulted in improving 25,000 stubs to start class on Telugu Wikipedia, co-organized Train-the-trainer 2019 and Wikimedia Summit India 2019. My experience also involves building and managing partnerships with education institutions and government entities. I have also been part of the Community Health Working Group in the Movement Strategy process. I am currently working as Community Manager at Quora where I work involves building and managing Quora’s Telugu community across the world. I am the community manager for Quora in Telugu, from the beginning. I have been SPOC from its Alpha and Beta testing phase, and public launch, and working closely with product and engineering teams. To grow the project, I work on partnerships, developing & executing marketing strategies, among other things.
Wikimedia projects’ role in improving access and opening up knowledge spaces and impacting millions of people around the world is a constant motivation for me to contribute to the projects. The Wikimedia movement has a great potential to make a lasting impact on even more people where current government and societal structures are neglecting and keeping them away from the availability of knowledge. Current issues like harassment, less diversity, centralized power and lack of adoption to rapidly growing technological aspects are hindering the Wikimedia movement's progress in this direction. I am deeply motivated to contribute my part in participating in movement governance by serving as a board member to Wikimedia Foundation | |
Top 3 Board priorities | 1. Hiring and onboarding CEO: Hiring the right candidate as CEO is a priority issue to build on major initiatives and steps taken by Katherine Maher and to ensure the progress made in the last few years won’t be reverted to earlier phases of uncertainty.
2. Empowering stakeholders across the movement: Empowering Wikimedia movement entities and reducing the excessive centralisation of power all over the world is key to make leaps in the strategic direction we are committed to. 3. Improving board relations with the community: Building trust and belongingness is an important aspect of collaboration with the community. Community is the main and highly crucial stakeholder in movement and it should have more skin in the game when it comes to key decision making. The board should be easily accessible to community members through various channels. | |
Top 3 Movement Strategy priorities | 1. Invest in Skills and Leadership Development: Without a sustainable skill and leadership development programme in place, there will be little difference in what is already happening in the movement. Additionally, As Foundation and movement are built from the earnest contribution from volunteers this should also help in giving back.
2. Establish a movement-wide knowledge base: Building a movement-wide knowledge base that is well-structured and multilingual will help leadership and governance across the world. Being a major source of knowledge in the world, it is a disadvantage for us not to have such a meta-level knowledge bank. 3. Improve User Experience: Wikimedia projects should catch up with current technological advancements which can solve several issues we are facing in participation and retention. | |
Verification | Identity verification performed by Wikimedia Foundation staff and eligibility verification performed by the Elections Committee | |
Eligibility: Verified Verified by: Matanya (talk) 20:45, 1 July 2021 (UTC) |
Identification: Verified Verified by: Joe Sutherland (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 18:20, 29 June 2021 (UTC) |
Trustee Evaluation Form | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|