CIS-A2K/Work plan July 2018 - June 2019

Executive summary

CIS-A2K is submitting work-plan for the year 2018-2019. In the upcoming year CIS-A2K would be working towards creating an inclusive Wiki atmosphere in India. With emphasis on creating safe spaces, promoting gender gap bridging activities A2K team would like to work with all the Indian communities, projects and individuals with interesting ideas and for the overall development of Wikimedia movement. CIS-A2K works closely with the Indic Wikimedians and has always been thankful for their support and encouragement, timely feedback and their interventions. CIS-A2K has been able to facilitate idea exchange and idea incubation amongst Indic Wikimedia communities. These ideas have resulted in the growth of the community and have played a crucial role in the emergence of community leaders. In alignment with the strategic direction of the Wikimedia movement A2K team proposes to conduct activities which will boost Knowledge as Change Agent in redistributing Social Equity. During this proposal period A2K team would work across 4 crucial areas for the growth and sustainability of Indic communities and projects.

CIS-A2K would like to acknowledge the emergence of user groups, active community leaders who are serving as liasons with WMF and other funding agencies for the growth of their communities. This is an extremely optimistic development for the future of the Indic Wikimedia projects. In light of the emergence of these structures of support, leadership and implementation CIS-A2K would like to reinvent its role from support and implementation catalyst to an organisation which focuses on learning and evaluation practices of Wikimedia projects and strategies in India. It is with this objective that we are shifting from the earlier Focus Language Area strategy to Focus project Area strategy. This strategy will allow CIS-A2K to engage all Indic communities and collaborate with individuals without the earlier resource or mandate restrictions.

Needs-assessment

Following CIS-A2K's best practice, CIS-A2K conducts an extensive community consultation before writing a work-plan. This year we have successfully reached out to to 196 Wikimedians, who have given suggestions regarding the current status of their projects, skills and capacities that need to be developed, direction in which Indic Wikimedia projects need to be steered towards and many pints of information. A survey on Skill-development was conducted where 92 Indian Wikimedians were approached, 35 of them responded to the survey.

Apart from the flagship Needs Assessment conducted by CIS-A2K we have engaged other mechanisms to receive feedback from Indic Wikimedians:

Needs Assessment conducted for Supporting Indian Language Wikipedias Program
India IRC
Feedback forms specific to initiatives and events organised by CIS-A2K
Strategy salons to discuss formulation of Global Movement Strategy

Introduction

CIS-A2K has been working as a catalyst organisation with the funding received by Wikimedia Foundation since 2012 September. It has performed various roles for the growth and sustainability of Indic Wikimedia Communities. CIS-A2K has developed strategies specific to Indic language communities taking into account factors such as participation of the community, availability of institutional partners and scope for long term work. In this proposal A2K team would like to expand its engagement beyond the Focus Language Areas. There has been consistent feedback from non FLA communities to A2K team about actively engaging these communities.

While our earlier role of providing support in conducting outreach events, organising training and anchoring partnerships for optimisation of opportunities and conducting outreach activities are still important in the Indian context, A2K team with immense pleasure acknowledges emergence of user groups who would have these activities as their primary objectives. These user groups have among them strong leaders and experience of conducting all of these activities. In light of this development A2K team would be changing its strategy to develop as an organisation that specialises in Learning and Evaluation practices for the Indic Wikimedia projects.

Strategies specific to Indic Wikimedia projects needs to be guided by a vision that takes into the core values of Wikimedia projects but also understand and synthesise opportunities from like minded organisations, establish partnerships with Government bodies and attract new communities to engage with Wikimedia projects. Our strategy is to develop processes that will guide in enriching content, build long term skills offer sustainable partnerships and produce community leaders to engage and lead their respective communities.

Invest in an Idea

CIS-A2K team has performed roles of incubating an idea (MediaWiki Training, Request Page ) and customising ideas from global best practices (Wikimedia Conference (India), Bridging Gender Gap initiatives) since its inception. In order to facilitate growth of Indic Wikimedia projects, A2K team during this proposal period is investing resources and energy on 4 programs/ideas that we believe are going to be 'triggers of change'.

Focus Project Area (FPA): This idea enables A2K team to work with all ideas that require support and grooming without the earlier self imposed restrictions. Indic communities have diversified and specialised over the last decade. There are active project specific communities in the same language communities. A2K team believes that this engagement model is the 'trigger of change' as it builds on interest that is already prevalent and can lead to high quality deliverable (content, images, training manuals or bridging gender gap focused activities). In the proposed plan period A2K team will be working with Punjabi Wikimedians in expanding the Wikisource project.
MediaWiki Training: Until 2016-17 A2K team organised a general purpose Wiki Technical Training, where in MediaWiki related ideas and topics were briefly discussed. A2K team had been unable to contextualise and understand the scope of MediaWiki related discussions in improving the Indic Wiki projects. However during the current work plan we organised a focused MediaWiki Training where programers, developers, MediaWiki enthusiasts and GSOC participants took part. Many areas of collaboration and independent tools such as dashboard and other patches were created and listed for action. We believe in this idea as a big idea because of the potential it carries in addressing technical impediments that often discourage Indic Wikimedians.
Bridging Gender Gap CIS-A2K team firmly believes that it is of vital importance to invest energy and resources in addressing the problem of gender gap on Indic Wikimedia projects. While our earlier strategy has been to increase participation and content across projects, we would like to work in building capacity of female Wikimedians and grooming them as community leaders. A2K team would be organising workshops across Indic communities to discuss the ideas of 'safe policy'. We will also try to integrate safety and support policies across all our events. A2K team would also be supporting research that can identify non-program initiatives such as research, , drafting of support manuals and grievance redressal mechanisms and further training for Wikimedians across Indic communities.
Wikisource Conference India CIS-A2K recently conducted an exclusive Wikisource IRC that brought majority of Indic Wikisource enthusiasts together (probably for the first time). It was the enthusiasm and various ideas discussed in this IRC that has alerted A2K towards the vast potential of this project for Indian communities. Wikisource project can be an ideal recruiting project for new editors and will be of direct benefit to many users. A2K is gearing up for organising a South Asia Wikisource Summit in the upcoming plan period. The aim of this conference is to bring all Indic Wikisource projects together and build synergies for collaborative growth and development. A2K is also going to produce a comprehensive handbook with focus on Indic Wikisource projects. This handbook would serve as a one stop resource for all Wikisource related queries.

Key insights and feedback from Needs assessment of 2018

Content Enrichment	Skill Building Initiatives	Sustainable Partnerships	Building Leaderships	Areas of improvement for A2K
Editors from various walks of life should be encouraged. Attention towards crowd sourcing concepts, encyclopedic style of writing, importance of NPOV.	Tools for fact-checking and citations on mobile platform; accuracy and verifiability of content;	A2K must work with rural, semi urban schools and popularise Marathi Wikimedia projects as learning platform	Facilitate regular meetings and discussions among Indic Wiki communities	Inter language and Inter Wiki Collaborations.
Replicating activities which are successful in other FLAs;		CIS-A2K can guide the government on content development on a mass scale, provide expertise to build content that government already owns	Organisations like TIFR, NIC etc that already possess vast resources and knowledge banks;	Focus on increasing geographical footprint;
Developing a project to groom newbies and learners in Wikimedia projects		Regular meetings and conversations with Wikimedians to understand their work and the challenges that they're facing.	Organizations with the infrastructural capacity to host frequent edit-o-thons,	Training areas located geographically closer to communities
Provide resources to Wikipedians in order to support them improving and creating articles		A2K should focus on intentions and takeaways of partner organizations.	CIS-A2K should support FAN(Fab Asia Network) for involving makers from Asia to participate in Wikipedia movement	Lack of tutorials or online guides, creating new learning materials
Create list of articles that don't have proper references				Bring in more transparency
Create extensive list of references available online				Blogging on Wikimedia blog has helped in spreading awareness about Odia Wikimedia projects globally
Developing a library at CIS-A2K.