CIS-A2K/Work plan July 2018 - June 2019/Leadership

Executive summary

Wikimedia movement across the world has been able to grow and sustain due to excellent community leaders who embody voluntarism and leadership. While India has been able to demonstrate leadership in other civil society movements, there has not been adequate leaders to lead the Wikimedia Projects. To ensure that the current community leaders do not face burn out and leadership pool is not restricted to a few people A2K team shall be conducting programs towards building capacities and leadership among individuals, communities of interest, user groups. In this work plan period, programs are envisaged from capacity building, support towards grant application and grant disbursal practices. This shall facilitate in community leaders effectively organising outreach activities and campaigns.

Note: A2K team would like to learn from the experienced community leaders about best practices for engaging community members and effective documentation of the achievements. With the new Generation leaders A2K would like to develop a leadership program that provides big picture of the Wikimedia movement.

Bridging Gender Gap

Indic Wiki Projects can be considered to be healthy and mature only when they are able to significantly reduce the gender gap in terms of content, participation and support mechanisms available for Wikimedians from marginalised communities. While many projects and communities are working on addressing the gap in the area of content and participation, A2K would be working to set up processes that ensure safe space policies in all its events. We would also be working towards producing Code of Conduct policies for our various events. A2K team also aims to work closely with the Safety and Support Team at WMF to contextually translate the policies and grievance redressal mechanisms in case of any complaints.

A2K team would also aim to work with other marginalised communities such as LGBTQ and conduct orientation sessions across various Indian languages.

Grants and Resources

CIS-A2K team has noticed that there has been a sharp drop in the number of applications it has received in the current plan period. The decrease is a promising sign as it indicates that many Indic Wiki communities and individuals are in touch with the WMF for grant applications and other kind of support. It must be noted that many Indic community leaders actively participating in grant applications have been participants in A2K's training initiatives.

A2K would like to continue its Request Page despite the decrease in number of requests. Request Page serves Indic Wikimedians who are yet to interact with complex grant procedures and allows communities to run a pilot project to assess risks and concerns before designing a larger intervention. Request page also allows for non-financial requests and technical requests. These requests undergo the following steps before it is approved: event page creation, community discussion and endorsement, and review by CIS-A2K team members, alignment with WMF strategy and Global Metrics.

Along with supporting communities requests via our request page A2K during the proposed period would also be conducting awareness sessions regarding the grant structures at the WMF. A2K team will also work to set up resource centres in interested communities. The resource centres will have both digital and physical resources for the utilisation of community. These resources will be under the name of A2K but will be cared and maintained by community leaders.

Outreach activity

A2K will give training to active users to understand better about Wikimedia Foundation grants, encourage them to conduct workshop by providing resource and financial support. Along with that A2K will train them technically needs in Wiki. There is a potential in unexplored groups and places. A2K would support enthusiastic individuals and institutions to conduct outreach programs in these areas. For grooming the new contributors, cadre of Wiki guides will be developed. Application of Integrated approach for skills and knowledge aspects will be evolved with thematic organisations like Citizen Science groups. A2K will facilitate the process.Encouraging, involving and collaborating with New Wikimedians in ongoing efforts. A2K will support efforts to conduct Sessions among the Wiki-Guides (Experienced Wikipedians signed up to guide in Wiki-Adoption Program) to improve co-ordination in conducting the project,develop strategies regarding project and share learnings among themselves. A2K will work to improve retention and increase in number of Very active editors. Core idea is to follow-up and nurture new Wikipedians to become good contributors. A2K will integrate other programmatic efforts to align with this project (ex: creating video resource that help Existing Wikipedians in their Wiki-adoption activity)

Global Engagement

It is important that experienced and hard-working Indian Wikimedians participate in global and important Wiki-events. This does not only help them to improve their skill, they also get an opportunity to share their expertise with others in a global platform. Along with exposure such activities help community leaders to bring back to their communities learnings, best practices and new opportunities of collaboration.

CIS-A2K regularly receives request to support travel and participation of Indian Wikimedians.

Capacity building

25th Bhubaneswar Tungi meetup
Collaborative activity in Train-the-Trainer 2018, Mysore

A2K will build on its previous programs like WikiTungi to train Wikipedians. WikiTungi is a city based community, which offers an unique advantage of spending quality time with community members to discuss about status of Odia Wikimedia projects, skills to be acquired for optimising time and effort. We will encourage community members to join monthly IRCs, start webinars and to take part in A2K's event like TTT and MWT. We will also conduct mini MWTs and TTTs for increased participation and focused discussions.

Capacity building exercises will be carried out across Indic communities as per the needs expressed. These exercises will help in identifying areas for growth and organise training programs that will have maximum impact in the long run and devise check in and retention ensuring activities to ensure long term impact.