Grants:TPS/Ankitashukla/Grace Hopper Celebration India/Report

Event name

Grace Hopper Celebration India - 2015

Participant connections

The event witnessed participation of around 2,300 people, particularly females. I met a lot of students as well as women professionals in the event, including:

Kimberly S. Stevenson: Corporate Vice President; Chief Information Officer, Intel
Roopa Kudva: Partner, Omidyar Network; Managing Director, Omidyar Network India Advisors
Geetha Kannan: Anita Borg Institute India’s Managing Director

I met another Wikimedian Dinu Kumarasiri who had come all the way from Sri Lanka to attend the event! Dinu was also an intern with Wikimedia in OPW Round 9 with me. There was another intern Nitika, who interned with OpenStreetMap in the same round.

I, alongwith Dinu and Nitika, conducted an informal session for the scholars attending the conference informing them about FOSS, its importance, how they can become contributors to FOSS etc. We then discussed about our experiences as Wikimedia interns and informed them about the multitude of options in which they can contribute to Wikimedia, eg, coding, design, documentation and outreach. Due to limited access to Internet on-spot, we could conduct any hands-on session, but are still connected to the scholars through a Google group and are helping them take the first steps towards becoming a contributor. :)

I also distributed the Wikimedia swag I had requested, during the session, which included stickers, notebooks and T-shirts! :D

The session was attended by around 45 scholars. (Pics below)

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience: What is one way you shared something from your experience with your community (either locally or globally), after the event?

Add a link here to a blog post or newsletter you wrote about your participation afterwards, or to a meet-up you organized to share your experience with your local community.

At the conference, I introduced the concept of open source to several attendees, and particularly my experience with MediaWiki, with the help of my fellow Wikimedian friend.

After the conference, we were successful in getting newbies interested in contributing and getting involved in our community. In order to help them move forward and start with their first contributions, I have created a Google group (the group is private as of now to make them comfortable to ask any question that they otherwise may not ask on IRC or mailing lists).

We have been regularly posting mails helping and guiding them with FOSS and how to get involved. In order to expand the outreach, we have also added a few members in the group who were not a part of the conference but are enthusiastic to learn about the conference and the opportunities that it provided. And these non-attendees (of the conference) are also showing great enthusiasm in FOSS contributions. I am hoping to bring the group members to phabricator, IRC and the wikitech-mailing list by the end of the upcoming week.