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CIS-A2K/Reports/CIS-A2K Quarterly Report 3

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CIS-A2K

CIS-A2K (Centre for Internet and Society - Access to Knowledge) is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape.
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Quarterly Report: (January - March 2014)

Project: Access to Knowledge Programme
Grantee: Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, India
Grantor: Wikimedia Foundation
Grant Period: 22 months
Grant Sanctioned: INR 26,000,000/-
Grant Disbursed: INR 25,782,032/--

Background to the Access to Knowledge Programme

The Wikimedia Foundation approved a grant to support the growth of Indian language Wikimedia communities to the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) to expand their Access to Knowledge program (A2K) in India. The grant enabled CIS to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand upon Wikimedia’s Indic language free knowledge projects, including Wikipedia in Indic languages. Further, the grant aims to generate improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects and wider distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge within India.

Introduction

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This is the third quarterly report CIS-A2K has published for the time period January to March 2014. The report provides a brief overview of the quarterly progress of CIS-A2K Program.

Overview

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New partnerships were built during this quarter while attempts were made to deepen relationships with the existing ones. New partnership was formed with KIIT University, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences where a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed for furthering Odia Wikipedia. CIS-A2K continued its projects with existing partners; detailed updated of each project is provided under progress achieved.

Majority of the team's time in March was dedicated towards finalizing and publishing a draft work plan for 2014-2015. The plan includes 7 language area plans, 3 community strengthening initiatives, 8 stand-alone Wikimedia projects, creating movement resources, publicity, research and documentation, and general support and service to the movement. The work plan can be accessed here.

CIS-A2K also put up the proposal for a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation's Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) for the next phase of support. You can view the proposal here and track discussions here.

Progress achieved

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The following are the key highlights of CIS-A2K's work during this quarter which gives a glimpse of the progress. A detailed quarterly growth of the five language Wikipedias is capture below:

Telugu

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Telugu Wiki 10th Anniversary Flier listing all media partners in the bottom

The major work taken up by CIS-A2K team in collaboration with Telugu community in this quarter was to organise Tewiki10. Tewiki10 is ten years celebration of Telugu Wikipedia that was organised at KBN college, Vijayawada. Several activities such as Target 55555, quality improvement of existing articles, outreach, and community strengthening through specialised training were done under the umbrella of Tewiki10 event. While the focus of CIS-A2K towards the beginning of the quarter was in cultivating new editors and working towards successful organisation of Tewiki10, towards the second half of the quarter, CIS-A2K was involved in active consultations with the community members in developing Telugu language area work plan. In total, 5 meet-ups were organised apart from the Tewiki10 event. Community members actively contributed and engaged with the work plans. A total of 6 wiki training sessions were organised. A special event was organised to celebrate World Women's day on March 8 at Hyderabad and Bangalore. For a detailed review, see this page.

Odia

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Guests releasing a kit DVD containing Odia typeface "Odia OT Jagannatha," offline input tool "TypeOdia", Odia language dictionaries, open source softwares, offline Odia Wikipedia and Ubuntu package

During this quarter CIS-A2K signed two MoUs with two educational institutes from Odisha for collaborative educational resource building and harnessing academic resources to enrich Odia Wikipedia, other Indic language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects. It also organized few outreach in these institutions to assess the institutional framework for potential Wikipedia Education Programs. CIS-A2K supported Odia Wikipedia 10 (Odia Wikipedia's 10 year celebration). CIS-A2K supported Odia community in organizing another two days long event Odisha Dibasa 2014 (Odisha's statehood day). With CIS-A2K's explicit request, copyright of 14 books (13 in Odia and 1 in English) were migrated from "All rights reserved" to CC-BY-SA 3.0 license by the copyright holders. An advanced Wikipedia training session was organized for the editors in which some of the experienced Wikimedians shared learning, demonstrated advanced tools, gadgets and brainstormed about the future activities. CIS-A2K's Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource work plans were discussed with the community during various community and also during the advanced session. These events had huge media coverage in print and web media. You can read detailed progress of Odia work plan during this time frame here.

Konkani

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Wiki Women's Workshop

During this quarter CIS-A2K spent a lot of time and effort in community consultation that helped develop Konkani Wikipedia work plan for 2014 - 2015. Inputs were taken from several Konkani Wikipedians, Konkani linguists, Konkani professors, cultural experts and more. CIS-A2K was also able to build stronger ties with its already existing partners like Goa University and Nirmala Institute of Education. With Goa University CIS-A2K completed 85% of Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization project while the team started a new project with Nirmala Institute of Education where 100 B.Ed. students are enrolled to work on Goan towns and villages on Konkani Wikipedia. You can read detailed progress of Konkani work plan during this time frame here.

Kannada

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New editors editing Kannada Wikipedia during an edit-a-thon in Sagar

Key highlight of the activities during this quarter was the signing of a MoU with University of Mysore. As per this MoU, CIS-A2K will partner with Mysore University in digitizing and helping them re-release first 6 volumes of the Kannada Vishwakosha under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. Institutional partnership with SDM College, Ujire, was initiated where students of Master of Communication and Journalism will be writing articles on Kannada Wikipedia. As a part of partnership with English Department, Tumkur University, students of MA English will be adding articles to Kannada Wikipedia under three broad categories. Apart from these tie ups, 6 outreach sessions were conducted during this period to instill growth in Kannada Wikipedia. Institutional partnership with Christ University resulted in creation of new articles and also created many new editors during this period.

Bangla

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It should be noted that we could not achieve much progress with the Bangla work-plan as we were short of staff. During this quarter we have supported two community events of Bangla Wikimedians based out of Kolkata, which are listed below. Also efforts were put to revisit the current plan and develop a work-plan for the period July 2014-June 2015. We will welcome feedback on this plan until June after which we will revise it.

Community Support

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During this quarter CIS-A2K supported 4 major community events. These include

Minor fiscal and swag support was also given to various communities during January which was mainly towards celebrating Wikipedia's 13th anniversary. These include:

Technical Support

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Other Key Events/Activities

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  • Supported Women's History Month, India-2014 led by Netha, Harriet, Rohini and other champion Women editors from India. CIS-A2K staff was glad to take part in some of the activities as part of this month long event.
  • CIS-A2K had a two day meeting with WMF & FDC visiting team in its Bangalore office. The attendees were Anausya Sengupta, Senior Director of Grantmaking Wikimedia Foundation; Garfield Byrd, Chief of Finance and Administration Wikimedia Foundation; Sydeny Poore, Member of Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Committee; Subhashish Panigrahi, CIS A2K, Team Member; Nitika Tandon, CIS A2K, Team Member; Muzamiluddin Syed, CIS A2K, Team Member and T. Vishnu Vardhan, CIS A2K, Program Director. The main agenda of the meeting was:
  • Understanding current state of A2K -- basic facts (finance snapshot, organizational context within CIS)
  • Financial review of CIS-A2K, per grant agreement
  • Reflection on past year - successes and challenges in activities
  • Reflection on past year - spending vs. plan
  • Discussion of the preparation for funding via the FDC process; Q&A
  • Reflection on relationship with various communities - successes; obstacles; gaps
  • Discussion of A2K's current resources: staff, funds, engaged volunteers; discuss actual plans; discuss path according to roadmap
Meeting minutes can be found here.
  • Half day meeting was organised and attended by WMF & FDC visiting team, WMIN EC and CIS-A2K team members. The agenda of the meeting was:
  • Understand Wikimedia movement in India and it’s stakeholders objectives - Role of WMIN Chapter and CIS-A2K
  • Finding synergies between CIS-A2K team and Wikimedia India Chapter
  • Identifying areas of conflict between CIS-A2K team and Wikimedia India Chapter
  • Expectations from each other (Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS-A2K team)
Meeting minutes are being finalized in consultation with WMIN and will be shared soon.
The work plan includes details of aims, objectives, programme activities and expected outcomes. Most of the language area plans were put together in active consultation with the respective Wikimedia language communities. Various inputs and ideas contributed, opportunities provided, and challenges thrown at the CIS-A2K program during the last year by the Wikimedia communities in India, our institutional partners, Executive Committee (EC) of Wikimedia India Chapter (WMIN) and the Wikimedia Foundation's Grantmaking Team have significantly informed our work plans.
Each plan has an independent budget and is closely mapped on to the implementation plan. An attempt is made to correlate why we are spending a certain amount on a certain activity. Thus all these budgets are very optimally planned and the overall budget is an assimilation. CIS-A2K believes that this will give mission level transparency to our work and provide a clearer structure of accountability to the movement and the community.
  • CIS-A2K put up the proposal for a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation's Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) for the next phase of support. You can view the proposal here and track discussions here.

Press/Media/Social media Coverage

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CIS gave its inputs for the following media coverage:

Request to WMF seeking permission to purchase equipment for CIS-A2K Team

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The current grant from the WMF does not have a budgetary provision to purchase equipment for the CIS-A2K program or team. Most of the equipment the team is using is quite old and is falling apart. We would like to request the WMF to allow us to invest in equipping the A2K team with new laptops and a low cost web-streaming kit. This will help in increasing the efficiency of the A2K team and in documenting various Wikimedia activities. The following is the list of equipment and a rough estimate. Asaf, we request the WMF to consider this request and allow us to utilize this money from the current WMF grant.

Sr.No Item Price per unit No. of units Total Price Make/Specification
1 Laptop Rs. 83,900/- 5 Rs. 419,500/- HP Envy TouchSmart 15-J001TX Laptop
2 Projector Rs. 80,000/- 2 Rs. 160,000/- Epson EB-1776W
3 Web-streaming Kit (low cost) Rs. 300,000/- 1 Rs. 300,000/- Includes various hardware items
4 Camcorder Rs. 140,000/- 1 Rs. 140,000/- Sony NEX-VG30EH Camcorder Camera
TOTAL 9 Rs. 1,019,500/-

Please note that this is a rough estimate and the exact cost could differ slightly. We anticipate to have about Rs. 1.2-1.5 million unspent amount under the Grant and would request the WMF to give us permission to buy the above equipment for the CIS-A2K program. Thank you.

This is approved, up to 1.2 million Rs. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 23:03, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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