[Wikimediaindia-l] CIS-A2K 2.0 and new Programme Associates

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Wikimedians,

It gives me immense pleasure to announce that CIS-A2K
 is implementing its new model of
working - CIS-A2K version 2.0. This model takes on board many of the
criticisms that have been made of our work so far.

We will be eliminating the role of Program Director in this version, and I
(from July, 2015) am the person at the Centre for Internet and Society in
charge of programming under the WMF grant. Nirmita Narasimhan (from this
month onwards), Policy Director will be assisting me. This will result in a
reduction of the budget.

As part of this version 2.0, CIS-A2K would try to engage communities
towards an in depth analysis of community engagement, and take A2K
programme closer to the community by contracting Program Associates (PA).
Each of the five focus language areas(FLAs): Kannada, Konkani, Marathi,
Odia and Telugu will have one PA each working from the city or town where
most of the community members operate. This will help CIS-A2K understand
the language community more closely and work in accordance with needs of
the community. Thus avoiding duplication of resources and bringing focus to
the activities organised. The PAs will be directly managed and be held
accountable by members of each language community who will assign any work
they want to be done. CIS-A2K team will provide an additional layer of
supervision and oversight. This will reduce need for CIS staffers to travel
from Bengaluru for every event/activity.

In addition, the existing employees at CIS-A2K would now be working for all
the five FLAs in a more specialized role as follows:

Pavanja  : Would be
responsible for creating movement resources such as handbook, tutorial
videos, etc, and shall plan for creation, printing and distribution.
Rahmanuddin

: Would operate as technical liaison person.
Subhashish  : Will help
Wikipedians create blogs on Wikimedia blog and report all events happening
around, along with media publication and coverage of  events organised by
the communities and A2K team.
Tanveer  : Would be
responsible for all insitutional partnerships and content donation
activities. Communities are encouraged to get in touch with Tanveer if they
want any specific institution to be explored for Wikipedia activities.

This will enable the above core A2K team members to have multiple touch
points with the FLA Wikimedia communities. Unlike the previous model where
a single Programme Officer was solely responsible for activities for a FLA.

Abhinav

and Tito Dutta  would be
Program Associates and will be working on Marathi Workplan and policy level
discussions respectively.

We have ensured that the PA selection process is done by community
consensus.
Announcements were sent out on the FLA Wikipedia village pumps in the 2nd
and 3rd week of August.
A community nomination was expected to set the process rolling, but with
multiple people applying, A2K team asked the applicants to translate some
of the important movement resources documents (These were handbooks
regarding Editing Wikipedia
,
Illustrating Wikipedia
,
GLAM handbook
, Free
licenses handbook
and
so on) to assess the applicants understanding of Wikimedia projects.

The translations sent by the participants were put up for community members
to review (these were uploaded by candidates on commons.wikimedia.org). The
reviews did not offer any decisive inputs regarding finalising PA position.
It was also felt based on visit and conversations with Telugu Wikipedia
community members, that a selection committee should be constituted for
selecting PA for each language.

*Telugu -*

Telugu announcement was made on 19 August, Candidate A applied on 20
August. As this was the only application, the application deadline was
extended to 15 September and an announcement in this regard was put out on
7 September on Telugu Wikipedia village pump. Candidate B and Candidate C
submitted their applications on 26 September and 28 September respectively.
Mr. Ravi Vyzasatya, Dr. Rajsekhar and Ms. Sujatha were part of the
selection committee. Selection committee members and their profiles:

*Ravi Vyzasatya*: Mr. Ravi Vyzasatya with username వైజాసత్య is one of the
earliest Telugu 

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Legal threat for Wikimedia community volunteers in India getting WMF grants

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Ravi,

Thanks so much for all the feedback and the useful questions that you are
asking.

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 11:29 AM, Ravishankar ravidre...@gmail.com wrote:

 The former WMF India programs did not get any financial support from the
 Wikimedia India 
 Trusthttp://cis-india.org/news/announcement-of-wikimedia-india-program-trust.
 How  were programs like India Education program run? Will this come under
 FCRA violation? How is the IEP different from any community led event in
 receiving foreign money and executing projects?

 Let us start the discussion from this :)


Just to be clear - the Wikimedia India Trust was never operationalised. WIT
did not manage or financially support the IEP or the activities of the
former WMF India programme. The India programmes was directly run by the
WMF. If I am not mistaken the team were employees or consultant of WMF. The
money was not routed through any Indian entity.

Best wishes,

Sunil
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: Re: [Wikipedia-gu] Urdu Wikipedia crosses the 50, 000 mark

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Dhaval,

Thanks so much for your question. Access to CIS email id, admin privileges
on our website content management system, subscription to staff newsletter,
access to staff calendar etc. are only revoked when a ex-partner,
ex-staffer, ex-intern and ex-volunteer makes a request or there is grave
risk to our objectives. I could give you a list of ex-CIS folk with contact
details if you would like to verify this. We have mostly assumed good faith
since July 2008 :-)

When we articulate the same value in CIS's institutional ethos as trust
everybody or amorphous institutional boundary. I will have a discussion
with Muzammil and the team to find out whether it would be advisable for
him to post using this id to the Wikimedia mailing lists.

With apologies for the confusion caused by our protocols,

Sunil


On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 4:49 PM, Dhaval S. Vyas dsv...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thank you Subhashish for the clarification,

 I saw Muzammil using @cis-india.org email address and hence considered
 him CIS employee. It seems that the organisational emails are provided to
 ex employees as legacy or it might be my mistake in considering that an
 organisational email account instead of a public one. Pardon me for my
 ignorance.

 Regards,
 Dhaval
 On 25 Apr 2014 10:58, Subhashish Panigrahi subhash...@cis-india.org
 wrote:

  Hi Dhaval,

 CIS-A2K does not have any role in the creation of these articles.
 Muzammil remains one of our valuable ex-employees since March 15, 2014.
 Please see this announcement [1].

 1.
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2014-April/011040.html

 Thanks,
 Subha


 On 25/04/14 2:58 pm, Dhaval S. Vyas wrote:

 Hi Asaf, Ravi, All,

 Please see below replies received from Muzammil on queries raised by you.
 I did not notice that Muzammil is part of CIS. It looks like the Urdu
 content generation is a task carried out by CIS A2K program under wikimedia
 grant.

 Do you (WMF) have any specific budget for such tasks? Gujarati wiki
 community will love to get paid for content generation.

 Thanks,
 Dhaval
 -- Forwarded message --
 From: muzammil muzam...@cis-india.org
 Date: 25 Apr 2014 10:09
 Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-gu] Urdu Wikipedia crosses the 50,000 mark
 To: Dhaval S. Vyas dsv...@gmail.com
 Cc: Wikipedia Gujarati wikipedia...@lists.wikimedia.org

 Dear  Vyas,


 Good News Muzammil,

 But I have seen questions raised for you regarding this number. People
 have found out that till mid February there were only around 27 thousand
 pages, how did Urdu wikipedia reach 50,000 mark in 2 months?

  I will have to examine the extent of bot activity. However, a high
 level of bot activity was also seen on Hindi Wikipedia in the past.


 Someone also found that most of the recent activity is due to Bot
 operation and 90% of pages are less than 20kb in size, which means they are
 nearly substubs.

  I would rate most as stubs. But even these can be forerunners for
 good articles of the future.

 Regards,
 Muzammil




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 --
 Subhashish Panigrahi
 Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge
 Centre for Internet and Societyhttp://cis-india.org
 @psubhashish


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [A2K]: The Access to Knowledge - Bulletin - January '13

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Theo,

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:45 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote:
 1) I can't seem to understand the rationale behind hiring academicians here
 at all.

There was no rationale behind hiring academics. It just happens that
two of the three people that the recruitment committee selected turned
out to be academics. The other finalist was not an academic.

  Your organization chose researchers and academicians but the job
 requirement was and is, for a management person to oversee and direct a
 team.

We did not choose. The recruitment committee chose.

 I don't think either of the candidates present that kind of expertise.
 Their field of reference is narrow to begin with, limited to the discipline
 of their speciality, add to that how little exposure they have to Wikipedia
 or similar online culture - this doesn't sound like remotely a good fit. -
 this fact was actually the first point that made me think other interests
 were put ahead of the Job requirements.

We did not have enough Wikipedians applying. I am sure the Recruitment
Committee would have gone with a Wikipedian if there had been enough
applications from the community.

I have been a Free Software activist for the last 10 years. I have
contributed to national policy formulation and practice w.r.t. Free
Software, Open Standards and Open Content in multiple countries
including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Moldova and Tajikistan. But I have never
submitted a line of code to any Free Software project. Similarly, I
believe that those who don't edit Wikipedia can also make significant
contributions to the Wikipedia movement.

Best wishes,

Sunil

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] why to donate

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Rudolph the Rd Nosed Reindeer,

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 6:52 PM, Rudolph the Rd Nosed Reindeer
rednosedr...@hotmail.com wrote:
 Interesting isn't it? That one should have timed that A2K bulletin to come
 out exactly when the Chapter is having a fundraiser and leave people like
 the good Doctor here confused about all this? Seems a bit deliberately done,
 don't you think?

We have been publishing the monthly bulletin since the beginning of
the grant period. On most months Noopur has fwded the bulletin to this
mailing list.
See:
1. September 2012:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2012-October/008763.html
2. October 2012:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2012-November/008826.html
- We made a mistake and did not make a mention of the size of the
grant in this edition.
3. November 2012:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2012-December/008977.html
4. We seem to have missed out on distributing the December bulletin to
this mailing list.
5. January 2013:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2013-February/009249.html

We will continue to publish the bulletin on a monthly basis. Do tell
us how we can improve the format and content of this newsletter.

Best wishes,

Sunil

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] why to donate

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Abhishek,

CIS is not supporting travel expenses for Chapter EC meetings. Nor has
CIS provided funding to the Chapter so far from the Wikipedia grant.
CIS has provided in-kind support to the Chapter in previous financial
years for ex. society registration costs and the costs of their
financial adviser during their first financial year. We strongly
suppor

This month, we are reimbursing the Chapter EC travel and related
expenses because the Chapter EC has kindly consented to support a
training programme that CIS is organising for it's A2K team in
Bangalore. It is only happy coincidence that they were also organising
a meeting in Bangalore during those dates. I was not aware of this
when I reached out to the EC and asked for their support us.

Dear Friends,

In the first week of March, we hope to release a 6-monthly report of
the utilization of the grant so far. Usually we only provide an annual
consolidated report for all grants at the ledger group level. But for
this particular grant we will increase the degree of transparency to
address concerns of the community. If you have any suggestions on how
we should structure this report or if you have any further questions
about how CIS is spending the grant allocated do not hesitate to ask
me.

Best wishes,

Sunil



 Original Message 
Subject: Training of CIS-A2K team on 23 or 24 of February
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 10:48:42 +0530
From: Sunil Abraham su...@cis-india.org
To: Wikimedia India EC wikimedia-in-e...@lists.wikimedia.org

Attn:
 Sudhanwa Jogalekar
 Karthik Nadar
 Anirudh Singh Bhati
 Nikita Belavate
 Pranav Curumsey
 Srikanth Ramakrishnan
 Viswa Prabha

Dear Members of the Wikimedia India EC,

Hope 2013 has gotten of to an excellent start for all of you.

CIS is organising a training for the A2K team on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th
of February in Bangalore. The new Programme Director - Vishnu Vardhan
will also be attending this event. We would like the EC to spend one day
training the team on a variety of issues. We would prefer if you opt for
either 23rd or the 24th as we have some other trainers that have
confirmed for the 22nd.

CIS will cover air travel and accommodation for all EC members. CIS will
also provide per diem for meals that are not provided during the
training. Unfortunately, we don't have a separate budget for fees.

This idea has been discussed with Anasuya Sengupta and Jessie Wild at
the Wikimedia Foundation and they have supported it.

Best wishes,

Sunil

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 1:08 AM, Abhishek Suryawanshi
i.abhishek.suryawan...@gmail.com wrote:

 Dear Sunil,

 Could you please share information about CIS supporting Chapter Travel
 expenses?

 And Its nice and positive move, Great to see CIS continues to support
 movement in India.
 Volunteers can devote their time in doing activities and CIS can support as
 per request.

 As Chapter is shy/silent about acknowledging funding from CIS - Hope so your
 reply will clarify that CIS is there to support Chapter activities
 irrespective of criticism.


 Keep Supporting, Keep Inspiring! :)



 Regards,

 Abhishek Suryawanshi,
 On Behalf of Wikipedia Club Pune







 
 From: Srikanth Ramakrishnan srik.r...@wikimedia.in

 To: Wikimedia India Community list wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 Sent: Tuesday, 12 February 2013 11:31 PM

 Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] why to donate

 Membership under processing is differnt from memvership alreadt
 processed. INDI-31 is non existant and will remain so.

 As for CIS funding, you still havwn't said where you have got the
 information from.
 The Chapter has alwaya made things public and will xontinue to do so. If
 the CIS funds us, it will be madw public.

 n Tuesday, February 12, 2013, Abhishek Suryawanshi
 i.abhishek.suryawan...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 
  Dear Srikanth,
  I appreciate you keep a check of the Chapter Membership List. But at
  the same time I guess you will also respect the Chapter President's word. 
  I
  have had a talk with Sudhanwa (President,Wikimedia India Chapter) and just
  two days back he informed me that my Chapter-membership is being proceed. 
  I
  would like you to have or increase your communications with other EC 
  members
  (or at-least with President) before claiming me or anybody else with
  allegations such as a 'Cheat' :)
 
  P.S : How does it affects my query about CIS funding chapter's travel
  for Board meeting or not ?
 
 
 
  Regards,
  Abhishek Suryawanshi,
  On Behalf of Wikipedia Club Pune
 
 
 
 
  On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 10:50 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan
  srik.r...@wikimedia.in wrote:
 
  Just to  inform you that Abhishek Suryawanshi, who claims to be a
  Chapter Member with membership number INDI-31 is NOT a member. The
  entry currently doesn't exist in our membership list. Mr. Suryawanshi
  was a member of the Chapter during the earlier Financial Year and did
  NOT renew his membership. I hope the community is now aware of what
  kind of people

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [A2K]: The Access to Knowledge - Bulletin - January '13

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Theo,

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:45 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote:
 2) The hiring process wasn't nearly as neutral as you are suggesting. From
 what I know CIS didn't have 1 in 5 vote, it first picked who got selected
 for the first round to even have a vote, and I am told that qualified
 candidates were eliminated outright by Jadine in the first week before they
 were put up for any vote.

This is indeed a serious concern. I can think of one way of
determining whether CIS [Jadine and I made those decisions jointly
after some background checks regarding the ethical fibre for the
candidates] has indeed eliminated qualified candidates. Could you send
me or the members of the recruitment committee directly a list of such
candidates? I will then organise a con-call of the recruitment
committee without me participating and one of them will post to the
list with their final verdict on whether those candidates should have
made the short list. If indeed such mistake has been committed by CIS
- I will personally publish a public apology on the CIS website which
will feature in our monthly bulletin which in turn reaches 4k people
and will also be fwded to this mailing list.

Best wishes,

Sunil

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [A2K]: The Access to Knowledge - Bulletin - January '13

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Theo,

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:45 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote:
 3) I am still curious about some of the relationships here. As far as I know
 achal still serves on your board? because I have a distinct memory of there
 being some association here. He also still serves on the Advisory board of
 WMF and had a lot to do with selecting Bishakha. He was also a fellow for
 WMF, some time after the start of the India programs.

Achal used to be on our board from the time we registered in July
2008. He has not attend board meetings since September 2011. Current
board members of CIS are listed here:
http://cis-india.org/about/people/board-members. Achal continues to be
a member of the registered society and CIS does contract him
occasionally for research support activities like editing manuscripts.

Best wishes,

Sunil

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Volunteer for CIS's A2K programme director recruitment committee

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Adethya,

Apologies for sending the previous message prematurely.

On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Adethya Sudarsanan
adethyas...@gmail.com wrote:
 I would like to nominate myself to the  CIS's A2K Programme Director
 recruitment committee. I am based out of Chennai.

Thanks for volunteering for the recruitment committee.

 Kindly let me know the prospects.

Not sure I fully understand your question. You will be involved in
scoring the CVs and other details of applicants that make the long
list. You will also be responsible for conducting face to face
interview with the short list in Bangalore or Delhi.

Best wishes,

Sunil

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Volunteer for CIS's A2K programme director recruitment committee

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Yuvi and Vickram,

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Vickram Crishna
vvcris...@radiophony.com wrote:

 On Aug 5, 2012 3:05 PM, Yuvi Panda yuvipa...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Sunil Abraham su...@mahiti.org wrote:

 Simply out of curiosity, what would constitute 'sufficient' managerial
 experience?

 The rest of us were hoping ;-) you would explain.

Apologies for the imprecise language. I was thinking of 'sufficient'
being middle ground between 1) 'any managerial experience' and 2)
'significant managerial experience'. More imprecise phrases to clarify
an imprecise phrase.

The trouble however in the world of free knowledge and open culture -
is that those playing a leadership role are not thought of as
managers. But often these leaders have much more management experience
than those exposed only to traditional organisations.

Best wishes,

Sunil

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Volunteer for CIS's A2K programme director recruitment committee

[Sunil Abraham]

On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 1:11 PM, Vickram Crishna
vvcris...@radiophony.com wrote:
 True. Your explanation clarifies that what is needed is leadership
 experience, possibly either with large or small teams, obviously somebody
 who has enough time to devote during the next month or two for this task,
 but not for the role being filled.

Exactly. I could not have articulated it better myself.

 I suggest that instead of leaving the 'sufficient' adjective in place,
 simply request all volunteers with leadership experience to apply (i.e. to
 advise their availability), and choose the one with the greatest time spent
 in such roles.

Excellent. However, I will only screen out those with limited
experience to create a short list. The final volunteer for the
committee will be selected from the short list using  IETF's Publicly
Verifiable Nominations Committee (NomCom) Random Selection process.

So to reiterate for the other members on this list. If you have any
leadership experience and have some time to spare in September - do
nominate yourselves by sending an email to me.

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Volunteer for CIS's A2K programme director recruitment committee

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Wikimedians,

I would like to request members of the Indian Wikipedia community to
nominate themselves to serve on the CIS's A2K Programme Director
recruitment committee. This programme will hopefully receive large
grant from Wikimedia Foundation and we would greatly benefit from
community input during the hiring process of the new Programme
Director.

The volunteer must be experienced Wikipedian, based in India [ as we
cannot afford international travel for the interviews] and must have
sufficient managerial experience [including experience with conducting
interviews].  The volunteer should be able to spare time in September
to review applications remotely and also conduct face-to-face
interviews for 2 days either in Bangalore or Delhi.

Those who fit the description are requested to nominate yourself by
sending me an email with a profile and relevant URLs before COB 25th
August 2012.

I will publish a long list on cis-india.org on 29th August, after
removing those nominations that don't have the required
qualifications. The volunteer to serve on the recruitment committee
will be selected from the long list by using IETF's Publicly
Verifiable Nominations Committee (NomCom) Random Selection[1].

The other members of this recruitment committee will consist of
1. One of the existing independent consultants [Hisham, Nitika,
Noopur, Shiju or Subha]
2. One member from the Wikipedia Chapter (Wikimedia India Program
Trust) community. To be nominated by the Chapter Executive Committee.
3. Executive Director of CIS - me.

The recruitment committee will be responsible for screening the long
list of eligible applications and conducting one-on-one face-to-face
interviews with the short list of applicants.

Best wishes,

Sunil

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3797.txt The random seeds will be the
30 August 2012 result for the following national lotteries - Australia
(http://www.lotto.com.au/), UK (http://www.national-lottery.co.uk) and
USA (http://www.powerball.com or http://www.usamega.com)

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Vacancy for Programme Director - Access to Knowledge

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Wikimedians,

This is the announcement that we have published on the jobs sections
of the CIS website for the Director of the Access to Knowledge
Programme. Please share with interested friends, colleagues and
communities.

Please send me feedback if any, I am happy to make some incremental
changes to the announcement.

Best wishes,

Sunil

--
Vacancy for Programme Director (Access to Knowledge)
http://cis-india.org/jobs/vacancy-for-programme-director

 The Centre for Internet  Society (CIS) is seeking applications for
the post of Programme Director (Access to Knowledge) for its New Delhi
office. The Access to Knowledge Programme Director would report to the
Executive Director, Centre for Internet  Society, Bangalore.
Position summary

The Programme Director will manage CIS’s Access to Knowledge programme
which is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, to support the growth of
Wikipedia and its sister projects and to advance access to free
knowledge in India. The Programme Director will partner with the large
Wikimedia community in India to focus on Indic and English languages
and will manage a team of four staff members.
Responsibilities

Support the growth of Indic language communities and projects by
designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and
cultivate new editors, tackle technical challenges and explore
innovative approaches to building the projects, e.g., donations of
state encyclopedias, education partnerships, galleries, libraries,
archives, and museums (GLAM) institution partnerships.
Support India-focused initiatives to improve the quality of
India-relevant content on English Wikimedia projects such as,
university outreach, GLAM institution partnerships, India-relevant
thematic contribution campaigns, etc.
Support expanded access to free knowledge across India by
developing technology-based solutions like Wikipedia (mobile) and
Wikipedia (offline).
Help the Indian community share experiences and tell its story to
the wider Indian and global communities through traditional and social
media.
Generate and document lessons from programme activities that can
inform the work of Indian communities and similar programmes in other
countries.
Manage the team and grant resources effectively; manage the
programme in an open and transparent fashion with ongoing
communications and reporting to the Wikimedia community and the
Wikimedia Foundation.
Serve as a spokesperson for the Access to Knowledge programme and
build ties with the Wikimedia India chapter and other free knowledge
communities and movements in India such as Free/Open Source Software,
Open Access, Open Data, Open Educational Resources, Indic-computing,
etc.

Characteristics of the Director

High level of commitment: The Programme Director should be
strongly committed to CIS and Wikimedia movement missions and
objectives of the programme and deeply believe in the values of CIS
and Wikimedia projects in the Indian context, exude enthusiasm for the
mission and can powerfully embody and communicate the mission.
Intellectual curiosity and flexibility: Must enjoy tackling
difficult, ambiguous problems and able to incorporate new knowledge
into how one approaches situations and generates solutions, loves
learning from others while expanding intellectual horizons.
Open and transparent: Have a high level of integrity and be
comfortable working in a highly transparent fashion, open to input and
feedback, a proactive and candid communicator who wants people to know
what she/he is doing and isn't afraid to bring others in when things
are off-track or when you need help and able to handle criticism in a
mature fashion.
Community builder: It is essential that the leader sees himself as
a partner to and supporter of the Wikipedians who have and will
continue to be the leaders in building the Wikimedia projects. The
Programme Director must be willing and able to work with a diverse
array of people, many of whom come from non-traditional backgrounds
and have a fervent commitment to Wikipedia’s community-led nature.
Strong cultural competency: Able to navigate in a global movement
and on a global team in addition to navigating the complexity of
India.
Proficient manager: Able to design and execute on a range of
initiatives; organize and manage a team of people and responsible in
use of resources (financial and human).
Data-driven: Should be well versed about the Indic and English
projects, subject his/her own approaches and activities as well as
those of the team to rigorous analysis and willing to stop doing
things that prove to be ineffective based on the data.
Partnership developer: Able to initiate, negotiate and operate
partnerships that advance the Wikimedia mission in Indic languages and
English (as relevant to India) with a wide range of institutions
across the public, NGO, philanthropic and private sector.
Willing to travel: The Programme Director must regularly 

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikimedia-l] Changes to India Program

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Hari,

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Hari Prasad Nadig m...@hpnadig.net wrote:

 discussion running up to these changes. My specific concern is how the
 Chapter would evolve going ahead from here, and given that CIS has helped
 the Chapter activities in the past, what role CIS plans to play in
 strengthening the Chapter - whether there would be efforts to strengthen
 the organization or such.


Please don't worry on that count. CIS will maintain status quo w.r.t. to
Chapter relationships. Whatever facilities/services are currently being
provided to Chapter and have been provided to the Chapter in the past -
will continue to be provided from CIS's core-funding. These services will
continue beyond the 22 month period of this grant and for as long as we are
around.

For WikimediaIndia-l users, just a note that I had earlier posted a
 response to Barry's email here:
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-July/121523.html


As mentioned in my first message to the list - CIS is very committed to
increasing the accountability and transparency of this particular grant and
also the organisation as a whole. For example - to control travel related
costs - CIS could publicly disclose the list of hotels in each city that
are affordable at our per diem rates - these hotels will be used by all
staffers including the A2K team. For greater transparency around staff
travel - we could provide demand-based access to the staff calendar
including the A2K team. In other words, if you wanted to know what I or any
member of the A2K team was doing or will be doing on a particular date -
you could email our publication's manager and he would tell you. Hopefully
measures such as these will increase the bang you are getting for your
buck. I hope you will also point out other areas where we could make
improvements as CIS.

Best wishes,

Sunil
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikimedia-l] Changes to India Program

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Hari,

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Hari Prasad Nadig m...@hpnadig.net wrote:

 discussion running up to these changes. My specific concern is how the
 Chapter would evolve going ahead from here, and given that CIS has helped
 the Chapter activities in the past, what role CIS plans to play in
 strengthening the Chapter - whether there would be efforts to strengthen
 the organization or such.


Please don't worry on that count. CIS will maintain status quo w.r.t. to
Chapter relationships. Whatever facilities/services are currently being
provided to Chapter and have been provided to the Chapter in the past -
will continue to be provided from CIS's core-funding. These services will
continue beyond the 22 month period of this grant and for as long as we are
around.

For WikimediaIndia-l users, just a note that I had earlier posted a
 response to Barry's email here:
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-July/121523.html


As I said in my first message to the list - CIS is very committed to
increasing the accountability and transparency of this particular grant and
also the organisation as a whole. For example - to control travel related
costs - CIS could publicly disclose the list of hotels in each city that
are affordable at our per diem rates - these hotels will be used by all
staffers including the A2K team. For greater transparency around staff
travel - we could provide demand-based access to the staff calendar
including the A2K team. In other words, if you wanted to know what I or any
member of the A2K team was doing or will be doing on a particular date -
you could email our publication's manager and he would tell you. Hopefully
measures such as these will increase the bang you are getting for your
buck. I hope you will also point out other areas where we could make
improvements as CIS.

Best wishes,

Sunil
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikimedia-l] Changes to India Program

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Wikipedians,

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Barry Newstead (WMF)
bnewst...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 Hisham’s departure coincides with another change in the India Program. We are 
 pleased to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has approved a grant to the 
 Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore to expand their Access to 
 Knowledge programme to support the achievement of the Wikimedia mission in 
 India.  CIS is a leading organization in India working on Internet policy. 
 They are part of the broad free and open community. CIS is a long time friend 
 of Wikimedia, our community in Bangalore, and the Wikimedia India chapter.


I would like to first like to thank Wikimedia Foundation for giving us
a grant to expand our Access to Knowledge Programme with a greater
focus on Wikipedia. I look forward to working with colleagues from the
Foundation and serving the community in India.

A little bit about my self since I am posting for the first time on
this list, I was elected an Ashoka fellow in 1999. I was part of the
founding team of Mahiti.org though no longer formally involved.
Between 2004 and 2007, I managed IOSN.net, a project of APDIP-UNDP
that focussed on promoting FOSS, open standards and open content
policies in the Asia-Pacific region. Apart from the Government of
India, I have worked with the governments of Moldova, Tajikistan,
Saudi Arabia and Iraq on free software and open standards policies. I
currently serve on the boards of Samvada and Tactical Technology
Collective and also on the sub-board of Open Society Foundation's
Information Programme.

Now a little about CIS that is not in the FAQ. We are most often in
the news for our work around Freedom of Expression under our Internet
Governance programme. But most of our budget is spent on the other
less controversial areas. As a research organisation CIS does not
enforce party positions across staff members and fellows, like the
Kamasutra we encourage a multiplicity of positions. CIS has hosted
inclusiveplanet.com in the past and is currently hosting hasgeek.in.
CIS's garage has been converted into a hacker space called The Lab. In
the past, we have had the privilege to useful in small ways to
individual Wikipedians, the Indian Wikipedia community and India
chapter. The whole team looks forward to stepping-up that dramatically
with this grant.

As a registered non-profit society, CIS will strive to maintain high
levels of transparency and accountability to the Wikipedia community
and the general public. We will make the budget and programme plan
publicly available shortly. We will be transparent about staff
remuneration and travel-related costs – as is the case with other CIS
staffers. We will setup a recruitment panel for the Programme Director
with hopefully participation from the community and the chapter as was
the case in Brazil. More on that soon.

For now, if there are any questions for me regarding CIS and this
particular grant – I would be happy to answer them.

Best wishes,

Sunil

P.S. Apologies for posting from my Mahiti id.

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