[Wikimediaindia-l] Update on my work
Hi everyone, I wanted to share with you all few things that I'm currently working on and I'd love to get your ideas, thoughts, suggestions, questions and most importantly approvals. Supporting Outreach I started working on this sometime in December by talking to some community members and understanding how they have been conducting outreach session, what they think about outreach, how can we make it more effective etc etc. I got varied comments with some talking positively about outreach while some thought that outreach was not helpful. Im in the process of collating all comments suggestions I got during my conversations with community members and including them with some of my own views as to how can we make outreach sessions more effective. This includes building presentations, brochures, FAQs, tips, ideas on how can we provide the appropriate kind of training on Wikipedia, how can we make sessions more fun for the participants, how can we follow up with the participants, how can we measure the effectiveness of these sessions etc. The objective is to build a handbook that is inclusive of all ideas and standardized documents that one could use to conduct outreach session anywhere in India. We want to facilitate community members efforts wanting to conduct wiki workshops and motivate others to conduct similar sessions. Initially, these documents will be in English - but can be translated to Indic languages subsequently. I'd want to work closely with the Chapter to conduct WIki Academies with other community members to conduct these workshops. Here is the link to the handbook:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Outreach_Program_Handbook. Ashwin, Naveen, Srikanth L, Srikanth R, Suyog, Pradeep, Subhashish have contributed to this document by giving me ideas or helping me build standardized documents. I'd like really like to thank each one of them to help me work on this handbook and make it what it is today. I'd encourage all of you to please feel free to edit, expand, improve and suggest. Testing Outreach I want to test wether all the ideas such as what kind of pre-work an outreach needs, repository of documents, follow up ideas, and all the other suggestions that are collated in this Outreach Handbook are effective or not. The best way of testing this would be conducting outreach programs following these suggestions and measuring their effectiveness. I have reached out to several institutes in Delhi with the idea of conducting Wiki sessions at their institutes. To name a few: I have written to 9 different department heads at IIT Delhi including biochemical, management science, civil, chemistry engineering departments, National Institute of Fashion Technology, St.Stevens College, Lady Shir Ram College, Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology etc. I have already heard positively from some institutes and I'll keep you updated as and when things become a little clearer. Even if we're able to conduct 4 of these sessions in Delhi over the next month it will give us a good testing ground for this Outreach Handbook. The idea is to measure results of these 4 sessions in terms of no. of total participants, no. of participants who created usernames, no. of participants who started editing, keeping in touch with the participants over a period of time and evaluating no. of participants who continued editing over a period of 3 months - measure and share this data with you all. Since the community size is small in Delhi, I plan to conduct these sessions with the help of Shiju, Subha and any interested local community members. I request any other local community members who are interested to let me know if they can join in these outreach sessions. (I have already started reaching out individually to as many as are listed on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Delhi_Wikipedians on their talk pages to invite them to the planned meet up in Delhi on Jan 15th. With regards to outside Delhi, I am realising that it does take time and effort to identify potential places to do outreach - and this is one reason some community members do not do outreach. I would love to help out other cities as well, and I am going to approach local communities in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkatta and Pune in this regard. Institutional Partnership One of the other things I'm currently working on is how to build partnerships with like-minded organisation. For this - and with Noopur's help - I am exploring how to partner with SPIC MACAY (www.spicmacay.com). The main objective of this organisation is to preserve and promote Indian classical music, dance and cultural heritage. SPIC MACAY is also a volunteer based organization with chapters spread all over the country and some in other foreign countries as well. They conduct events where they have prominent Indian classical artists (vocalists, instrument
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Update on my work
hi Nitika, A parameter to consider while trying to measure effectiveness of an outreach session is the time constraints of the person doing the outreach. If working folks are involved, it would be difficult to get this sort of feedback. Things get easier, though, when size of the group with which outreach is done is less than 5. Perhaps doing micro-outreach and relying on a domino effect would be more effective in measuring effectiveness of outreach. Just a theory. Also, for the aforementioned working force, a single page outreach cheat sheet would be awesome. I'd also push for more advanced editing workshops to encourage the next generation of admins. I'd also push for a few more tech workshops per year. Pradeep Handheld On 12/01/2012, Nitika ntan...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi everyone, I wanted to share with you all few things that I'm currently working on and I'd love to get your ideas, thoughts, suggestions, questions and most importantly approvals. Supporting Outreach I started working on this sometime in December by talking to some community members and understanding how they have been conducting outreach session, what they think about outreach, how can we make it more effective etc etc. I got varied comments with some talking positively about outreach while some thought that outreach was not helpful. Im in the process of collating all comments suggestions I got during my conversations with community members and including them with some of my own views as to how can we make outreach sessions more effective. This includes building presentations, brochures, FAQs, tips, ideas on how can we provide the appropriate kind of training on Wikipedia, how can we make sessions more fun for the participants, how can we follow up with the participants, how can we measure the effectiveness of these sessions etc. The objective is to build a handbook that is inclusive of all ideas and standardized documents that one could use to conduct outreach session anywhere in India. We want to facilitate community members efforts wanting to conduct wiki workshops and motivate others to conduct similar sessions. Initially, these documents will be in English - but can be translated to Indic languages subsequently. I'd want to work closely with the Chapter to conduct WIki Academies with other community members to conduct these workshops. Here is the link to the handbook:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Outreach_Program_Handbook. Ashwin, Naveen, Srikanth L, Srikanth R, Suyog, Pradeep, Subhashish have contributed to this document by giving me ideas or helping me build standardized documents. I'd like really like to thank each one of them to help me work on this handbook and make it what it is today. I'd encourage all of you to please feel free to edit, expand, improve and suggest. Testing Outreach I want to test wether all the ideas such as what kind of pre-work an outreach needs, repository of documents, follow up ideas, and all the other suggestions that are collated in this Outreach Handbook are effective or not. The best way of testing this would be conducting outreach programs following these suggestions and measuring their effectiveness. I have reached out to several institutes in Delhi with the idea of conducting Wiki sessions at their institutes. To name a few: I have written to 9 different department heads at IIT Delhi including biochemical, management science, civil, chemistry engineering departments, National Institute of Fashion Technology, St.Stevens College, Lady Shir Ram College, Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology etc. I have already heard positively from some institutes and I'll keep you updated as and when things become a little clearer. Even if we're able to conduct 4 of these sessions in Delhi over the next month it will give us a good testing ground for this Outreach Handbook. The idea is to measure results of these 4 sessions in terms of no. of total participants, no. of participants who created usernames, no. of participants who started editing, keeping in touch with the participants over a period of time and evaluating no. of participants who continued editing over a period of 3 months - measure and share this data with you all. Since the community size is small in Delhi, I plan to conduct these sessions with the help of Shiju, Subha and any interested local community members. I request any other local community members who are interested to let me know if they can join in these outreach sessions. (I have already started reaching out individually to as many as are listed on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Delhi_Wikipedians on their talk pages to invite them to the planned meet up in Delhi on Jan 15th. With regards to outside Delhi, I am realising that it does take time and effort to identify potential places to do outreach - and this is one reason some community members do not
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Update on my work
A parameter to consider while trying to measure effectiveness of an outreach session is the time constraints of the person doing the outreach. If working folks are involved, it would be difficult to get this sort of feedback. Things get easier, though, when size of the group with which outreach is done is less than 5. Perhaps doing micro-outreach and relying on a domino effect would be more effective in measuring effectiveness of outreach. Just a theory. Great suggestion Pradeep. I agree, volunteer time is limited and is extremely valuable. Hence every minute invested by the community in outreach should have maximum possible impact. If greater effectiveness means limiting the number of participants to a number as small as 5 or 10 then we must do that. I'd include this point in the handbook or else fell free to add it yourself. Having said this, if there are let's say 40 members interested in attending a Wiki workshop or a meet up it will be difficult for us to handpick 5-10 members who would attend the session. Under different circumstance we should work differently: If we have enough community members then may be we should think of ways of dividing this group of 40 in 4 different groups and individual community members leading each group. But the question is, what do we do when we don't have enough community members in that particular region. In such situations we'll have to conduct outreach for larger number of participants and find more efficient ways of following up with the participants post the session. Some of the ways could be: Towards the end of the session ask the participants to select an article that they all would like to collaboratively edit during the next one week. Tell them that you've created a Google group for them where they could post messages, queries, comments etc. Keep a close watch on this newly created Google group and guide and help them by answering their queries promptly. Pretty much like what Ashwin is trying do with the GA master class. Towards the end of the session ask the participant if any of them would like to become representatives of this group. You should maintain direct contact with these volunteers (these could be 1-2) and if possible ask them to organize follow up academy session where participants could get their doubts cleared or ask them to invite all the participants to wiki meet ups etc. Basically, these volunteers could serve as your single point of contact for the entire group making your task of following up much easier. More ideas and suggestions on this are welcome! Thanks Nitika ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
