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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sunil Abraham <[email protected]>
Date: 11 నవం 2015 4:07 PM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] CIS-A2K 2.0 and new Programme Associates
To: 

> 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 Wikipedians and sysop on Telugu Wikipedia and Telugu 
> Wiktionary. He has been a Wikipedian for more than 10 years. His areas of 
> interest are research articles, biographies of personalities. He is 
> instrumental in creation of village  articles on Wikipedia using his bot, 
> which has created close to 24,000 articles on Telugu Wikipedia. He also 
> proposes rules and policies on Telugu Wikipedia. By profession he is a 
> researcher with expertise in Molecular Biology, Immunology, Cell Biology.  
>
>
> Rajasekhar: Dr. Rajasekhar, username Rajasekhar1961, has been a Telugu 
> Wikipedian for over 8 years and is a bureaucrat & sysop on Telugu Wikipedia, 
> sysop on Telugu Wikisource and Telugu Wiktionary. He was one of the senior 
> most Wikipedians with interest in wide range of areas like Biology, Telugu 
> language, Yoga, Telugu personalities, Medicine and Transportation. He is a 
> pathologist by profession. Interesting thing is that he has turned his lab 
> into Wikipedia help centre and has provided his phone number publicly for 
> anyone to call and know about Wikipedia.
>
> Sujatha: Ms. Sujatha Thummapudi, username T.sujatha, has been a Telugu 
> Wikipedian for over 9 years and is a sysop on Telugu Wikipedia, Wiktionary 
> and Wikisource. She has been writing articles on spirituality, religion, 
> places and so on. She was part of the Lilavathi's daughters project and lead 
> the project in Telugu. She, along with her husband Mr. Sriramamurthy garu has 
> been actively working in Te Wiktionary, Te Wikipedia and Te Wikisource as 
> well.
>
> Mr. Ravi Vyzasatya asked the three candidates two questions and the 
> candidates answered the same on Tewiki village pump. Later A2K team asked the 
> selection committee to send us their decision.
>
> The selection committee for Telugu came to a consensus and selected Mr. Pavan 
> Santhosh as the candidate for the post of PA for Telugu for a period of 3 
> months on trial basis. If the performance is satisfactory during this period, 
> we can continue with him. His profile is given below: 
>
> Pavan Santhosh: He has been a very active Telugu Wikipedian with more than 
> 16000 edits to his credit and has worked extensively to improve content and 
> quality in Telugu Wikipedia, Wikisource & Wiktionary. He was the joint 
> secretary of the committee that organized the 11th anniversary of Telugu 
> Wikipedia. He has been an Individual Engagement grantee from Wikimedia 
> Foundation for the project “Making Telugu content accessible”. He has 
> organized and co-organized many meetups, events and outreach programs.   
>
>
> Kannada - 
>
> The announcement for PA was made on Kannada Wikipedia village pump on August 
> 12, It was postponed twice to 15 September and 15 October. The decision was 
> given by selection committee in last week of October. 
> Selection committee members and their profiles: 
>
> Tejas Jain (User:Teju2friends): Software engineer by profession. Has been an 
> active Kannada Wikipedian since 2007. Has more than 4500 edits in Kannada 
> Wikipedia, about 250 in Kannada Wiktionary, about 35 in Kannada Wikiquote. He 
> has also contributed to other Wikimedia projects. He has written useful 
> scripts. He has participated in many Kannada Wikipedia events, meetups and 
> conducted outreach programs.
>
> Harish M G (User:M G Harish): Software engineer by profession. Has been an 
> active Kannada Wikipedian since 2006. He has more than 2700 edits to his 
> credit in Kannada Wikipedia, about 105 in Kannada Wikiquote. He has been an 
> administrator of Kannada Wikipedia. he has written useful scripts. He has 
> participated in many Kannada Wikipedia event, meetups and conducted many 
> outreach programs. 
>
> Vikas Hegde (User:Vikashegde): Software engineer by profession. Has been an 
> active Kannada Wikipedian since 2009. He has nearly 800 edits to his credit 
> in Kannada Wikipedia and about 35 edits in Kannada Wikiquote. He has also 
> contributed to other Wikimedia projects. He has been the major contributor to 
> some projects in Kannada Wikipedia. He has participated in many Kannada 
> Wikipedia events and meetups. He is also a well known Kannada blogger and 
> written some useful blogs about using Kannada in IT.
>
> The selection committee has agreed to appoint Mr. Ananth Subray for a period 
> of 3 months on trial basis. If the performance is satisfactory during this 
> period, we can continue with him. Here is a profile of Mr. Ananth Subray. As 
> he is a student, he would be employed as an intern. 
>
> Ananth Subray (User:Ananth subray): Mr. Ananth Subray is a 2nd year BSc. 
> (PCM) student at Christ University, Bengaluru. He has been part of the 
> Wikipedia Education Program in the university from last 2 years. Having been 
> recommended by the faculty and his other fellow batch-mates, he also helped 
> us to run the Wikisource activities for the Education Program for the junior 
> batches in his university. Ananth is fluent in Kannada, Hindi and Telugu 
> apart from English. Even though new in the Wikimedia community, Ananth has 
> been a fast learner and is active as a Wikimedian. He has participated in the 
> Mediawiki Train-the-Trainer programme conducted by CIS-A2K this year.  
>
>
> Konkani 
>
> The Konkani Wikipedia community has selected Ms. Melissa Simoes as the 
> consensus candidate to become the next PA for Konkani. Here is her profile.  
>
> Melissa Simoes (User:Melissa Simoes on gom.wikipedia.org): She is a graduate 
> and has a degree in education. She has worked as teacher in a high school at 
> Goa. She has been a very active Konkani Wikipedian and has contributed whole 
> heartedly to Konkani Wikipedia. She had important contribution in making 
> Konkani Wikipedia go live. Writing poems is one of her hobbies.
>
>
> Odia
>
> The announcement for Odia Wikipedia PA was made on 14th August, but was 
> postponed to 10th October as one of the previous selection committee members 
> requested that he would want to apply for the post. A new selection committee 
> was formed. The selection committee gave their decision on 1 November. 
> Selection committee members and their profiles
>
> Mrutyunjaya(User:MKar): most active Wikimedian in the Odia Wikimedia 
> community so far. Admin on Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource. Been active in 
> building the "WikiTungi" (Odia Wikimedia user group) in Nalconagar where he 
> has brought many Wikimedians onboard. Active in conducting community surveys, 
> designing and implementing WikiProjects and WEP; discussion and content 
> acquisition for Wikisource from many authors.
>
> Shitikantha Dash(User:ଶିତିକଣ୍ଠ ଦାଶ): OR WT admin, active in WP and WT. 
> created over 100K words by using a 1930 lexicon, created an encoding 
> converter for Shreelipi Oriya font-Unicode conversion. MWTTT participant and 
> active tech contributor in OR WM community. Currently pursuing MTech in 
> Rourkela, Odisha.
>
> Harihar Prasad Satapathy(User:Hpsatapathy): Works in the court at Rayagada. 
> Active since 2014 on OR WP and EN WP. The articles he created about Rayagada 
> distt. been the highest no. of articles ever created about any distt. on OR 
> WP.
>
> The selection committee has agreed to appoint Mr. Sailesh Patnaik for a 
> period of 3 months on trial basis. If the performance is satisfactory during 
> this period, we can continue with him. Here is a profile of Mr. Sailesh 
> Patnaik. As he is a student, he would be employed as an intern.
>
> Sailesh Patnaik(User: Saileshpat): Mr. Sailesh Patnaik is a Mechanical 
> Engineering student at KIIT University, Bhubaneswar. He has been active in 
> Wikimedia Movement from last three years. He is also involved and 
> coordinating with CIS-A2K from 2013 for the growth of Odia Wikipedia and 
> strengthening the community. He is already handling the social media accounts 
> and outreach programs for Odia Wikipedia.
>
> Hope the Wikipedia communities in India will continue to guide us and hold as 
> accountable with their feedback and criticism during A2K version 2.0 so that 
> we can continue to evolve and change the programme.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Sunil
>
> Ph: +91 9611100817

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