Wikipedia:Meetup/Pune/Pune12

Today's meet saw different participation from last time. For the record we had with us :
 * The usual suspects - Sudhanwa Jogalekar, Harshad Gune & Ashwin Baindur
 * Budding editor - Arnav Sonara
 * Newbies - Sudeep Ghiya & Saurabh Agrawal
 * Editors returning back to Wikipedia after a long hiatus - Vijay Kudal & Sohel Bohra
 * Distinguished attendee - Dr Radha Misra, Professor, SNDT Womens College, Pune
 * Proxy - Manjusha Joshi representing her daughter Shravani (user:Shravanisj on en:WP)

The meet started with a short welcome and introductory session. All were informed of the activities being done/planned for Pune Wikipedians -
 * Editing English & Marathi Wikipedias.
 * Efforts for Commons (sadly not taking off)
 * Forthcoming GLAM initiative.
 * Software development efforts at SICSR.
 * Campus Ambassador program.

Mandar Kulkarni spoke about his motivation to edit in Marathi and why this is such a worthwhile and important activity. Mandar regularly features a Marathi article in WikiPuneri. He is the author of more than 600 articles on Wikipedia.

The highpoint of the evening was a Skype call with Hisham Mundol. Hisham outlined the Campus Ambassador program and explained that Pune was chosen as the location of the pilot project of the Campus Ambassador scheme. The reasons for choosing Pune included, among others, large number of educational institutions, cosmopolitan student body and established Wikipedia user community. The lessons learnt here would be useful for the next stage when the movement would be moved.

In the discussion which followed a number of points were made -
 * The vacations are due so Hisham/the program needs to move fast. Hisham said he's coming to Pune next week.
 * The number of active editors in Pune may not suffice keeping in mind the scope of the pilot. Hisham plans to call for campus ambassadors country-wide and involve people who are not yet Wikipedians but interested in participating.
 * There is a need to approach those in authority in all educational institutions so that the followup will be seen by all as sanctioned by authority and therefore moreachievable.
 * In Maharashtra, college students need to undergo 100 hours of computer training/involvement which is not syllabus driven. This provides scope for Wikipedia to get involved.
 * Getting the experiences of Mozilla ambassadors and others in Red Hat etc who have been invoilved in outreach programs will be useful.
 * Hisham requested that we should meetup with as many contacts as possible when he is in Pune and is open to the idea of Skype talks and cold calls to heads of institutions.

Those who had come to the meetup for the first tme were then asked as to how we could help them or how they could help us. The last activity was an editting session for the newbies in which a new concept was tried out. The first two exercises of a newly prepared worksheet for learning editting in Wikipedia :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AshLin/Academy

Next monthly meetup is on 14 May 2011. Meeting when Hisham is here will be intimated by Sudhanwa.

Au revoir, Ashwin Baindur