Submissions/What does community building mean? (Insights from India)

This is a rejected submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.

95

Title of the submission: Demystifying & Elaborating Community Building - Insights from India

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation): Presentation

Author of the submission: Hisham Mundol

E-mail address: <hisham@wikimedia.org>

Username: [User:Hisham]

Country of origin: India

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.): Consultant, WMF

Personal homepage or blog: India Program

Abstract (Historically, India has been under-represented in the global community of editors - purely from a numbers perspective. The en-wp community is variously estimated at between 1500 - 4000 editors while the Indic language community is less than 1000. The latter is desperately low given that there are 20 Indic language wikipedia projects in varying stages of quality and quantity. The potential and imperative is massive given that there are close to 1 billion native speakers of Indic languages. In the past, there was always a chicken-and-egg dilemma of what to address first - community, content or readership. Over the past year, India Program has been propounding the argument that the single most important part of the link is community. Community will build content and readers will follow content.

The community angle is all about community building. There is however a great deal of ambiguity about what is community building? This presentation will seek to go beyond motherhood statements and articulate what are the imperatives for community building - communication, collaboration and celebration. It will give specific, implementable ideas (by communities small and large - across the world) on how communities can be built. It will display the power of a single editor to start an idea and for this idea to gain momentum. It will reveal the incredible potential of something as seemingly regular as a WikiProject to build an idea. It will show how technology can be used to support community building. It will address what are the hot buttons to press when attempting community building. It addresses how policies need to be aligned with the reality of a community's context to support community building - as opposed to being blindly copied from more mature projects.

For additional context, do go through this white paper of sorts. This is the synthesis of several dozen conversations that happened over several weeks with Indic wikipedians all over India and indeed the world. This was done face-to-face, through questionnaires, chats, IRC and was done either through group discussions or one-on-ones. This exercise serves as the basis for the entire community building work that WMF is doing in India through the India Program catalyst project - and is the cornerstone of every insight presented in this session. For further context, do look at the Indic Languages meta pages.):

Track

Length of presentation/talk: 45 Minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

Slides or further information (optional): Slides

Special request as to time of presentations: <none>

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Odisha1 (talk) 07:50, 19 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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