Brazil Program/Reports/January Report 2013

Team building and services

• Hiring of Data and Experiments consultant: finalized hiring process in Brazil, still under approval process (to be interviewed by Sue Gardner). Results to be announced soon.
• Hiring of a short term, part time community member contractor, to develop data analyses projects in partnership with the community and the new Data and Experiments consultant
• Quotations for services short term contractors on:
  • Video material production for online outreach and the Education Program
  • Building of calendar, methodology and checklist to improve outreach in Brazil

=Institutional Developments

• More research, contacts and meetings with possible partners to build institutional relationships and move on with shifting the model, as proposed by the Narrowing Focus document. Summary of assessments is under construction and will be published soon on Meta.
• Rental of a co-working space for an experimental three months period in São Paulo, where the team will be able to work together more often
• Update of the annual planning and budget Learn more

Outreach

Campus Party

WMF and Wikimedia Brasil promoted activities in Campus Party, an event held in São Paulo, with the participaton of 7 volunteers and 2 WMF staff members Campus Party 2013. Two lectures have been presented (one by Mateus Nobre, volunteer from Mossoró (RN) and one by Everton Alvarenga, coordinator of the Education Program).

WMF also started conversations in the event about future possible partnerships with Serpro (Serviço Federal de Processamento de Dados, or Data processing Federal Service, a public federal company), Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC), the federal public communications company, Garoa Hacker Club about three projects:

• Serpro: initial talks on the possibility including Wikimedia in Serpro’s distance learning courses on digital inclusion - see more at Open Educational Resources: Wikimedia would produce the content and Serpro could provide the trainings for their network (follow-up needed)
• EBC: exchange of content between EBC and Wikinews (Wikimedia Brasil in the lead) and promoting EBC’s open call for audiovisual production, including web based content (follow-up needed)
• Garoa Hacker Club: now incorporated and with a larger office, initial conversation on a possible future institutional partnership took place. (follow-up needed)

Additionally, contact was made with Mozilla Foundation regarding the launch of Firefox OS in Brazil (where the first launch will take place), since it’ll bring Wikipedia app as a default

• http://br.wikimedia.org/wiki/Campus_Party/2013/Relat%C3%B3rio Read more about the Campus Party activities.]

Digitalia

Organization of the Wiki Meet-up at Digitalia, a digital culture event in Salvador (Bahia). Digitalia brings together academy, artists and activists to debate and propose projects and researches on digital culture. The event took place in February, from 1 to 5, but the organization of it happened during January, with the support of Wikimedia Brasil Community. 25 attendees on Wikimedia Workshops, 8 accounts created. More detailed report on results will be included in the February report. Wiki Meet up in Salvador Digitalia 2013

Education - Brazil

Reports on courses

2012 - second school term[7] Number of Universities: 11 Number of Campi: 13 Professors who joined the pilot: 15 Number of classes: 15 (only 6 finished in 2012 because of a national strike) Total possible students: 337 (courses not affected by the national strike) Number of usernames created: 79 (courses not affected by the national strike) Total articles: 44 (16 pending to be moved to the mainspace) Total bytes: 274 349 Bytes/article: 5 824

Key findings for 2012

1. There is a considerable number of university professors willing to join the program in Brazil 2. There is not enough online and campus ambassadors for a sustainable growth so far 3. There is room for the program growth, as long as we improve guides and online training materials for a course mainly driven by the professor 4. The program may also focus on complementary activities of translation of high quality article of other Wikipedias, preferably with experts of the subject to review, for a faster improvement of the Portuguese Wikipedia quality

Read more

Program development

Next steps

About 15 professors will continue working on the Education Program class assignments during the first semester of 2013 - [http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikip%C3%A9dia_na_Universidade/Cursos Learn more]

Two new approaches will be adopted:

1. Wikiprojects revamp: Health Wikiproject development with the participation of Wikipedia experient editors and Medicine students, professors and researchers They already started editing
2. Translation of articles in partnership with Gama Filho University

Material Production

• Quotations for video material production were made: the proposal is to develop videos in partnership with professors and editors so we can provide guides for sustainable and scalable development of the project
• Improvement of help pages and assistence (online assistance system to be built by April)

Communications re-Education Program

• As stated in the Global Education section, blog posts were made on a professor profile as well as on Campus Party activities
• Interview by Everton to a National Radio Station Listen to it - Portuguese
• Article on the Education Program at http://diariodigital.sapo.pt/news.asp?id_news=613443. Some misunderstandings from the journalist were corrected in a comment in the end of the post by Everton Alvarenga.

Mateus Nobre presents at Campus Party in Brazil.

Brazil program organizes Campus Party activities

Wikimedia Brasil together with the Wikimedia Foundation organized activities supporting the use of Wikipedia in education in Brazil through Campus Party. Mateus Nobre, a Wikimedia Brasil volunteer, talked about Wikipedia and Free Culture, giving a general panorama on the history of encyclopedias, from the medieval to the information age, where we have Wikipedia as part of the free culture movement. The coordinator of the Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil, Everton Zanella Alvarenga, also talked about Wikipedia and the Future of Education. Learn more about the Campus Party activities.

Professor Iara Camargo

Blog profiles design professor in Brazil

The Wikimedia Foundation blog recently published a profile of Iara Camargo, a professor of design in Brazil who participated in the Wikipedia Education Program last term. She joined students in her Editorial Design course in improving articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia about subjects such as designers, design concepts, and publishing houses. Iara wrote an article on book design as part of her work with her students. Learn more about her experiences by reading the post.