CIS-A2K/Events/Review meeting and MoU with Vigyan Ashram

The review meeting and MoU signing was done with key persons of Vigyan Ashram at Pune on 26 & 27 december 2019.

Background

Vigyan Ashram aims to achieve ‘Development through the education system’. Its mission is to integrate development activities in the community with education. VA is engaged in training rural youth on various rural technologies and helping them to establish technology based enterprises. VA is generating content on rural technologies and promoting it through its website. VA thinks that Wikimedia platforms will be appropriate for dissemination of the content generated through their work. Therefore they have been training students on creating content in Wikimedia projects with the support of CIS-A2K since 2017.

Objectives

Strengthening Indian languages, especially Marathi, on the world wide web for open education and creation of free knowledge
Involving rural students, especially girls, in Wikimedia projects and supporting them in increasing and improving science & technology-related content, and Wikisource-related digitisation process.
Empowering rural youth in establishment of enterprises related to open source and free knowledge related opportunities in the future.

Facilitators

Director, Vigyan Ashram - Dr Yogesh Kulkarni
Tito Dutta & Subodh Kulkarni - CIS-A2K

Event details

Date : 26, 27 December 2019
Time : 10am to 5pm
Place : J. P. Naik Training Centre, Pune, Maharashtra, India
Venue : Vigyan Ashram office
Participants : 5

Report

The meeting started with review of the work done at Vigyan Ashram in the last two years. The Wiki co-ordinator Pooja Jadhav and Komal Sambhudas presented the statistics of Wikipedia articles, Commons uploads and Wikisource work. The scanning details were also discussed. Then Director, Yogesh Kulkarni explained the plan of Vigyan Ashram regarding free knowledge creation and how Wiki projects can be synchronised with core area of work. CIS-A2K representatives elaborated further areas of collaboration. The working on MoU draft followed after this. Both the institutions mutually agreed on the following roles & responsibilities -
CIS-A2K will :

provide the financial support to conduct events based on the request and needs of the SECOND PARTY.
provide the support to the trainers for specific events.
provide suitable equipment like scanner and merchandise items like handbooks, stickers, t-shirts, pens etc.
help Vigyan Ashram to do the reporting and documentation of the events.
try involving Vigyan Ashram representatives in major Wikimedia related events/workshops in India which would be mutually beneficial.

Vigyan Ashram will :

organise workshops for training of girl students in colleges around Pabal village.
form team of girls and women to carry out digitisation of rare books, archives of organisations etc.
develop an innovative programme for involving educated rural women in locally relevant knowledge creation.
develop Open Education Resources (OERs) on new appropriate technologies.
engage dedicated staff/contractor/consultant for coordination of Wikimedia activities and digitisation work to achieve targeted milestones.
organise events for developing thematic content on Wikipedia.
prepare reports and documentation related to the activities

Action plan

Scanning with processing of pages per month : 5,000
Training workshop : One per quarter
Wiki events other than workshops : One per quarter
Development of new OER content : Five per quarter

Gallery

Review and action plan making
MoU signed for collaboration
MoU