DCW Conversation Hour

DCW Conversation Hour

• Welcome
• Past conversation hours
• Upcoming hours
• Be a speaker
• Get involved

The DCW Conversation Hour is an effort of the Deoband Community Wikimedia towards its strategic development. The conversation hour aims at inviting scholars from around the globe, and also people from within the movement, to build the DCW's base strategically. It was inaugurated by Donia AlDomiaty on 30 September 2022.

The last extension of the Conversation Hour was organised on 17 March 2023 with Dr. Nicole Schwitter as the speaker. The next conversation hour is scheduled to take place on 16 April 2023.

Background

The DCW initiated a lecture-type series in September 2022, aiming to invite experienced Wikimedians and external scholars and learning from them the issues that concern its strategic development. The DCW felt a need to work on its female contributors, and that made us invite Donia Al Domiaty in the first session of this series. This inaugural session was hosted by the DCW's co-founder Sumaiyya Laraib on 30 September 2022.

Subject to unavailability of resources, the DCW was not able to continue to lecture series in a desired manner leaving it as a pending-load on the affiliate. We subsequently invited Dr. Ashraf Dockrat from the University of Johannesburg on 13 November 2022. Dr. Dockrat being a senior member of the Jamiatul Ulama South Africa and a qualified religious scholar spoke on the subject: Islamic scholarship and Wikipedia.

The DCW subsequently proposed a strategic research plan for defining its growth trajectory, and the researchers suggested to give this session a fresh try, and we invited Dr. Nicole Schwitter to speak in the third session on the effect of meetups in the development of Wikimedia projects. This session was hosted by Monib Ahmad on 17 March 2023. We were happy to notice the outcome and have decided to organise the conversation hour once in a month!