CIS-A2K/Institutional Partners

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CIS-A2K has had the privilege of teaming up with like-minded educational institutions, research and development organisations in furthering the cause of the movement. These institutional partnerships offer CIS-A2K valuable knowledge regarding needs of the community, projects that can be taken up and offer invaluable help in strengthening the local community.

Our partnerships with the following organisations have resulted in creation and retention of new editors, many Wikimedia projects going live from the incubation stage, content donation, technical support groups and effective outreach activities. They have also helped us leverage local contacts which would otherwise remain hidden from our knowledge.

Young people, especially in rural areas, don’t get enough opportunities to develop themselves and contribute to society. Vigyan Ashram is an organisation that trains rural youth in digital skills. We collaborated with Vigyan Ashram from Pune with the aim of creating content on Wikimedia with the help of rural youth. The objective of this collaboration was to have more content in Marathi on the free platforms that was authentic; to involve rural women in creating science and technology based content; and empowering rural youth. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed with Vigyan Ashram that outlined the objectives of the collaboration and the steps to be taken.

We trained them in skills like writing, editing, digitising, and scanning. Finally we were able to set up a digitisation centre and collaborated with a library in Rajguru Nagar. Our young participants worked on scanning and digitising old and rare books that were published more that 100 years ago. They did not just scan them but converted them into ebooks. Our young friends got trained into the advanced processes. We are able to create something that is sustainable. And we are proud to say that today, this centre is a unique entity not just in our country but in Asia.

The best part about this whole process was that our participants were eager to work for digitisation, Commons upload, and Wikisource OCR process. This way we were able to create a team of individuals who became experts in their choice of skill and were able to contribute in a more structured way to Wikimedia projects. Many institutions around the country are now looking at this centre of ours as a model on which they will build their centres in future. This, we would humbly say, is an example of "show, don’t tell!" In the year 2020, a documentary called ‘Savitrichya Online Leki’ was made to show the journey of our team and that of Vigyan Ashram.

Year wise events - CIS-A2K/Events/Institutional Partnership with Vigyan Ashram

Lek Ladki Abhiyan, a socail organisation based in Satara has been working relentlessly on the issues that women have to face in their day to day lives. Their objective is to empower and educate women on issues like child marriages, gender gap, female infanticide and foeticide, forced labour, domestic violence, etc. We have been collaborating with Lek Ladki Abhiyan since 2017.

Lek Ladki Abhiyan published 14 books that dealt with issues like: women and violence, rights of children, change, the law that prohibits the knowledge about the gender of the fetus, equality, etc. These 14 books were released under free license by Lek Ladki Abhiyaan. They are now freely available to everyone. In March 2021, we conducted online events for women activists across Maharashtra during the Women’s History Month. During these events 7 videos on the theme ‘Women at Work’ were made. We are in the process of collaborating with more organisations to create more videos and uploading them under free license.

The Digitisation centre at Lek Ladki Abhiyan's Muktangan Training facility in Satara was officially launched on 15 August 2021. It was also the first anniversary of Savitribai Phule Women's Archive. Lek Ladki Abhiyan in collaboration with CIS-A2K organised a small gathering of organisations, authors and librarians from Satara district to spread the word about free knowledge and digitisation process. The regular sessions on copyrights, re-licensing process, Wikisource project and free knowledge movement are conducted. The Public library at Satara has collaborated regarding the scanning of public domain books. The uploading of scanned books is in progress. The scanned books are here - Books scanned by Lek Ladki Abhiyan

Year wise events - Lek Ladki Abhiyan

The Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir (PNVM), a trust registered under the Society Registration Act is located in Pune city of Maharashtra state. PNVM was founded on 7 February 1848 and in 2022, it is celebrating its dodransbicentennail year (175th Year). The motto of the institution is ‘Spreading knowledge across the globe’. The library has a huge collection of more than 80,000 books mostly in Marathi language. Apart from Marathi the books in Sanskrit, Hindi are available. The library has a network of 6 branches located in different suburbs of Pune city. The total membership goes beyond 5000 readers. The library started a digitization project in 2016. PNVM partnered with Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge programme (CIS-A2K) in October 2021 to bring the digitized content on Wikimedia projects for making it freely accessible and searchable on the internet. CIS-A2K is facilitating the process by giving regular inputs on copyright issues, database management, skill training for uploading on Wikimedia projects, digitization techniques and connecting the knowledge with larger repositories. Due to this collaboration, a total of 1100 books containing around 2.25 lakh pages have been uploaded on Wikimedia Commons in the last two years. The gallery of books digitized by PNVM and photographs of library, scanning process has been created. The contribution of PNVM is being appreciated nationally and globally by the free knowledge movement.

After acquiring necessary proficiency in digitization and significant contribution to open and free knowledge, PNVM and CIS have decided to expand the digitization activity with inclusion of some new initiatives like development of database related to authors and books, initiating a network of libraries for collaboration, awareness about the digitization and innovative programs to disseminate the digitized knowledge. The scanned books are here - Books scanned by Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir

Year wise events -CIS-A2K/Events/Institutional Partnership with Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir

The world is slowly getting better at adjusting to the ‘new’ normal because of the global pandemic. Everyone started working from home. During the lockdown when events and workshops could not be conducted in person, Jnana Prabodhini took the initiative of conducting workshops with our help online. They encouraged the women to come forward and participate in the workshops that helped in creating and editing content primarily on Marathi Wikipedia. Jnana Prabodhini has mobilised more than 40 women in the activities of knowledge creation.

We started the Lingua Libre project in November 2020. Another training session happened in January, 2021 which was conducted by an expert Wikimedian, Tito Dutta. The objective of this session was to impart knowledge about creating and uploading various lists. Our participants have already begun their work in this area by creating lists related to festivals, cuisines, articles, tools, etc.

Another list that was created was of verbs and their forms. This work was integrated with the Lexeme Project. Jnana Prabodhini gathered a group of 40 language-enthusiast women. Later two groups known as Mahir Morshed and Bodhisattwa, that included technical experts, were created to help this endeavour in future.

One group of Lingua Libre project expressed interest in recording audio books. These women promised to upload at least three books of Marathi Language as a part of Women’s History Month. We also organised a workshop and talk by an expert for women who were interested in recording audio books. These books were taken from the Wikisource.

Year wise events - CIS-A2K/Events/Institutional Partnership with Jnana Prabodhini

India is one of the countries that is said to run out of drinking water in the near future. With the constantly changing climate and the harmful effects of global warming, it has become imperative to educate people about conservation of water. With the help of Project Jal Bodh, our team trained participants to work on writing and editing articles about conservation of water. Our aim was to bring all the information about water under one umbrella.

This whole endeavour started in a small village with a session with Jalbiradari activists. They were trained to build resources on Watershed Management on Marathi Wikipedia which would then help them contribute content to Wikipedia in future. Our objective behind this initiative was to build Wikipedia as the source of content on rivers and water. We also wanted to bring awareness in the society about this topic.

Next we worked with the Jeevit Nadi organisation to train them in the field of open knowledge and Wikimedia projects. These organisations presented us with their research, information, sources, photographs, etc.

Our project caught the attention of Rajendra Singh of Tarun Bharat Sangh. He joined our movement and took it across states to the national level. He was generous enough to release 75 Hindi books and 15 English books under the free license.

We were then joined by Manavlok and Jnana Prabodhini from Ambejogai in drought prone Beed district of Maharashtra. Experts on water issues - Pradeep Purandare, Santosh Gondhalekar and Laxmikant Deshmukh - also donated content on water and rivers. This project that started at such a small level went to the national platform due to the help from all these giants of this field. Topics like rivers of Maharashtra and River activists were touched upon with the help of organisations that are earnestly trying to save our sources of life.

Year wise events - CIS-A2K/Events/Partnerships under Project Jal Bodh - Knowledge resource on Water

Do you remember where are all the assignments and papers that you have written during your college? They are probably in the basement of your college gathering dust or somewhere where no ray of sun can reach. We wanted to change that. We were fortunate enough to get the cooperation of PAH Solapur University in this regard. In our collaboration with Solapur university, we are able to get in touch with post graduate students of Mass communication and Journalism. We held a workshop for them and produced content for Marathi Wikipedia. These students of Solapur university were asked to write their assignments and put them up on Wikipedia. This turned out to be one of the most successful exercises for the reasons given below:

• The articles that were written for the assignments were well-researched.
• The students took efforts to make sure the articles were immaculate and had authentic sources.
• The articles were uploaded on Wikipedia that got an archival value.
• Wikipedia, in return, got enriched with authentic material.
• The articles were freely available for everyone in the society.
• The assignments didn’t go to waste.

Looking at the success of this project with the Mass Communication students, heads of other departments also showed interest in similar activities. Hence, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed with Solapur University. The HODs agreed to work on Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikidata, Commons, and other Wikimedia projects to enhance the skills of their students. The objective was to make more and more people aware about the projects. More dedicated efforts were put in content and knowledge creation in which the students were involved. The aim was to get the students involved in developing content for Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Wikisource, etc through their assignments. Eventually, our aim is to have more content under free licence which can be available to everyone.

Year wise events - CIS-A2K/Events/Institutional Partnership with PAH Solapur University

In March 2024, an MoU was signed between the Department, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to collaborate on digitizing cultural heritage and promoting free knowledge. The Department released a decade's worth of cultural media to Wikimedia Commons, and as of September 2024, 6,500 media files have been uploaded under various categories.

For more details - CIS-A2K/Institutional Partners/Department of Language and Culture, Government of Telangana

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