Hello far away peers,
This email is to present a new project and ask for support from you guys
Isla and I designed a project called Kumusha Takes Wiki. You'll find a
presentation of it here:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kumusha_Takes_Wiki
To make it short, we are going to hire "Wikipedians in Residence" for about
one year. Each of them will be hosted in a different country (right now,
specifically looking for Uganda and Ivory Coast). Their goal will be to
activate communities to create and contribute freely-licensed information,
texts, images and media about their communities (villages, townships,
suburbs, inner cities, etc). Part of their activity will be to organize
local events during which people will discover open knowledge, Wikimedia
projects and OpenStreetMap project and be invited to participate of course.
Once the WiR are hired, they will receive several weeks training in Africa
Centre in SA (that shall be this fall). After that time, they will go to
the
chosen countries, and implement the plan.
In terms of practical competencies, the WiR will need to know the basics
about OSM (what is it, what is for, benefits etc. no need to enter in big
technical details), will need to know how to organize mapping parties, and
will need to know how to inject information back into the project. Ideally,
they should become trainers themselves so that a couple of people in the
chosen countries can themselves become organizers of mapping parties.
If they are so gifted they can help crafting maps from the data. But I
would
not see this as a mandatory point.
We need to find a way to get them acquire these competencies. At best, an
informed OSM person will come to Africa Centre and train them. At worse, if
we identify online resources that could summarize what they need to know
with regards to the basics (I'm sure there is such thing), we'll manage
this
way; but they would still need to acquire the practical skills (and
usually,
a good way to do that is to participate to mapping parties and see how
it is
done...).
I live in a city (in France, not South Africa :)) where there is an active
community (and my part of the city is actually very incomplete :)), so I
already got in touch with them to "get in the field myself" so as to "get
it". There are also many resources in French about it. And I know some
French wikipedians quite active in OSM project as well, so I know I can
"train myself" to a certain point. We need to set up something quite
equivalent for our WiR in South Africa so that they can become great
resources for geo data !
Can you help us find a solution ?
Best
Florence
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