WikiForAll is a series of training programs designed to train the Alumnae student chapter of the iGiver in association with the Women In Tech collectives(WITc) India. iGiver is a Not for Profit organisation to help the women students from marginalised backgrounds to pursue their skills in tech. As part of the Alumnae chapter initiative iGiver and WITc have associated with the CIS-A2K to co-design, develop, research and implement training programs on WIkipedia and sister projects.
The Orientation program of the WikiForAll was held on 20th October 2024 at Shri Krishnaswamy College for Women and around 25 participants took part in the event.
In the first phase of this program series (timeline is for next 2-3 months) we will be introducing MediaWiki projects to the students. This program would help the students to learn beyond engagement on Wiki platform, they shall get an understanding on web development languages and scripts. This also would help them improve their practices in learning fundamental programming languages and logical thinking.
We expect that this program would help the students understand various technical skills that shall associate with their careers and academics. Moreover, this is their first time of engagement with an Open Knowledge community. Their volunteer interest to learn and contribute would add more to the MediaWiki developers community in India.
My previous research with the CIS-A2K titled “Bridging the Gender gap: A report on Indian Language Wikimedia Communities” includes an observation on Outreach and Training for women in technical aspects. Therefore, the output of this program would be to meet the needs for skill and knowledge gap for women who have lack of access to resources.
The inaugural event included an orientation and introduction to Free and Open Source Software, Wikimedia projects, communities and explaining about how to participate in the local Wiki events happening in India.
“WikiForAll is an initiative to bring together all the Alumnae to learn and contribute to the FOSS and Open Knowledge projects. This would help us learn how global intiatives work so that we can participate in an educational movement, and also share Open Knowledge. We also believe that this program will bring us a good exposure to many tools and programming languages such as JavaScript, Python, also using GitHub and other command line interfaces. This way it will help us in our career front and also to empower other fellow women in our family and surroundings to easily get introduced to learning new technologies. We look forward for this collaboration with the Wikimedia movement where we are keen to learn, educate, research and empower our community of first-gen of Women in Tech.” – Mahalakshmi, an Alumnae of the Vizhuthugal program by iGiver
We also discussed the challenges that the students face to learn the tech skills and the medium/platform that can work best for them to learn and contribute to FOSS projects. Mr. G. Srinivasan who is an experienced tech enthusiast also addressed the students and shared his insights about how students must choose their passion and follow them to aspire a career that they wish to pursue.
As a follow up to this event we are co-designing a curriculum and an interface along with the help of User:Ranjithsiji (contributor from Wikimedians of Kerala User Group) to mentor and help the students to contribute to MediaWiki projects. This being a recurrent event we are initially planning this for 2-3 months and the output will also include a research project on how to implement this prototype on a large scale.
Thanks to Mr. Raghav and Mrs. Vijaylakshmi from the iGiver team and also the management of the Shri Krishnaswamy College for Women, Chennai for bringing up this unique initiative to take forward FOSS to the suburbs.
Image credites: User: Reshmak0615, CC BY-SA 4.0
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