Dear Chakravarthy,
Thank you for writing to us. Ravi has very usefully
clarified about the A2K grant. Thank you Ravi.
I am adding a little more context and details to what Ravi has
mentioned.
Kindly note that the Wikimedia Foundation approved a grant of
₹26,000,000 to the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in
Bangalore to expand their Access to Knowledge (A2K) program in
India; of this, ₹11,000,000 has been released. The purpose of
the grant is to enable the A2K team to work with the Wikimedia
community of volunteers in India to expand on Wikimedia’s
Indic-language free-knowledge projects. This information was
shared with the Wikipedia India community by Barry Newstead, ex-
Chief Global Development Officer, Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).
[1]
The A2K team is supported by a team of five people, who are
employees of CIS, and work out of offices in Delhi and
Bangalore. The team consists of Vishnu (i.e. me) as the
Programme Director, Dr. Pavanaja & Subashish as Programme
Officer, Nitika as Programme Manager and we are in the process
of recruiting a new person. Dr. Tejaswini Niranajana acts as the
Adviser to the A2K programme. The team has sent timely
announcements whenever a new employee has been hired. [2] The
team aims to generate improvements in India-relevant free
knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects, and the wider
distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge within India.
As it may happen in most donor-donee relation, our donor
organisation WMF in consultation with the A2K decides Program
Goals and team deliverables. In addition, WMF is also involved
in our quarterly and annual reviews. CIS believes in high
transparency with it's donors and the community it serves. Hence
the team publishes a newsletter every month including all
activities, accomplishments, events that the team has been
involved with. These newsletters are regularly updated on our
website and are also shared with the Wikipedia community every
month via various mailing lists. [3]
Please let us know if you have any further questions and
suggestions on the revised budget utilization.
Best regards,
Vishnu
On 5/7/2013 5:52 PM, Ravishankar wrote: