New subject: Fwd: Vacancy for a Programme Officer for the Access to Knowledge programme (CIS-A2K)

26 Sep 2016

Dear friends, 

First of all, apologies if this mail is not in your native language. 

This to share with you all that we have published on the jobs section of the CIS website
[0] for the position of Programme Officer of the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) programme.
We would really appreciate if you can share with interested friends, colleagues and
communities. 

Please let us know if there is any kind of changes needed. We will love to address any
concerns or inputs. 

Best, 
Subhashish 

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The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) is seeking applications from prospective
candidates who identify themselves as female, for the position of Programme Officer
(Communications) , to support its Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) Programme. 

The job application is open to women only because we feel that a woman communications
person will contribute more towards bridging the gender gap in the Wikimedia movement by
emphasising on gender-sensitive communication apart from contributing internally for
bringing a gender balance in the team. The position is full time and will be based in CIS’
Bengaluru office. Programme Officer will work closely with CIS-A2K Team (hereinafter Team)
and would report to the Executive Director/any supervisor in Team. 

Position Summary: 

As a Programme Officer, your job will be to support the Team’s larger goals — growth of
Indian-language Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects (hereinafter Wikimedia projects),
and the contributor communities (hereinafter Community). Your primary responsibility will
be to support the Programme Associates — that spearhead our on-ground programmatic
activities -- with regular communications with the community and the world outside. 

Characteristics of the Programme Officer: 

* High level of commitment: The Programme Officer should believe in the values of CIS and
Wikimedia projects, exude enthusiasm for the mission and can powerfully embody and
communicate the mission. 
* Intellectual curiosity and flexibility: Must enjoy tackling difficult, ambiguous
problems and able to incorporate new knowledge into how one approaches situations and
generates solutions, loves learning from others while expanding intellectual horizons. 
* Open and transparent: Have a high level of integrity and be comfortable working in a
highly transparent fashion, open to input and feedback, a proactive and candid
communicator who wants people to know what s/he is doing and isn't afraid to bring
others in when things are off-track or when you need help and should able to handle
criticism in a mature fashion. 
* Community builder: It is essential that the Programme Officer sees herself/himself as a
partner to and supporter of the Wikimedians who have and will continue to be the leaders
in building the Wikimedia projects. The Programme Officer must be willing and able to work
with a diverse array of people, many of whom come from non-traditional backgrounds and
have a fervent commitment to Wikimedia movement’s community-led nature. 
* Strong cultural competency: Able to navigate in a global movement and on a global team
in addition to navigating the complexity of India. 
* Partnership developer: Able to initiate, negotiate and operate partnerships that advance
the Wikimedia mission in Indic languages and English (as relevant to India) with a wide
range of institutions across the public, NGO, universities, philanthropic and private
sector. 
* Willing to travel: The Programme Officer must regularly travel within India to engage
with Wikimedia communities and partner with institutions. 

Responsibilities: 

* You will be responsible for the overall communications of Team that include storytelling
in the form of interviews, blogs, opinion pieces in newspaper/other platforms, regular
coverage in both Indian language and English media, and anything beyond. 
* You will be exploring widely from conventional to new media to spread the stories of the
hundreds and thousands of volunteers that make the Indian-language Wikipedia and Wikimedia
projects such great knowledge repositories. 
* Creating original stories of challenges and learning, and successes of Wikimedia
community in general and the ones that we closely work with in particular. 
* Function as an interface between A2K team and the community, and help the team better
work collaboratively with the community. 
* Sharing the work of the community and A2k team in a regular basis in the monthly
newsletters and other places. 
* Providing training on effective communications to the communities in a need basis, and
supporting them to independently tell their own stories in their own languages. 
* Announcement of programmatic activities in the form of announcements, blogs and reports,
and microblogging (social media, etc.). 
* Interviewing Wikimedians under the ambit of the WikipediansSpeak [*] project and beyond,
and share the story of the Wikimedia community widely in the media. 

Required Skills: 

* Graduate or masters in journalism/other media studies, law, or any other discipline with
at least two-three years of professional experience with a strong track record of success
in high performance organisations, preferably in non-profits. 
* Experience could be during studies or after, primarily in blogging, writing organisation
reports, managing social media for organisations, interviewing and covering people’s
stories in mainstream media. 
* Prior experience of working in a collaborative community, preferably and open one like
Wikipedia and in online. 
* Good understanding of the basics of organisational programme design and management. 
* Strong understanding of the Internet and the forces that underpin the success of
Wikipedia. Active participation as a Wikimedia volunteer would be an asset, though not a
prerequisite (must be prepared to demonstrate knowledge of how Wikipedia works in
interviews). 
* Experience working in a global, multicultural and diverse team environment will be
preferred. 
* Must be fluent in English and at least in one Indian language. 
* A good understanding of the cultural and knowledge universe of the Indian language
communities. 
* Ability to integrate and understand the complexity of the Indian language communities. 

Pluses: 

* Support India-focused initiatives to improve quality of India-relevant content and
number of editors on Indian-language Wikimedia projects. 
* Support the growth of Indian-language Wikimedia communities and projects by designing
and implementing community collaborations and partnerships projects – detailing rationale,
aim and objective, execution, evaluation, timeline, resource investment, etc. 
* Spearhead CIS-A2K’s pilot projects.Identify institutions/groups that have ready-made
content/archived material and aggregate available material in respective languages. 
* Create a network of state institutions, university departments, non-government
organisations, academics, artists, researchers and Wikipedia community members that will
work towards creating a repository of knowledge on specific themes by using Wikimedia
projects as a platform. 
* Conduct initial meetings with the principal investigators from each of the shortlisted
institutions and share project ideas. 
* Facilitate Wikimedia community involvement with the core network of institutions and
principal investigators to collaboratively participate on specific content/area modules. 
* Create social media platforms for visibility of these projects and facilitate need-based
technical and online support. 
* Conduct a series of Wikimedia outreach sessions for various nodes within the network. 
* Conduct periodic monitoring and evaluation of the pilot projects in progress. 
* Generate and document lessons from programme activities that can inform the work of
Indian communities and similar programmes in other countries. 
* Provide ad hoc support to the Wikipedia community on all aspects of Indian languages as
may be deemed necessary. 

Context of the CIS-A2K programme: 

As an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia and
Wikipedia’s sister project, we design and implement different projects with an aim to
create high quality content and cultivate new contributors to Wikimedia projects. The
projects will be premised on themes and seek to create a multilingual repository of
knowledge using Wikimedia projects as a knowledge platform. You are encouraged to deeply
engage with the CIS-A2K work plan before making the application. You will work cohesively
with the Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia India Chapter to meet specific goals of
each language community in India. You will be a part of a small team of 5 to 10 doing high
visibility and high impact work. 

Please note that we, at CIS, do not have any distinction,exclusion, or preference that is
based on the basis of race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion, national extraction,
social origin, which has the effect of nullifying or impairing equality of opportunity and
treatment in employment. (adapted from Declaration ILO Geneva [3]) 

Location: The position is based out of the CIS’s Bangalore office. 
Remuneration: Compensation structure will be determined by the level of expertise,
experience and current remuneration. 

To apply, please send your resume along with a covering letter and at least three
references to Tanveer Hasan (tanveer(a)cis-india.org) by October 20, 2016. 

Notes: 
0. http://cis-india.org/jobs/cis-a2k-programme-officer 
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter 
2. WikipediansSpeak is an initiative to bring the voices of Wikipedians to the world and
include interviews in various media, both multimedia and text-based narratives and beyond.
More in the project page <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikipediansSpeak> 
3. http://www.ilo.org/public/portugue/region/eurpro/lisbon/pdf/agender_jun06.p… 

Thanks, 
Subhashish Panigrahi 
Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge 
Centre for Internet and Society 
@subhapa / https://cis-india.org 