Train the Trainer program 2018

Train the Trainer 2018 was the 5th iteration of the Train the Trainer Program by the CIS-A2K. This year TTT was organised in the city of Mysore. The event was attended by 21 Wikimedians throughout the Indic language communities, including three foreign delegates from Bangladesh and Nepal. Like previous years, this year, TTT followed the pre-event session with ice breaker activities, which helped the Wikimedians to know each other, and interact with the fellow participants.

The day one of TTT 2018 began with a small round of formal introductions for participants who joined later, the idea of the introduction session was for the participants to share their area expertise and projects they are working on. We have always identified that during the free time participants interact with each other and talk about collaboration activities, so this session helps to know more about your fellow participants. We had a Master Class (Master Class 1) about the Pre and Post event best practices, for the participants to understand how to plan an an event and what should be the preworks before organising an event, we also had sessions on best practices for community members to write and review grant proposals and an introductory session on Wikidata.

The day two was a field trip (Master Class 2) to Sri Chamarajendra Zoological Gardens, a local zoo in Mysore. The intent of the field trip was to give exposure to the participants to learn in an open environment. Followed by the field trip, a session on Diversity initiatives was conducted to understand the challenges and opportunities of having a diverse community.

On the day three, the participants were introduced to a variety of Wikimedia events (Master Class 3) and a panel discussion by Wikimedia affiliates from India (WMF, Chapter, User-group and CIS-A2K) about the organisational structure and responsibilities. The aim of the panel was to help the participants to understand the structure of Wikimedia affiliates in Inda, to share the different kind of events and collaborations they can do with the affiliates. This year CIS-A2K introduced Revolving cafe for the participants to attend some parallel sessions related to Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Institutional Partnership, Support and Safety. The day was concluded with a lightning talk on Social media best practices, how affiliates and community member should use social media channels to promote their work. Subsequently, there was feedback and summing up session.

This year CIS-A2K made a few changes to the Train the Trainer program, for the first time the event was held out of Bangalore. We had invited a longtime Punjabi Wikimedian, a previous alumnus of TTT to externally audit the TTT 2018 being part of the team. Dr Manavpreet Kaur has provided a 10 points suggestion/feedback to the team which will be addressed in TTT 2019.