WikiTungi: Bhubaneswar City Wiki Community Turns 1

The tungi, named after an ancient practice in Odia that involves passing on knowledge of the scriptures, is a city based Wikipedia community that helps Wikimedians around the city to meet and learn from their shared experiences. The Tungi meetups and events are organised with the help of the volunteers.

The Odia community's WikiTungi is based out of two cities, Puri and Bhubaneswar. While Wikimedians in Puri conduct meetups bi-monthly, Bhubaneswar Wikimedians meet once a month. In every meetup, Wikimedians exchange their resources with each other, helping address their doubts and queries regarding their problems and projects.

This February marks the first anniversary of the Bhubaneswar WikiTungi. The WikiTungi members from the city meet every second Sunday of the month. To commemorate the first anniversary of this novel effort, nine community members from the Bhubaneswar Tungi met for a celebratory dinner at a local restaurant on 9 February 2017 and toasted to the dedication of the volunteers.

The community discussed various ideas (listed below) and the ways in which they can be implemented in the regular WikiTungi meetups. Members of the community also showed their interest in organising the third edition of WikiConference India in Bhubaneswar to bring Wikipedia to more people across the state of Odisha. During the community meetup, Tungi members came up with few ideas to implement it as a best practice in the Wikipedia movement.

Some of them are listed here:

• The Tungi members will invite one of the global community leaders for a Skype or hangout session.

• Discuss the best practice from the global community and discuss them with the community.

• Updating the minutes of the meeting and sharing them with the other community members.

• Updating the Learning and Evaluation team about the new learning of the community every month.

• The community will also send postcards as a souvenirs to the participants of the global community for the online sessions.