Education/News/January 2020/Internship program: Engaging New Volunteers to Join the Community

Internship program: Engaging New Volunteers to Join the Community

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Summary:

Internship program in Wikimedia Indonesia's Community Space in Yogyakarta
Wikimedia Indonesia Internship Program
Internship program in Wikimedia Indonesia's Community Space in Padang

Wikimedia Indonesia has previously opened an internship program in Wikimedia Indonesia’s Yogyakarta Community which resulted in 4 interns finished the program. Three of those four interns are now still active in contributing online and also helping us with our other programs, such as GLAM, Community, Competitions, and Wikipedia workshops.

The internship program has been considered as an effective way to develop our community. Our community in Yogyakarta has grown and become more active in participating in Wiki projects, both offline and online, since we have had more volunteers from the internship program. This internship program is mainly aimed to support our Education programs. They are included in organizing Wikipedia workshops, documenting activities during the Wikipedia workshops, and also reporting event happened. However, the interns will also be involved in other programs as well. During the Internship period that lasts for two months, the interns are taught about Wikimedia projects and are guided on how to contribute to Wikimedia projects, both offline and online ways. They are also given the opportunity to explore themselves and to come up with ideas of what they want to contribute to the community.

In this year’s internship, Wikimedia Indonesia gives opportunities to our communities in Yogyakarta and Padang to also organize and Internship program in their community spaces. Our communities were thrilled to find out that they will be given chances to have an Internship program at their community spaces and were willing to be in-charge for the program under the supervision of Wikimedia Indonesia’s Education Program’s Coordinator.

Our community in Padang opened the recruitment in August 2019 and the internship also began in the same month until October 2019. There were 170 people signed up for the Internship program in Padang. However, we only had two slots available, so the chosen candidates were two students from Universitas Negeri Padang (UNP) and Universitas Andalas (UNAND).

While our community in Yogyakarta, began the recruitment process a month later, which was in September 2019. The chosen interns came from Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) and Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta (UNY). The internship started in September 2019 and finished in November 2019. Because we gave the opportunity to the interns to also present their ideas to the community, one of the interns came up with the idea of proposing donation request to governmental institutions. The donation that we expected to get were in the form of books that we could use as materials to be written during Wikipedia workshops. Both of the interns handled this donation request and in results we obtained several books contained local knowledge that we could write on Wikipedia. We stored the books in our Yogyakarta community space’s library.

We kept the tracks of our interns by requiring them to fill the attendant’s list with their active hours and their activities during the day. This list is monitored by the community’s coordinator and will be reported to the Education program coordinator to see their performance during the program. All of the four interns for this program have successfully finished their internship. Each of them was given a letter of internship completion and will be involved in more Wikimedia Indonesia’s activities.

Contact

To learn more about this program, please contact Amy at rahmi.nailah@wikimedia.or.id.