MENA Global Education Program Letter Templates for Outreach

Letter to Connect WMF Staff to Professors

Salam walekum. I hope you are doing well. Professor X from X was kind enough to recommended connecting with you.

Just to introduce myself, I work on the Global Development team at Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that is responsible for Wikipedia. My projects focus on X.

The Wikipedia education program works with professors around the world who are interested in assigning students to edit Wikipedia as part of coursework, supported by a variety of Wikipedia help resources (in-person help, online help, printed materials, electronic materials, etc.) that we provide. This program is currently already running in the U.S., Canada, and India, and we would like to start a pilot of it in Egypt in the academic term that starts in ________. The pilot will be small - we'll have only ____ of the best-fitting classes on board.

Because of all the amazing interest, we're now actively working on developing the support resources for _____ professors interested in using Wikipedia in the classroom in 2012.

I would also like to take this opportunity to connect you with Annie Lin (CC'ed on this email), the Global Education Program Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. Along with Frank Schulenburg (who was with me on the recent visit to AUC), Annie will be one of the main Wikimedia Foundation staff members supporting the development of this Wikipedia education program in Egypt. She would like to send you more information as I'll be transitioning out of the Global Education Program in MENA project.

For a basic overview of the Global Education Program, here's more information: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Education_Program If possible, we'd like to share some resources with you and see if you might know of professors who could be interested in working on this project. By way of this introduction, I do hope you'll be in touch with the Wikimedia team!