Heritage Lens Fellowship
Heritage Lens Fellowship is a training program by the Deoband Community Wikimedia to sustain its Heritage Lens initiative. It ensures smooth and convenient participation of our fellows in achieving the goals set for the initiative. Apart from its theoretical aspects, it provides local logistics and an occasional equipment support to the fellows.
The fellowship includes tasks of theoretical and practical nature such as capturing and uploading images, oftentimes engaging with Volunteer Response Team (VRT) and navigating through basic tools that a user must use while contributing to Wikimedia Commons. Each fellow is taken through training sessions [Empowering Creatives] on issues like copyright and attribution, freedom of panorama and project scope, and engaging in the deletion requests. The images uploaded are to be released under a CC BY-SA license
Timeline
The fellowship runs for a minimum of three to four days. The fellow is assigned an area of which they either capture images on their own, or find previously freely released images which are unavailable on Commons, or also help release images captured by someone else through VRT. These include subjective images belonging to the area's history which coincide with the objective of Heritage Lens.
Eligibility criteria
The fellowship does not require you to be a professional photographer or someone with a photojournalism degree. It is open to any knowledge-sharing enthusiast in India who is interested in making knowledge free. However, basic photography skills and a passion to learn are a must.
Responsibilities of a fellow
The responsiblities of the fellow include:
- Travelling/Collecting and Capturing Heritage
- Uploading on Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA license (This is usually done using the Upload Wizard set for the campaign.)
- Rightly categorising the images
- Learning by means of training sessions and implementing the skills learned
- Submitting a Learning Report at the end of the fellowship