Archive for Contribute

First bite of data.gov.in datasets

March 5, 2013 community, Contribute, contributions, FOSS, GIS, hackathon, Opendata, python No comments

We turned up at the announced event through the facebook events page , had no clue who the organizers were and the place we were going to . The page just mentioned about telling stories with data. Staying with the open data community i had a clue of what was coming , but did not have a clear agenda or plan of action for next few hours we were going to stay at the meetup.One of the datasets i have been hearing about a lot past few months  is from the data.gov.in website , since my rendevous with the Open Data from govt has been limited to the public data available through chalobest.in project , this project still has not been realized in  NCR area. Anyway the place was a buzz with people of all age groups mostly students from journalism and activists too . we all sat in small groups either talking about an idea or data set we would be working on . Since i was interested in the data sets from Govt , we picked the infant mortality rate  it was in CSV format , the big picture was to create a Heatmap out of  the data available , the first thing we noticed was there were not lat longs for the states , so two members from team @arcolife  and Myself sat down with the site Geonames.org to collect  the same , in the meantime @bhanuvrat , @kanteshraj were writing scripts to the data transformed  in the format required . Ramniq was our anchor man who was putting everything together , he started of with the Heatmap code , initially he was dablling with Openlayers later we switched to Leaflet which was much easier to code in . Overall at the end of it we produced the following heat map .

heatmap

which was sort of hardcoded and  static one with the limitations of time we could produce here is the code for the  Heatmap .

The experience has been good for everyone since we we were getting together after longtime and produced something in the end. Scope for improvements we can cover more years with  a time line kind of interface and really see it visually which is kind of nice than just some dry numbers on a spread sheet . We dispersed with lots of sweet memories  and hope to have more such events in future.

Tools and Software used

[1] Python
[2] Geonames
[3] Javascript
[4] Heatcanvas
[5] Leaflet

Logos for Fossacademy.org

February 26, 2013 community, Contribute, contributions, FOSS, fossacademy, social One comment

Few Logos i got from people around let me know which one of them you like through comments to this post.

imglogo3

Got the Logo Done for fossevents.in

November 24, 2012 community, community, Contribute, contributions, FOSS, social No comments

Got the above logo done by posting for a volunteer job on jobs.hasgeek.com , with in a  day of posting i got a very good response the best presentation and entry was from spurline , it had a concept too it said  ” For me, FOSS events have always being about getting introduced to new area of learning. Its about ‘seeing the light’… ” , thanks Hasgeek and Spurline for making this happen.

Newcomer experience and contributor behavior in FOSS communities

November 17, 2012 community, community, Contribute, FOSS, social, Uncategorized No comments

Kevin Carillo has come out with a Survey to measure Newcomer experience for people who have  joined and any  of the Debian, FreeBSD (including PC-BSD), GNOME, Gentoo, KDE, Mozilla, Ubuntu, NetBSD, or OpenSUSE  in last three years.

The survey is available here ,The good thing about this survey is it is all anonymous and the Data will be shared in open

Here are the latest result of his Survey after one week of this survey going public.

On one side Students with  Formal Education in Schools and Colleges complain about the  not getting jobs and on the other side the system being very conservative in there approach towards FOSS. i have been working on the aspect of how to get a Newbie to get to speed to contribute and get a job at the end of it ,since working in FOSS communities they develop certain work ethics and experience which are invaluable in real life scenarios , mostly in the FOSS world people do not get Employed because what they are good at but the valuable skills they get by doing FOSS work , this is something with which no formal training or teaching can give them , Employers are just seeking or wanting that part of it , so i warn students many a times to keep there passion and profession seperate in order to avoid conflicting situations , mostly  i have seen students want to Join the FOSS communitues with different motivations and expectations , i classify them mainly into

  1. Jobs seekers   : around  95 %
  2. Enterprenuers : 2-3 %
  3. Contributors   : 2 %

my approach in classifying is very simple check out if they are under any financial  pressure , can there family support there choice financially if not send them to Jobs in the industry they can always come back once they become more stable and hope in future they will turn back to become 2 or 3 kinds . I tend to have and focus most of my energies on making the 2 or 3 kinds .

Talking abour skills development the unstructured  way has been going on for years , recently i saw Openhatch  just trying to do that in a very structured way , i will be supporting it and will be talking more and more about it in near future.

Google SOC is  one other programme i have been following since inception , The general perception is not many of the GSOC students stick with the projects , or the spirit of Innovation or greater good , most of them are happy with using this as a ticket to  jobs , In India money is the other motivating factor , i have seen such a programme much before SOC was run by Sarai  they had this programme for supporting the practitioners with an intent of doing public good .

The Foss communities have come a long way in last two decades i have been associated with them now  the Local User groups are trying to reinvent themselves and move away from being only certain GNU/Linux Distro oriented communities there are now cluster of communities in the form of languages , content management systems, cloud software and  anything you can think of no wonder that proves we have come a long way. Communities too have there life and they evolve over time.

coming back to surveys these kind of impartial studies are very important , Other survey ideas which i have been thinking about are

  • Till date we still do not have numbers on how many Foss users around the world.
  • My personal interest has been to come out with a survey to measure how much value  ( by value i do not just mean money ) FOSS has added to ones skills apart from the formal education in his career , i do not know what can be the criteria and how to measure it :-(

MOOC and Education

October 29, 2012 Contribute, Education, fossacademy No comments

Education and learning are terms used synonymously , i agree with Seymour Papert and the people who have been influenced over decades by his writings.

last few years i have been  seeing a lots of buzz around the word MOOC , just few years before the  term like  Elearning had a similar effect on us  . Initially all the entrepreneurial kinds tried to capitalize this rush using technologies in last two decade like Flash etc and everyone’s focus was on the content and selling this content in the digital formats in India too there has been efforts , they were basically digitizing all the textbooks and were calling it Elearning.

then came the craze of devices like OLPC in 2006 , i learned about it around 2007 , The idea was started will all good intentions but it had its own flaws in the model and approach  , you can learn about the current status of the project here . The two contributions i see from this projects are Netbooks , Tablets frenzy and Sugar Environment , which again are ideas which are way ahead of time , when people are still stuck on there Elearning mentality . all of a sudden the combo of hardware and software for a digitized classroom became so important as though the world is going to end tomorrow. Elearning companies popped up some of them made it through this gold rush too.

at this point i would like to differentiate between Education and Learning , The so called form has changed from television to computers and  now to internet . all that has been happening is so far in  education is sort of push in the education terms .

Enter MOOC’s Khan Academy , Coursera , Udacity , Edx , p2p , Udemy are some good examples of these here  again a wild rush to capitalize and transform the education sector into an open play ground . Traditional universities have all joined in  the race too .i feel because of over growing pressure to increase the base and  reduce the capital expenditure they feel , this is it the holy grail to fix education  .

There are two of MOOC’s  happening here one is a unstructured and the other is structured around to fit the traditional education  , the content is good , exams and tests are all conducted on a scheduled way in the structured form of delivery .

i did hacking around last year to make a clone of called Fossacademy, now i see  course-builder is based out of it too , i have looked p2p code base  , the good thing them is they have a way to give students exercies and measure there learning while they are enrolled to the courses , but the approach i like the most so far has been the Social  contructivism   and a good example of it find the Free and Open source culture way  and project like nand2tetris .

So what is happening to Education well its happening and places of learning have started to pop up too in the name of New Age schools , since we need to re look at the way our next generations are going to learn from things around them .

Ubuntu 12.10 released

October 19, 2012 Contribute, FOSS, Ubuntu No comments

Ubuntu 12.10 has been released to my surprise i found only four mirrors from India. Need to talk to Andrew for maintaining Mirrors of all the major Distros in JNU.

Measuring Mobile Bandwidth in a Crowd sourced way ?

October 17, 2012 Cloud, community, Contribute, social No comments

I have been dabbling with the idea of collating data from individuals using crowd sourced way in India. so far the only way i have seen is the by downloading and uploading a certain amount of data to the client and measuring it. The features i am looking at in my app are as follows

1) HTML 5 based : since it will run on all platforms , write once and run it anywhere

2) Track the user ip for geocoding

3) map the result in on a map : using leaflet library

 

Why am i a doing this ?

1) As a user we have seen many G’s so far they are not reliable many times and we do not have a record of these services not working or in bad shape in some areas.

2) Policy makers can take certain decisions based on this raw data.

3) Mobile Companies can improve there services .

This website initially will be self funded later stage i will seek some funds from Govt , Companies or sources where they value these kind of interventions.

i in  talks with anders94 of  html5speedtest.me  he has agreed in principle to help me. Still i am not clear what license his scripts are since he wrote it for bandwidthplace .

There has been many efforts like these in past notable ones are measurement lab , i found there tools to be outdated and use java applets . But the 6 Terabytes of hosted on Google big data can be accesed using Big query for free. The other interesting case was of the Opensignal to my surprise they actually got funded for 131 Millon dollars for this effort ,never imagined you can make money from people’s effort.  BBC did a study of its own using some of the Opensignal Data and there own data to do a column studying the user base and the Signal strength.

Now coming back to my part i am looking at Node  as a serious tech in the whole thing in my building a page to collect the data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eucalyptus users Map

April 24, 2012 Cloud, community, community, Contribute, contributions, Eucalyptus, FOSS, GIS, social No comments

it all started with me lazily skimming through pages on the eucalyptus site yesterday, soon i landed on GSOC page since this is something whose results have been announced just yesterday too , from here i moved on to there next page Eucalyptus ideas page  , read on there website that they are have been not given the GSOC slots ,there idea number two is implemented here Eucalyptus users map , do send me feedback as to how it looks and works , in the meantime if you are interested in the first cut i tried making yesterday using the Wp plugin below is that version too
 

Get directionsKML-LogoFullscreen-LogoQR-code-logoGeoJSON-LogoGeoRSS-LogoWikitude-Logo
deependra.shekhawat@eucalyptus.com

loading map - please wait...

deependra.shekhawat@eucalyptus.com 26.928172, 75.792081 Euca user deependra.shekhawat@eucalyptus.com

Lets Teach our children to fail…

March 28, 2012 community, Contribute, contributions, FOSS, Personal, social, XO No comments

I am surprised by the way the society is moving especially the education system and our young tender years in school.Why do one has to be rewarded only for passing or not to fail ? Why is passing so important for ones well being because with that he does not learn much while one fails he learns a lot. Why are kids who experiment and hence commit mistakes  abhored as wrong when what they are doing is at least trying .

The same pattern emerges when we grow up into young adults where being sucessful becomes so obessesive that people go to any length to be so called  succesful , what i am saying is it’s not bad to be desiring for sucess but the way it’s played out is not ok . We as a society has laid a wrong precident in the young minds trying to so impinging our values and belief systems on them and how to fail is bad and sucess is the only way to Learn .

Every Kid in this world has a moral right to fail because that’s the only way we Humans learn if you stop that i think it’s an impediment to ones learning process and ultimately shows about the society and times we are living in , where in the name of competition Students are under tremendous pressure and loose the whole point of Learning.

So learning to fail and learning from failing should be our motto… think

 

Raxa JSS EMR how to contribute

March 23, 2012 community, Contribute, contributions, FOSS No comments

For all those who are interested in Projects in the category HFOSS Humanitarian Foss here is an opportunity to hack around and do your bit its fairly simple

We sometimes hang out in #raxa on Freenode (Chat here: http://webchat.freenode.net/).

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