Archive for contributions

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.

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/).

Fossacademy to do list

October 18, 2011 community, contributions, FOSS, fossacademy No comments

For those of who do not know Fossacademy is a going to be a remix site of Khanacademy , well after a long hiatus i was able to understand how app works in Google App Engine, here is a list of things to do let me know if anyone wants to work on this project.

1)Create a logo.
2)Work on the theme.
3)Adding Videos other than Youtube.
4)Start working on making exercises.

Hope people will like the effort as usual send in your comments and critiques .

Setting up the Dev environment and working on the Fork

June 1, 2011 community, community, Contribute, contributions, FOSS, fossacademy, python, social No comments

Khanacademy.org code is lying here Source , the link from here will point us to the Source Link i have checked and tried getting kinhg account looks like it a paid site and we need to pay after 45 days , my initial though before visiting this site was to branch and maintain a tree there itself looks like it is not as open as it claims. So the other option is to fork since the code is anyway licensed under BSD2 lincense .

We are going to maintain two Repos one of Khanacademy ( KA) and one of Fossacademy (FA) .

why maintain KA code , because initially when we start off as FA we will have just KA code but over time it is going to differ and change in ways , but also we will have some changes upstream in KA which we will be needing from time to time to fix bugs which must have already crept in.

yes it is a overhead we have to live with for the time being .

coming back to the FA we will be maintaining the code on Bitbucket , and everyone will pull from the stable FA and start maintaining the FA trunkc or fork they will be free to take the call .

on maintaining the dev environment , i found any variant of Eclipse to be a good IDE to maintain the code , you are free to maintain any IDE/Editor you are comfortable with .

this video explains it all Setting Dev environment using eclipse .

i will be writing on the goals and specs for the project as we move along keep watching this space …

Why Fossacademy.org ?

May 26, 2011 community, Contribute, contributions, FOSS, social 2 comments

Hi,
After looking at Khanacademy.org and following it  for few months now with both on development and content front i am convinced that if education , especially Foss education has to be done it can be done this way.

i have been trolling  on sites  sites like ShowMeDo and Youtube for quite a long now , and they have come up in a very good way content wise. The two things which Khan has done which is a good thing is

1) Monitoring students learning experience in the forms of coach
2) Assessing the students in the forms of tests
3) Knowledge maps  yes some of it i have seen some time back on Gnowledge but it did serve the pupose of self paced learning and assessment.

to know about more features you can check out Khanacademy.org

Yes of course we cannot compare to the Sal Khan’s passion and delivery mode which i think is unique of  every teacher in this world.

So why this post , yes i have started thinking on the lines of taking khanacademy.org code and making fossacademy.org with Foss content.

the content is going to come from the following sources

  • ShowMeDo
  • Youtube
  • Phpacademy

    • would like to add to the list more content sites as and when i start getting suggestions.

    for the folks who are interested in contributing and asking more questions i will be available on irc.freenode.net #fossacademy .

    OLPC Site visit

    April 24, 2010 community, Contribute, contributions, FOSS, Netbook, OLPC, Sugar, XO No comments

    I was invited for a site visit of OLPC in Chennai India , Arani is town around 150 Kms from Chennai here is a route map Route Map , and pictures below

    OLPC in Chennai

    , overall the visit has been fruitful saw sugar @ work kids discovering and learning new things on there own , there were some 10 Xo’s which attracted around 200 kids from in and around the village.

    The weather was too hot and dry i did not feel the humidity like Chennai so suggested them to install water cooler . The most popular activities were Paint , Wikipedia , lack to Internet is something which needs to be looked into to get these kids talk out to the world.

    on 20th the next day i visited one more school which is a govt school which is under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme of govt of India , here i learned about the ABL ( activity based learning ) which is similar to activity based in Sugar but it was more structured in the sense of the kid goes from one class to other after he has completed a set of activities in on subject or class. In this school the four XO’s are provided the programme is schedule to begin after summer holidays.

    things to be done in coming days , XO’s need Sugar upgrade. Teachers need training , identify kids who can teach other kids , get Internet connection so that they can connect to the larger OLPC community .

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