Archive for community

Who is a FOSS contributor and how her/his life should be celebrated

May 10, 2013 community, community, Education, FOSS, social No comments

Over the last two decades i had the privilege  to learn and teach many people from the Foss community . one of the mantras i learned from Adempiere community especially from  Redhuan D. Oon is where he defines and consolidates what a community means to him in three lines.

<< A NEW CONSTITUTION >>

Information Is Free … U HAVE 2 KNOW

People Are Not … U HAVE 2 PAY

Contributors Are Priceless … U HAVE 2 BE

i for one has been lucky in this life to meet and work with  more of the third kinds , today when we see the generation X ,  we see a Gap in the understanding of the spirit and the doubt towards what this is all about . i have decided to compile a book with these stories in order to encourage young students of genx as an inspiration to become  the third kinds. i am looking for people either themselves or  there stories of pains and pleasures to be documented for the next generations to come. do suggest me or get in touch with me if you want anyone from the community to be covered in this book.

12th plan Hackathon a report

April 11, 2013 community, hackathon, Opendata, social No comments

Planning Commision in Collaboration with NIC  especially the Data.gov.in  Team ( which is  setup according to the NDSAP guildelines)  organized a Hackathon to hack the 12th five year plan  for those of who are not aware like most of us Five years plans in India are economic blueprints  from Planning Commission as to how are are going to spend in Next Five years.

We were at the venue around 11am , when things were still settling down at the Venue IIT Delhi  , we were supposed to be connected to the live webconference in the opening ceremony but due to connectivity issues we were able to just watch the broadcast , but being in Delhi it was ok since there were frequent visit by  organizers just to check on how things were progressing.

In the whole commotion we sat in a corner and started talking about what to build we were froze on the Build your Plan  idea at around 2 Pm and started working on it there were two classrooms 6LT1 and 6LT2 allocated for us to sit and complete the work in the meantime there were announcements and updates presentation from different sectors as to what there expectations were as to this Hackathon , it was almost 5 Pm by the time others settled down and started the work in the meantime we were done with front end of our application. Sajjad and Ramnique coded the front end in two session one sitting in Cafe Qahwa . We realized we were not productive enough so we moved back home.

Day two we were all supposed to submit the applications by 12 in the noon and the presentations would be starting from 2 PM ,  we pushed the submit button just in nick of time with Sajjad Ramnique and Sumandro   with a hardly any blink whole night .

First on the block were us Sumandro presented our idea and the Jury was interactive and liked out idea . Here is the link to Build Your App the live application .  we hung around the venue till late in the evening till all the presentations were over .

User can drag the sliders and create his own plan to compare the allocations.

User can drag the sliders and create his own plan to compare the allocations.

 

Once the user plays with his allocations he will get different scenarios showing how his plan will look.This he can share with people which they can vote on.

Once the user plays with his allocations he will get different scenarios showing how his plan will look.This he can share with people which they can vote on.

 

overall the experience has been a positive one with some scope for improvements like the internet connectivity was bad we were using our own 3G phones as access points . Students were not equipped and educated to what was expected from the event. Lots of disturbance with the so called VIP’s visiting the venue now and then. No proper place to sleep yes people who hung out at the Venue were defending mosquitoes rather than building something .

Being first one for the Govt it must have been and educational experience , they also need to involve and publicize the event more in the public like they do to there Schemes in the Newspapers.

 

Team geohackers with Montek

Team geohackers with Montek

here are some of the moments in pictures and all the winners listed here , i wished they have put the list of all the people no matter how small the effort was because in an event like this everyone benefits and everyone is a winner.

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 :-(

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

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

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 .

    Fossevents.in

    February 7, 2011 community, Contribute, Event, FOSS, social, Uncategorized No comments

    off late things have become busy , not that you the reader are idealing and reading this post of mine out or boredom or drudgery,
    Fossevents.in is coming up nicely , it has been lying dormant for almost a year now it has seen some day of the light thanks to the support from community .

    my vision of fossevents.in was only one and when we started , i was away from organizing and running community activities for long and when i came back i see the landscape has totally changed , there are events happening all around you and you are not aware of the event which could be happening right there in your neighbourhood.

    my definition of an event is anything which is related to foss it can be workshop, meeting , hackathons, training programs actually this was not my idea of calling an foss event an event but slowly i realized that these events are in no way less or more than others so they deserve a mention on fossevents.in .

    Changing Socially active definitions

    January 2, 2011 community, community, FOSS, social No comments

    You twit N times a day , when you meet people you ask Are you on FaceBook , Linked in , or any of the social networking sites , do you make friends then meet or friend is just a number game for you , are these social networking sites really helping the Family and society as a unit together or its just an extension to say hi to everyone and giving updates on status of your social well being ? is FB just an extension to good old community living or just a way to survive in a  world where connecting and meeting folks on FB is just an easy way that  you have accepted and want to continue. What is your  the definition of being socially active ?

    What happened to the good old Sarai’s and community programs do they still exist or taken a new avatar and use FaceBook as only a platform , what happened to our good old Linux Users Groups http://www.linux-india.org/ LUG’s are they thriving because of a New tool in the form of social networking sites or they just don’t exist anymore , or they have lost somewhere in middle in all the noise try to to find a meaning of Community .

    I think the FOSS as a technology has matured enough and has been embraced  by industry, and the level of bifurcation or so called specialization has reached  a stage  where in we need specific users groups like firefox , open office , Coders,Admins , Activist so on and so forth , i see http://www.gtugs.org/ too  poping up and discussusions floating around on  LUG mailing lists  about have jquery or Drupal/Wordpress sessions actually Jermy allision and chris di bona talks about this phenomenon in this video  too. I see this phenomenon happening in India also  .

    So the meaning of being social or community is getting into  smaller groups with focus on few things and more towards mechanization of something like assembly like with folks doing smaller tasks in big numbers and other things like Internet , distributions , email , irc , FaceBook will be taken granted for that they will not be meeting too often physically untill and unless some project demands.