Hi, On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 02:22 -0700, saugata ghosh wrote: > http://business.newsforge.com/business/05/09/13/1816200 > > The idea is good. There will be a panel of Mentors.
The idea of mentors in an exciting one that is being shared at a lot levels today. As a matter of fact, this last Wednesday, I was at a semi-formal meeting at WBUT, attended by : 1. Prof. Ashoke R Thakur (Vice Chancellor, WBUT) - Convenor 2. Prof. D. B. Phatak (S. Nilekani Chair Professor, KReSIT, IITB) 3. Prof. Subimal Sen (Vice Chairman, WB State Council of HE) 4. Prof. Nandini Mukherjee (CS&E Dept, JU) 5. Prof. Amitava Sinha (HoD, CSE & IT Dept, WBUT) Of the various discussions that took place that day, the most interesting aspect to my mind were the inputs from Prof Phatak. He spoke extensively about the Eklavya and e-Guru projects spearheaded by IITB (actually he leads the effort). The projects' details are here http://ekalavya.iitb.ac.in/index.jsp The interesting factor here is that people from outside - Industry, LUGs, SIGs can become mentors under the eGuru project. In fact, Prof. Phatak spoke about tapping into the LUG culture and internalizing this OSS culture inside academic circles. I was very lucky to have a nearly 30 minutes one-on-one with him towards the end of the meeting, where I mentioned ILUG-Cal, some of our plans, about Ankur-Bangla and L10N etc. His plans are for a largely distributed model of collaborative development - his call is simple... by 2008, India should become a net "giver" to the global FOSS pool from its present position of being mostly a net "taker" <shameless_plug_warning> I also took this opportunity to present him a copy of the Koha 2.2.3 LiveCD that we had released earlier (see URL -> http://www.koha.org/about-koha/koha-team.html) He highly appreciated the fact that we have managed to build a bridge between the librarians and OSS hackers. :D </shameless_plug_warning> > Now whether anything on our website can help this > process grow - open for discussion One important thing that Prof Phatak mentioned was feedback from the mentored, in order to bring recognition to and awarding the best mentors. Talking on the topic he made it quite clear that it is not just that mentors are needed in FOSS domain, rather mentors and evaluators are also needed to come from specific domains as well. I pointed out to him that we are for example, keenly need a domain expert in GIS and spatial modelling arena for the wikimap project. cheers, -indra. > -Saugata -- Indranil Das Gupta Chief Technology Architect L2C2 Technologies -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- [ Innovations that make a Difference ] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone : (0)-98300-20971 WWW : http://www.l2c2.org -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
