> I guess we are quite keen on engaging with the local community. We have been > conducting rather well attended annual workshops (roughly 50 participants) in > the hope of fostering engagements with the community at large. However, our > experience has been that it is difficult to build a sustainable engagement > because it requires a very specific background and the overheads of > background building could be high. We have tried to engage the external > student community for their B.E. projects but by the time they build the > background to be productive, it's almost the time for them to graduate and > then the continuity of the project suffers. > > All this has forced me to restrict the explorations and give up on the > ambition of taking the ideas to their logical conclusion in the form of > submitting code patches to GCC. The problem is that in the kind of > explorations we want to do, even an adhoc code for experimentation comes late > in the picture and a sensible publicly shareable (and understandable) code > comes much much later. So I have no clue how to engage with people who can > work on this only part time with most of their time and energy being taken > away by their day job which cannot be compromised because paapee pet kaa > sawaal hai :-)
> In any case, I will be happy to give talks and should be able to pitch it at > different levels depending upon the interest and the background of the > audience. I would be happy if this could lead to a long term association. If > there is a reasonable number of people who wish to explore the option of > engaging with us, I will be happy to host the talks at IIT Bombay (and they > could well be on a Saturday or a Sunday). My Ph.D. students would be happy to > showcase what they are doing although I am afraid there is nothing that would > look entertaining unless one is curious about the behind-the-scene activities > of how programs are made to work :-) I think the projects with the objective to outreach could be very different. For example a Learning Management System / Course Selector / Admin that could be used by Engineering Colleges that could build an engaged community (I am sure there is still a lot of scope here). Or Civic apps like Public Transport Guide / City Guide, etc. The key would be to build this publicly on GitHub, making students / colleges use the software, enter issues, see code, push patches, have meetups etc. I am sure there could be a lot of ideas in that direction. This might be also a good opportunity to engage the local community and make it production quality. I am sure there would be a dozen of high quality Rails / Django developers who would be happy to pitch in / be associated. You are right about highly advanced topics though, there might not be enough critical mass around those projects. Here it might be a better choice to engage with tech companies who are working on those domains (which I think are again very few). -- http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
