On Mon, 2004-03-22 at 11:00, Trevor Warren wrote:
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It would be our pleasure to have Mr. Jain amidst us. We are keenly lokign forward to outlining a Plan Of Action towards activities at the Grass Root Level for the current Academic Year.
Do lemme know yuor thoughts on the same.
Dear Trevor,
I am trying to put together a list of ten projects that can speed up FLOSS adoption in India. This is something that is complimentary to the Project Resource Center that you were talking about. Everyone agrees that if we can harness the student community in India for FLOSS, the whole movement, worldwide, can get a fantastic boost. It can also go a long way in countering the accusation that India is a nation of "downloaders."
The challenge so far has been in creating a mechanism where students and mentors can be effectively linked together. The steps I would follow to make this happen are:
1) Encourage engineering colleges and research institutions to put their software in open source. We must ensure that the projects done by the students become a community resource by hosting it on sites like Sourceforge. Others should be able to build on the work that has been done, rather than reinvent the wheel.
2) Identify key projects that can speed up FlOSS adoption (that's what I am currently doing) and work with academic institutes to implement these.
3) Create a sustainable mechanism where the energy of students can be channelized year after year. Start on a small scale and scale up the mechanism gradually. This is where the inputs of academics, students and the FLOSS community needs to come together. We need an interactive debate to make this happen, because no one person or group has all the answers. Contributions from members of this list are welcome.
Venky