Hi Rushabh,
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 :-)
Thanks and regards,
Uday Khedker.
Dr. Uday Khedker
Professor
Department of Computer Science & Engg.
IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400 076, India.
Email : uday(a)cse.iitb.ac.in
Homepage:
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~uday
Phone :
Office - 91 (22) 2572 2545 x 7717, 91 (22) 2576 7717 (Direct)
Res. - 91 (22) 2572 2545 x 8717, 91 (22) 2576 8717 (Direct)
On Sunday 09 November 2014 10:30 AM, Rushabh Mehta wrote:
It seems that the IITs do not seem keen on engaging the local community
in these projects. Some ideas that cross my mind are hosting events,
talks on all the different projects for all categories (beginners /
intermediate / advanced) on a regular basis. Also it might be a good
idea to host all projects on GitHub / similar so that people can quickly
find out what is really happening. (The first things I want to see in a
FOSS project is the Issue list/ mailing list and Commit Log!) …. I am
sure the increased transparency would help the project too… I think this
could be a great opportunity to seed a FOSS community here in Mumbai
(results may come later)…