Re: Support GNOME in India and South Asia

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 9:23 PM Balram Pariyarath <balbbrl gmail com> wrote:

Hello Sri,

Thanks for replying! :)

Sounds great, so cool that you are involved in the Debian community.  Perhaps you can tell us what attracted you to GNOME?

Debian is what actually made me love GNOME. I worked on a self proposed idea with Debian which involved making a GNOME extension for my application. I am currently working on an IPA for GNOME 3 which will make the systems more interactive and helpful. It also involves a medium to communicate between different systems running the program.

 

Sounds fabulous!  It's so cool where love of one community leads you to another.

 

That sounds great!  Come see us on our #engagement channel on irc.gnome.org, and chat with us and we can figure out what sort of things you are interested in and come up with some projects. 

Also keep in mind that we have an GNOME Indian list too - https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-in-list

That's cool! I have subscribed to the list. Let me also give a brief into on my thoughts about maintaining the community.

What I aim of achieving through this is a better environment, especially for newbies to get started with open source projects, maintain a profile of what they are doing support such activities in colleges and once in a year, may be, bring them all together for a national level fest. 

We definitely need more people like you to help us when it comes to onboarding folks.  You can also talk with Carlos Soriano, he heads up the Newcomers project (http://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers) and is passionate about helping people get started in GNOME.  I am sure he would welcome your participation in you're interested in onboarding new people interested in coding/translating/documenting parts of GNOME.

 

While I started working on my GSoC project last year, my mentor went missing and I couldn't find a reliable source of guidance around me. I had to do learn all the stuff by myself, mostly through my mistakes. It took almost 2 weeks before I could get a thorough grip of my project. Had I found a good guide from here, I could have saved much more time. So the aim is to connect these people, through online medias.

Yes, that must have been very frustrating experience.  I hope you raised the issue to the GSOC coordinator on that score.

 

Association with GNOME can ensure incoming of more project ideas, input from a more experienced network of people and finally a valid certification for the students who work with us.

There will be provision for colleges to open a club franchise in their college, through our portal, so that we can bring all of them under one tree.

We've had discussions about setting up local communities.  We have them but they are fairly inert at the moment because we haven't built up a critical mass of people to build that network.  We need dedicated people who the time to stick with building that infrastructure.  It isn't always easy.  It can be done, but it has to be a persistent drum beat, something you kind of attached yourself to, and to extend the metaphor, dance to.

 

  

In addition, I have an opportunity for you to be involved with the Indian govt as well working on open source projects.  Perhaps you could champion GNOME for us there?

Sure. That sounds interesting! I'll be happy to help you guys in anyways possible! 

I just sent out mail regarding new meetings times.  Please fill out when you would be available.  I should probably have put some evening hours in the U.S. if that helps those who are living in Asia.

 

  

I see that you had mentioned FOSDEM.  Will you be there?

Not Exactly. I'll be appearing as an online speaker for the event as I cant make it to Belgium within the short period. I'll be there at FOSSASIA for sure.  

Ah, ok!  Good to know, we usually have one or two contributors who go to FOSSASIA.

sri

 

Regards,

Balram Pariyarath

Fellow | Google Summer of Code 2016

CS Head | Excel 2016

Chairman | IEDC-MEC 2016

Computer Science and Engineering (Batch: 2013-17)

Govt. Model Engineering College, Kochi-21

:  +91 8129130866
✉: balbbrl gmail com