Back to blogging after being away for sometime. Came back to know that will be off in the 1st week of March going here. The pictures sure look lovely – and Goa is apparently a good place to be.

Was in Kolkata over the last week (due to personal exigencies) and managed to catch up with Prof Ashoke R Thakur (VC of WBUT). One of the nicest things that the University is doing (besides the fact that it has mandated the use of FLOSS within its campus) is that it is taking a lot of administrative work on to the internet. Given that adequate network infrastructure is being put in place by the various stakeholders, this is a really bold step. The next stage might just be to go through a VPN driven digitally signed framework with each student being provided an unique e-identity. This might just be a good place to try out the Fedora Directory Server. The University has recently started off an incubation center – Ekta Incubation Center with the aim of guiding upcoming technology based businesses and business models towards fruitition. All these are healthy signs which will take their own time in showing good results. What however is not really healthy is that the students of the various institutions affiliated to the University are taking a very hesitant and tiny leap towards FLOSS. Reminds me of the discussions we had all along during LinuxAsia – will FLOSS skills land me a job ? Evidently it will. One has to take a look at the principal IT consultant to the University – L2C2 Technologies who have done decent work with Koha including getting a Koha LiveCD out. Additionally, there is the Senpai framework which is a customisable appropriate technology 😉 solution. But one needs to figure out a way to reach out with the Fedora Mentors project so as to provide a well mapped way to the students to figure out what to do.

Not much is happening on the Computer Literacy Project at Kolkata – so if someone has inputs on that please feel free to mail me at sankarshan dot mukhopadhyay at gmail dot com.