Campaign to promote free software in Karnataka

Aim

To spread the awareness and adoption of Free Software to strengthen the Free Software Community in Karnataka.

Ideology behind Free Software

Check this link: GNU India

On Richard Stallman, the founder of this movement RMS Homepage

Action Plan

• Target the Software Developers community.
• Target Engineering colleges
• Target Schools
• Take help from active communities in Bangalore

Howto Implement Action Plan

In a free knowledge society, anyone who wants to obtain knowledge can do so without any problems. Hence in that spirit I would like to put forward the rationale behind the above 'action plan'. By the sheer number of school students, schools have a decisive role in making the free software movement a success. But to take free software to the schools and make it a part of the curriculam we need to generate the huge technical support required to execute this plan ie., the engineering/technical students who are technically adept.

However, this too is a tough endeavour as most engineering students are not 'free software' oriented. We need to convince these students by showing them practically that free software works. This can be accomplished by supporting them with college projects and mentoring them. Of course, to bring them on par with the projects, we need to have multiple technical sessions at the Institution level.

As Professionals, it is a tough job to provide 'constant' support and hence we come to the concept of the Swatantra Software Users/Developers Groups at the Institution level. This group consists of students of the institution who will form a self-sustaining support system with support from the Professionals. Thus an efficient eco-system is created. The local unit needs to stay in touch with each other through online groups and collaborative wiki pages.

Now we come to the Developers community. This is the first line without whom the free software movement cannot kick off(And yes, the long-term goal should be to liberate the free software movement from the developers community). Our responsibility is to reach out to a maximum number of educational institutions and work to generate free software activists and contributors because the students are the life of this Movement. We need to constantly enlist the help of non-free-software developers as well and get them to also contribute to the Movement.

Last but not the least is the effort of FSF-Karnataka whole-timers. We need to contribute to a support of FSF-Karnataka whole-timers who will work full time to build the Movement. I cannot stress enough the necessity of whole-timers.

Without following these basic steps it is going to be very tough to take the Free Software Movement to the next level here in Karnataka.

Coordination

The campaign will be co-ordinated through this page, fsug-bangalore mailing list and orkut community

Volunteers

If you would like to help out in the campaign

• add your name here
• Link to your user page (create one if you have not done it yet, sign up if you haven't, it helps us in communicating updates)
• Add your contact information (emails, phone numbers) in your user page

1. Praveen A
2. Sujith Haridasan
3. Shashank Bharadwaj
4. Vikram Vincent
5. Mallikarjun
6. Kiran Kumar
7. Akshay
8. Karthik R
9. Senthil S, senthilsos@yahoo.com
10. Justin Joseph, justinjoseph007 at gmail dot com

Participating Organisations

Forum for Science and Development

  #Dr. S. Chatterjee,  Indian Institute of Astrophysics. 
  chat99 -at- vsnl -dot- com (Convenor)
  #Dr. Vijoo Krishnan, St. Joseph's College, PG Dept. 
  vijookrishnan -at- gmail -dot- com (Jt. Convenor )

Free Software Users group Bangalore"

Kannada Localization Initiative

There is an initiative that has been going for a long time now at Kannada Localization Initiative - Please join hands there and take part in the translation drive. There is a mailing list for discussion related to Kannada translation.

Please feel free to join in.

Vikram Vincent's Swatantra Localization

The necessity to localise the computer in our mother tongue

For Swatantra Kannada localisation, particularly w.r.t. Debian and GNOME, contact Vikram Vincent.

Contribute to the Swatantra Kannada localisation on Alioth/Debian http://kannada.alioth.debian.org/

Send a mail to "421892@bugs.debian.org" and tell you are interested to see a mailing list for debian-l10n-kannada and why do you think we need a list.

List of active communities/people that you can garner help from

• Indlinux
• Sampada Kannada Community
• Baraha Community
• Alternative Law Forum

Events that were

• BMSCE Swatantra Tech Fest - 21st April 2007
• Etv coverage of free software movement in Bangalore(28th April,2007)

Reference

• Announcement