Metakgp:Governance/Election March 2017/SOP Arun Patro

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I am Arun Patro, a dual degree student in Electrical Engineering, currently in my fourth year. My handles are @arun (slack) and @arunpatro (github).

Contributions to MetaKGP

  1. Created grade distribution charts to course pages (blackjack).
  2. Encore's page.

Experience

Administrative

  1. I was a Team Leader at AIESEC's GEP portfolio that saw me mentoring the 4 members to facilitate international exchanges during summers. (6 months)
  2. I was the governor of Encore for AY 2015-16. During the tenure, I along with my co-governors were responsible for putting up 3 stage plays, 1 street play and take a team of 10 for an outstation. It was during this tenure that Encore recieved a Bronze during Rangmanch, the stage play competetion, in Spring Fest. Along with handling the outstation, the finances and the practices, I was responsible for training 30 UG and 5 PG freshers and teaching them the many facets of theatre and dramatics. My governership saw the resumption of taking in PG freshers after nearly 4 years.

Technical

  1. I was briefly a part of AGV in my first year, where I got most of my practical electronic knowledge and experience. I learnt Image Processing and Computer Vision here, which I have later continued in my BTP and other personal projects.
  2. I was a mentor for the winter workshop in Dec '14 for IP.
  3. My first internship was at Cyient where I worked on an configurable IoT enabler. This included learning in the fields of computer networking, the BLE protocol and nodejs.
  4. My second internship was at GE Healthcare in the X-Ray Engineering division. I worked on creating a dashboard (Software), Capacitor characterization (Power Electronics) and Remote Beacons (IoT).

Thoughts on MetaKGP

Vision

Metakgp is a repository and platform all about KGP and its people. It serves the purpose of facilitating the collection, documention, archival and dissemination of all trivial and non-trivial information about KGP and its ethos. 

Philosophy

The prime purpose of metakgp’s existence is information and collaboration. This is what metakgp and its members will help in facilitating. We will only create tools, sites, platforms, collect information from administration and ERP. Metakgp will provide API to all the information. Projects like grade distribution analysis, CGPA analysis, chatbots, etc i.e. non generic tools not to be maintained by metakgp but individual developers. They can however be affliated to metakgp.

Approach

Competition here is harmful for us and not that right way forward. To compete means to make something that’s already out there (in a better way), which is not the point of our existence. I want to approach the growth and future of metakgp without any competition and in a synergic and symbiotic manner. Further down the line, I want metakgp to be the backbone of every other society out there. This can work by us increasing their (any society’s) productivity, reach, building a website, etc for them. They must just help us collect, document, archive and disseminate information about KGP. 

A few plans

All plans that I propose are inline with my philosophy of creating novel, collaborative and generic tools and platforms that targets all of KGP. Synergy with other societies is of prime importance for harmonious co-existence. 

The core of all these projects is to have a more rigid deadline based projects headed by project maintainers.

Minimum Achievable Goals:

These are a few goals that I think are quite simple to implement. My reason for prioritizing them as minimum achievable is to solve the problem of userbase for metakgp. We need more and more tools that targets most of KGP. A rule of thumb would be that develop something that’d be used by atleast 3000 people. 

  1. The essential package: A compilation of all tools and platforms that every KGPian will need. As solo projects, they might loose lustre, but as a consolidated package, as a onestop shop, metakgp can get more users. 

    1. Cab Pooling: A more efficient method of pooling. It’ll have a number of cab drivers’ numbers. The website will have chat rooms for discussion, comment section for plans that anyone can initiate, and an interactive display (could be calendar based) for visualizing.  

    2. Book Sharing: Relevance is questionable in the age of kindles and digital content. But nevertheless, this could be useful in community engagement. 

    3. Market Place: a revamp of Centrale, that’ll be easier to use and search. A free/donate  section of this marketplace can be used for discarding old items, which others can reuse. 

  2. Concept of Department Reps

    1. Responsible for maintaining department’s page and its course pages.

    2. Getting descriptions of all courses, and new courses not currently available

    3. Linking to people who have taken the course to ensure we have a good number of feedbacks. 

    4. Create a slack for their respective department for every batch. ( 60% of EE 2013-2017/18 was on slack, now defunct)

    5. Coordinate with respective dept. societies to see if we can help them out in any way (a very generic system to be created by us)

Next stop:

As a vision of being a tech backbone to every soceity out there, I’d like to work with TSG and help them create/maintain any portal/platform/query-box that the VPs introduce.

  1. A calendar for housing all events that can be viewed by anyone.

    1. Admins (GSecs, TSG Govs, Dept Reps) can publish events regarding GC, seminars, workshops, hackathons and other events in the institute. Dept Reps to coordinate with respective department (office and dep soc) to publish any open seminars. 

    2. Feed for calendar to be created. A person can subscribe to a soc, a dept, or one of the GCs to be sent event notifications via messenger, email, etc. ICS export and GSync to be featured too.

  2. TSG Societies: Atal’s vision was to see societies opening up, like workshops to non-members and participation. Somehow facilitate this (Obv technically, considering this is TSG’s role)

  3. Sort of a starter pack that’ll be released to the freshers [Will compete with instiinfo]

    1. All info about each 1st year course to be made. 

    2. GYFT sync

Worries, Apprehensions

A few issues that I really consider grave are gender represetation in Metakgp. I believe with more women on board, we can get a different perspective at solutions. I believe we need to start off with inviting our female friends first to open metakgp meetups. Hackathons for women would definitely be a plus. 

I see PR as an issue which hampers the reach of our works. I understand that Public Relations is a difficult and sensitive issue (too much of it looks bad, very little of it might not be appealing). I honestly do not know how to publicize our works for an effective reach. I believe that rather than stressing on publicizing, we need to create such good and useful products that people would spread it themselves, after all there’s nothing like word of mouth, is there?

Future

I envision a social platform, an extension/compilations of metakgp’s works, for KGPians that they would use everyday, analogous to DC++. 

Public Comments

I like that you have created a list of minimum achievable goals. I'll use Amrav's SCAMP guidelines to rate each part of the proposal.

The Essential Package

All three sub parts of the essential package will be helpful and if we they critical mass, they can be very impactful too. I'll give 3.5 in alignment'.

You should spend more time working on the feasibility of the proposal. Searching for "Open Source Cab Sharing tools" on Google gives me a couple of results will be similar for "Open Source Book Sharing portal" and "Open Source Market Place". You should try to figure out how good are these tools and do we actually need to implement these tools by ourselves. If existing tools are good enough then the task is easy, otherwise a lot of effort will go into building them. 2.5 for effectiveness.

The proposal isn't well calibrated. We already have platforms which provides the proposed functionalities to an extent, we have KGP Centrale which can server for all three, we carbuk.com for cab sharing, there is minimal discussion about how building our own platform improves upon existing platform. So, 1.5 in Calibration of the project to failure.

The proposal is measurable, we either have "The Essential Package" or we don't, but it is hard to measure the quality and impact of the package. Hence 3 in measurableness.

Concept of Department Reps

In the scheme I think point d is not relevant, each department can maintain their communication channel, we don't need to get involved with that. Overall this can be something very helpful but something that can be very hard to pull off, this will require a lot of follow up and lot of pestering of the department society representative. You should also think about why would a department representative do the thing (s)he is supposed to do. Sometimes just being asked to do something is good enough, other times you might have to put specific incentives, maybe certificates or publicity. You should also talk with some HOD to see if they can offer any support. To make this proposal a success your people skill will matter a lot.

Measurable: 2.5 somewhat measurable.

Calibrated: 1 don't discuss possibility of failure

Aligned: 4 it would be awesome if it works out

Effective: 2 The goal is defined but there is no clear time frame or clear step.

Magic: 3 I like it


-- Hargup (talk) 22:37, 18 March 2017 (IST)

Minimum Achievable Goals

(1a) and (1c) will be somewhat tackled during the InterIIT Tech Meet 2017 - however, a more scalable and practical solution that can be put to use for fellow KGPians is something that has to be done, outside of the Tech Meet.

(1b) was already discussed by @icyflame and @chebhyshev on our Slack group - and the common opinion that came out during the discussion was that, most people don't prefer to share their books - as they don't want their book to be mistreated (say, chips' oil stains on the page corners).

Next Stop

(1b) might again be tackled during the InterIIT Tech Meet 2017. I would just like to share the common opinion we had while discussing about it's practicality - if KGPian societies aren't convinced to put up their events on facebook, then what would convince them to add their events to our portal? So, can you clarify whether you have a tweaked-Naarad in mind to scrape facebook KGPian events, or a web application built from scratch with posting access to the society Governors / GSecs at the back of your mind?

-- Athityakumar (talk) 02:17, 19 March 2017 (IST)

I am thinking that we'll initially scrape from naarad, or rather manually fill them. But that's not the end goal, we'll ask the societies to post themselves. Facebook reach is allright, but there's no messenger bot that notifies people who've selected going for an event. Selective feed for events is new. I understand many of my proposals are actually discussed over the months on the group. I have just prioritzed them to execute. Its a delight that many of the plans will be built for the dashboard event for Inter IIT Tech Meet. I would like your help in scaling it further. They book sharing could be limited and may not have 3000 users, may not be 300 also. But I'd still like to push for plans that involve community interaction. The book sharing tool isn't a massive project, it can be realeased in 2-3 days. All for the purpose of attracting users for using any of the tools.

-- Arunpatro (talk) 14:26, 19 March 2017 (IST)