Metakgp:Governance/Election March 2017/SOP Nishant Nikhil
Nishant Nikhil
Third year undergraduate student
Department of Mathematics
9933979842
Contributions:
Contribution to wiki can be found at this link.
And gyft was my implementation of a small idea, then later I gave the repo rights to MetaKGP.
Furthermore in Kharagpur Open Source Society, during selections for the team. I and Himanshu Mishra co-ideated contribution to wiki as one of the task to be completed for getting selected. (Though it had mixed results as there were some very bad edits, I wont encourage this sort of event in near future).
Agenda:
I have always thought of MetaKGP as a place where artists interact (though much of our work is tech-related we might call them tech-savvy artists). But the things with artists are that they get bored easily. And artists never stay at the place where they get bored.
So when MetaKGP started there were regular meetups then slowly the number of meetups dwindled down. My best memory of MetaKGP is still the hackathon part and maybe second to it would be one of the meetings where we decided about “gyft”. (Vikrant suggested me to get an Android app for it, but after making the “gyft” python app I never got the encouragement to make an android app)
Is MetaKGP slack channel boring?
No. I come once in a while and always get to see some pretty awesome posts in the slack channel. But the thing is the posts are usually from same people and I have this image in my mind where I associate MetaKGP only with *few* people. To tackle this I thought maybe KGPians are not yet habituated with slack. So I made a facebook group, ShowKGP and yes it is quite on track. Though most of the posts are from few people only(maybe it also follows a normal curve), but I see new users posting something and commenting something everyday and this is what I needed.
(Note: The main motive behind this group can be summed up in a conversation, one person talks to other and says: Oh it is awesome and so simple, I can sum it up in one word: Sharing!
Well in my personal opinion I think that coming to IIT has put me with some nice people and nothing else. And the more I share the more they would share with me and this way I grow).
But we are artists and can always do something better, so how can we tackle this thing (the biasedness of KGP junta towards facebook) ?
In my opinion, Slack is a better channel than facebook for discussions (given the new threads feature). But someone needs to put some conversation on the table. (People see and then people do, this is my personal experience with ShowKGP (initial few posts were just from the admins and admins keep posting interesting stuff once in a while)). So in nutshell:
| Slack | ||
|---|---|---|
| Discussions | + | - |
| User Base from KGP | - | + |
So if we have good discussions regularly on slack, interested users would come and never leave. Even though getting a good user base to slack is a far fetched dream.
One more point: In first year I stumbled upon HackerNews. Even though people said its UI is not good, see Quora and other sites. I got stuck to it because interested users come and never leave.
What can I do for it ?
I can post stuffs, but this can be done without standing for election. Well! I would act as a moderator for the stuff and being a little more responsible than an average user I would make sure that new users feel comfortable and their posts do not go neglected and I would see that there is only “healthy” discussions going on.
What about projects?
I think artists do projects only for themselves and not others (unless it is a job), I recently made a chrome extension for dynamic queuing in YouTube because I wanted that. So where does MetaKGP comes in picture ? Ideas!
Yes people get ideas when they talk to other people or when they see other people's’ projects. I got the idea for ‘gyft’ only after I saw ‘mftp’. And what is needed for this ? Better Discussions and interesting meetups.
Now what would I do for it ?
Organizing talks. Yes talks! They are the best thing to showcase what you have done and mostly juniors are more ready for talks than meetups and for a developer this is one of the best way to showcase your talent and the problems you faced. Personally I know that a project has come in some XY shape but I am more interested in how it changed from some AB shape to CD to .. to XY. And this is where “talks from developers” comes in.
Though I want to change it from “developers” to “artists”. I would make sure that there are talks from some painter, some debater and etc etc, of course they would also be a part of MetaKGP.