Objective: Three ex

To share my three ex:

ex·pec·ta·tion/ˌekspekˈtāSHən/Noun

1. A strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future.

2. A belief that someone will or should achieve something.

ex·pe·ri·ence/ikˈspi(ə)rēəns/

Noun: Practical contact with and observation of facts or events.

Verb: Encounter or undergo (an event or occurrence).

ex·am·ple/igˈzampəl/

Verb: Be illustrated or exemplified.

Noun: A thing characteristic of its kind or illustrating a general rule.

Barcamp Kathmandu 2010

Khanchuwa Jwalanta presented something on liguid dish that does not put you in hang over and i assumed barcamp kathmandu 2010 will be of same type. But its different. Hang over of yesterday's barcamp kathmandu is still on. Many ideas and thoughts that i witnessed at barcamp kathmandu are still playing in infinite loop inside my head. I feel the loop will terminate only when i pour some of the thought about yesterday's event in the blog. But mind it, it is not full coverage of the event and so don't create news out of it. In barcamp style i should say, it is unblog of unconference. ;)

My pick for the event were
1) Crowdsourcing and Microwork in Nepal by msears
2) Sharing for Science by Ankur
3) Story Cycle (katha chakra) by saurav
4) Karma, a Framework for Creating Educational Software by peter.gijsels
5) Nepaluino by ujwal2 and
6) Udder This! by jhusilkira

Due to my son's DPT injection, i reached at event site arround 12 noon only. I was late. Before i reach the venue i knew i missed two of my pick Crowdsourcing and Karma. On the way I thought surumai bolna kati hatar yo khare haru lai as if they were going to miss a train to their home and by the way there is no train system in kathmandu. But its due to me so nobody to blame.

When i entered the hall, it was packed, full, over crowded and no seat available. Event was at the end of Youth and Media. On screen there was Thank You slide and some question answer was going on. Event was rocking. As my next picked session Sharing for Science was on the queue, i came out of hall and talked with some new people and old twitter friends. Bibek Shrestha was floating the idea that we should have frequent some type of developer and designer meetup to share onces knowledge. I totally agreed with him.

Ankur entered the hall shouting next session was his. So i also followed in. But the next session was of Chirag Bangdel with big question Why Art?. Only line i remember from his session is "Science keeps physical body alive but Art keeps one's soul alive". Conclusion is Techno Mani's also should learn art to be human with heart not just brain. Don't ask me the full form of Mani. :)

Then much awaited Sharing for Science started. Ankur shared his idea on establishing science journal library by the help of community. His definition of community just involves Me and You. I won't forget the slide with big hand with index finger pointing out and defining You that includes me too. According to him he has already registered site sharingforscience.org to get feedback and of course support for the idea. He is starting Sharing site with Popular Science and New Scientist magazines. He wants other to help to form the community by sharing some other publication or magazines to s4s. His big plan is to form big national level library later on. I wish him best of luck and i am sure a lots of people already thinking to lend some hand for the s4s community. I am also ready to help.

Then there was lunch break. During lunch i got lucky to put some of my question to Crowdsourcing presenter Mark Sears. My basic question was how will he ensure quality in crowdsourced work. He told me he has two ways for quality control. First way is to have to do same task by multiple people and compare them. Second one is there will be different level of checking by his staff and give points according to their quality of work. Another question was type of work he will bring. My point was spaming and writing fake blog for some product is not very interesting work to do. He is still in process of finalizing the services he is going to offer to the client.

After lunch, i joined session by Ujwal Shrestha about Nepaluino. He demonstrated very interesting projects based on arduino. Then followed by barcamp kathmandu promo video and photo show of its making. It was interesting. Then followed by DUPLICITY. I found that experimental video little disturbing so i won't write any further comment about it. Then session on khanchuwa.com totally refereshed me. Khanchuwa Jwalanta gave totally new meaning of OLPC. :) I really liked his presentation style and idea. Then next session was on "What you wear is not what you smoke" by Subin Shakya. I got good knowlege about hemp through his presentation. It was the first time i have heard about it. Many thanks to subin for this introduction. He is real hemp mani.

As i am also FOSS lover, i attended the session by Abhishek Singh on "How would you celebrate Software Freedom?". He asked to think about ways to celebrate the freedom provided by FOSS. SFD is one of the day when all FOSSians celebrate. His presentation slides were well designed and very pleasing. Final session i attended was by Geshan Manandhar on "Drupal Content Management System - A non technical introduction". His session was much like show case of Drupal where they have been used.

All in all barcamp kathmandu 2010 is great experience and had chance to know so many mani in same event. But there was one suspence till now what happened to Jhusilkira. May be turned into pupa to become beautiful butterfly.

links:
twitter: barcampktm
Session spreadsheet: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AihCxa4ZhLTkdFR6VlBjRkpyaVRXbk9kdDhrSm9uQXc&hl=en#gid=0
Tag for tweet: #barcampktm and #bcktm10
Site: http://2010.barcamp.org.np
Photos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=471773&id=525455322
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=254884&id=535101350&page=3
(these photos are not mine. they are owned by respective facebook user)

Open Exam = Future

A Day before yesterday(2010/08/23), I had an final exam of ITPG-531 Ingredients of Innovation. It is one of my course for my MRes degree. The course was taught by Dr. Jyoti Tandukar. His course material can be found at http://jyoti.tandukar.net/innovation/.


The site is evolving over time. Today it is different than what we had as our course outline :). Today i am not going to cover about what he taught in the class. I want to talk more on exam.

The exam is very different than other final exam i am used to. First difference is it just covers 20% of total marks. 80% was already covered in class work. Another fundamental difference is it is open book, open copy, open Internet, everything open. It is my first experience of so open exam. As i am used to traditional type of exam where questions are extracted from books exercise and class tutorials with little bit of modification. But as its all open i am pretty sure question will not come from those texts. So guessing exam question is little difficult. It can be any thing. It is scary. If you can not guess the question how are you going to prepare for it?

So for preparation, went through some class reading materials but in the back of the mind was it is of no use as they are no coming in the exam. So preparation = no preparation.

Finally exam started and got the question. Great wait was over. Question went like this:
Read the attached article and do a critical review of it in terms of impact of technological development in education worldwide in next 10 years.

















I went through the article. I thought it was easy and could finish in 15 minutes. Then Parkinson's Law kicked in. I used whole 3hrs time allocated for the exam. What ever i found critical that i liked and that i did not liked about the article wrote in a file and emailed.

All these are just a background for real motive of writing this blog. Actually while doing critical review, I tried to Google the title of the article and the author name thinking it must have been published in some magazine and assumed there will be e version of it. But to my surprise i could not find it.

So I thought if i can blog it then in future someone can find it here. (Above picture of the article is put with out any permission from the author. :) Actually i don't know who owns the copy right of the question. It could be big debating issue for the next blog.) Someone preparing for the Innovation exam can get hint from this blog.

As I am creating this blog I got an idea. If there is a site where people can blog or upload picture of the the exam paper then it can be great archive for future students. I am thinking about free question bank. Internet technology should help not only to get teaching materials but should help find the questions. Any one interested in this idea?

PictoBrower Flower

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Job list of Nepal = joblistnepal

Last Friday night, i was in front of my HP Mini surfing the net. Another background thread of thought was also quite active in my head that day. I was wondering why it is so difficult to find right candidate for right post. I was thinking it is my usual wondering which never got answered satisfactorily. Suddenly a question struck to me what i can do to better the situation? Right candidate for right job opening will be possible if i can put a system which easily transfer the information about need or opening to all interested capable person.

I kept on rolling thought about a such system and had the requirement for it ready after sometime :) Happy moment.
1) System must be very easy to post a new opening so that a person who just know how to send email can also post.
2) An interested person can subscribe to the system so that s/he is notified when there is new opening.
3) System must make available the old posting data for a person who wants to do research about type of high demand type job opening.
4) Data captured in the system must not be confined to itself. System must have ways to make available the data to other interested system which adds other values.

Back of mind there was hidden wish the system should be free to operate so that there is no financial burden to anyone. I must say i am little spoiled by FOSS movement. :)

But before creating any system i should check if such system already in operation. You know well to whom should you ask to. That is famous Google baba. I typed 'job' & 'Nepal' and hit search button. It returned many results. I checked few - jobsnepal, jnepal, onlinejagir etc etc. My requirement is not fulfilled by any existing system. This is the first time i became happy when i did not get what i searched. :)

Now its time to think about the solution. Should i build some web application? or use existing systems like Google group. I am impressed by successful operation of fossnepal using Google group. It is tested & it is working. It is great tool for creating community. It satisfies all my system requirement. Bingo.

I have registered a group 'joblistnepal'. Now its time to invite all the interested people to join. It is a group which will be successful only if we have people who believes in free culture and use this communication platform. If we could attract all job opening in Nepal then this group will be single source of job opening data. Those data can be used by other service providers as well. I think that will be great service by this group to Nepal.

I have done the initiation. Now i can just wait and see interested people to join. Once again, the group link is http://groups.google.com/group/joblistnepal . All are welcome.

Fully Distributed Scrum

I have just watched a presentation on Fully Distributed Scrum at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/fully-distributed-scrum

The presentation is very interesting one. Even if presenter has mostly present by view point of outsourcing company, there are a lots of thing to learn for offshore software development companies.

Some of the facts i learned from the presentation are:

1. Main problem of the offshore software development is distance between people.
2. Team member of one team must be distributed not different teams working on different module.
3. Bootstrap the team by bringing some people from offshore team to on-site for 2-3 iterations.
4. Video conference is must during daily scrum meeting even if it is of not so good quality video.
5. Digital Scrum board is must so that everyone can know the current status.
6. There is no point in outsourcing work to the offshore software company which follows waterfall.

My Flickr Photos

My interest in photography sometime occupies my free time. I find great pleasure shooting. My subjects are unplanned, random and whimsical. Today i want to share my favorite fruit. It is no other than An Apple.......








































One can find more pictures at my flickr set. It is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/8126330@N05/sets/72157622480071857/
I have licensed it in creative commons with no restriction. So one can use it for any purpose. But if you use it i deserve link back to my flickr set. :)