Brajeshwar whom i work with has some extra space in an office up in anderi, mumbai. Its already well wired and has computers, desks and some administrative support.
I've been working with Zack Rosen to set up a internship program for junior software developers in india to get experience working on Drupal. So far this has been a work from home project.
I am exploring with Brajeshwar the idea of doing something alittle more ambitious at his space in mumbai.
from a letter to zack:
my goals are to:
- actively improve the opensource codebase (and ancillary things like
testing and docs)
by having quality developers contribute to it.
- increase the number of open source developers
- increase the number of developers who are able to effectively
configure and deploy
drupal based websites
- create sites and provide support for ngo type organizations that
have worthy causes
but wouldn't necessarily have the skills or resources to build or
hire contractors to
build websites for them.
towards this i would like to hire a couple people to work on
civicspace full time.
this could be treated similarly as the summer of code trainings, only with the
expectation that this is an ongoing thing. additionally we might have a small
'class' of interns / students who would be going thru this as a
training process.
i would like them to:
- actively contribute to the codebase. possibly filling in holes that are hard
to get volunteer contributors to work on.
- provide training to other individuals and to create video training materials
helping people to understand how to use civicspace
- possibly as part of student projects provide support for non-profit
organizations
- eventually possibly opening up to do paid contract work
i would also like to establish a Node101 there. I feel the video production group is critical at all lecture / learning opprotunities. With people doing web development, software development, and video production for the web - we have a humble but sustainable beginning to a next generation technical institute.
