I am Kaustubh Hiware, a fourth year dual degree Computer Science and Engineering student. I present my case as a potential maintainer for the next year, 2017-2018.

Vision

I was introduced to metakgp two years ago by Harsh Gupta, where from I gained a better understanding of building community-centric tools. Since then, we’re still more of a code-intensive group of people. I initially wanted to change this image. But then this quote made me think otherwise:”Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you” . Do one thing - do it right. I want to promote that. Let’s become the pillar of support, where ideas and resources are shared by the dozen, with more (and perhaps more focused) channels on the metaKGP slack channel like #tech-help. Examples could be #android, #learnML, #learnAnything #binge #mentors (just some ideas)

Contributions

I've been an active member on slack. I've always been here. I'll always be here. I have a basic idea of every project undertaken by metaKGP yet, which I hope to extend under my tenure as a maintainer.

[Wiki] With a ton of changes, here are all the wiki edits I’ve made.

[Code] So far I've made the following contributions:

[WIP] A geotagged map for corresponding articles. An idea of expansion suggested by Nishant would be computing some metrics like score based on proximity to market, to institutional buildings, etc. View it here. This would be similar in concept to TSA's pujomap.

Proposals

MAG: Minimum Achievable Goal

More hackathons

(MAG) Hackathons are definitely a better way to reach out. This is one way to increase awareness of metaKGP among freshers. They can be subtly integrated with talks (or rather tech talks). These tech talks can be about some interesting projects that people in the campus have taken up, what their motivation was for the same, what hurdles they might have faced and how they overcame them. (This point also suggested by Rishabh Madan and Siddharth Kannan in Naresh’s SoP). What would be the motivation of freshers though to attend such hackathons? What metaKGP has to offer is experience that we share in terms of tools, frameworks and utilities. The success of these hackathons would largely depend on the participation from the people within metaKGP. Another possible incentive could be shirts / stickers / memorabilia. Funding for this would be a roadblock here. We could attempt to reach out to MLH or a similar organisation for funding, however past experience suggests this would be a challenge. Another way out for funding is via alumni, which needs setting up a booth during the annual Alumni meet in January.

Ideas for expansion

(MAG) Getting more people talking on slack. I think limiting the scope to kgp isn’t right. I’ve known of other societies in other IITs (I am unaware of the scene elsewhere) also have an active slack channel. An example is IIT Roorkee’s SDSLabs. IF we could get some people from there here, I think the scope of discussion would already be widened. We get an opportunity to learn from them, as they might as well.

Course reviews

As per the meetup of 27th July, a discussion was to incorporate course reviews more effectively in the wiki. This is crucial to any student who has to choose a depth or elective. An approach could be anonymous feedback on wiki, but this could run into some trouble since this shouldn't be served right away on the wiki.

A better approach as per the meeting would be circulating a google form, filter out useful feedback, and adding only those trusted / useful feedback into the course page. Once a base set of courses is worked upon, getting feedback on other courses would be easier.
As per SoP discussion, it would be wiser to have a separate website accessible to only KGPians, rather than the whole internet. A separate website could be made, integrated with the dashboard (which means the dashboard has to be active). Now, the access to the website might either be restricted to inside KGP, or adding an ERP-like authentication, which allows only KGP students to access these course review pages. A project with similar objective is Cliqery, which is a Q-A site.

Metakgp's blog

Similar to the newsletter idealogy presented by Srihari, I think creation of a newsletter and manually preparing a newsletter would take around four hours weekly, or seven hours fortnightly. (The newsletter would be a culmination of the discussions and decisions made, so that a newcomer does not feel out of place / left out). However, the number of new members coming in within that duration is hardly two - three, which would make the task of manual summarization cumbersome and less rewarding. I would suggest summarising weekly discussions in a blog format, which could be published on medium or a stand-alone jekyll blog on metaKGP’s website. Publishing this weekly blog would largely be the maintainer's responsibility. The weekly blog will be shared through the facebook page. This would increase the engagement of people who aren't aware of metaKGP in any way such that people interested in certain topics can also voice their concerns on slack. This point added after the SoP discussion.

General Ideas and discussions

You do you. - There are people who want to help out others. There are also people, who would rather hang out with a select few, sans judgement. Realistically, only 10 people per batch are actually involved in any sort of communication on slack. Let’s not try to be a place where anyone is forced to do anything they don’t really want to do and unless it's absolutely essential. Let people contribute the way they seem fit, and make the best out of it.

No one is really interested in maintaining a project unless they genuinely believe in it. Unmaintained/ out of date projects need to be identified and assign an interested mentor / maintainer. The idea is to have a maintainer for every project, this is not a strict bound, only one to better establish a point of contact for someone who has no idea about what metaKGP is or how to contact us. The mentor for every project would be mentioned on the github repositories, and if needed, on the individual pages. Again, this is not a hierarchical thing.

Setting up more points of contacts

To ensure a member of the slack channel, there must be an initial motivation / push for them to return to the slack channel for discussions. I suggest setting up something similar to mentor-mentee concept, where someone already active on slack can coax newcomers to return, or presenting newcomers a reason to return the channel is a way of increasing the activity on slack.

More meetups?

Don’t know. One of the reasons I understand the original KLUG ('06 - '08) couldn’t stand the test of time was less frequent meets, less talks. I personally want more meetings, informal, or 4 people per meet is perfectly fine IMO.

Collaboration with other societies

As per previous experience, it has been observed any society without active metaKGP people do not end with successful collaborations. The only society I think we have a chance of having proper collaborations is KOSS, simply because of the large number of intersection in these groups. KOSS seems a good way to reach out to an audience who might be actually interested in having conversations here, though more the merrier.

If we are interested in having more discussions about art, we could get spectra people to hang around, without any intentions for collaborations. BARC is a good alternative, but I personally don’t think it would be fruitful . However, we can collab with TSA, to have interesting projects which TSA comes up every once in awhile (although one could argue those interesting projects were only because because of Ashris and Vivek Aithal).

As suggested by P.N Vamshi, a lot of societies in KGP do not have a website, partly because they do not have members motivated enough to build a separate website for their society. In an attempt to solve this, Governors and heads of various societies can be contacted and asked to post all their upcoming activities / any content they feel relevant about their society on their wiki page. This partly satisfies their need for a separate dedicated website. Also, the following societies’ facebook page can be included in naarad as a feed generator.

Past Experience

Administrative

I have had no administrative role during my stay in KGP. What I can promise is I’ll be transparent in my conduct, never shy away from presenting my thoughts and change, if presented with a better approach.