Know the speakers: Krishnakant Mane
Please give a brief introduction of yourself
I am A software engineer by profession and a free software advocate. I have 10 years of experience in Java, php and Python language. I am particularly expert in Python including web application frameworks such as pylons.
I currently lead the development of GNUKhata
I also work as a FOSS adviser to many governmental and non-governmental organisations, specially on projects for large scale migration to Free software.
Apart from being a software engineer, I write poems in Hindi and Urdu/. I am a trained gazal singer and work for a musical group called Uddan. My passion is programming and composing poems. My mission is to spread ICTs in all the sectores of society specially in Rural education and development.
What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?
I have contributed just one drop of ocean in FOSS. My little contributions include the Project Insight at SPACE Mission Kerala where under my advice and supervision, a computer trainning lab was setup for visually disabled people. Job oriented training is being given and I personally conducted 3 workshops with exclusive use of FOSS.
I also led the True vision project in the Southern state of Tamilnadu, for a mission similar to the Insight project mentioned above.
True vision was funded by Electronic Corporation of Tamilnadu (ELCOT).
Under this project more than 50 Blind schools were provided computers installed with Ubuntu GNU/Linux configured with the Orca Screen reader (the one I personal use for all my work). More than 150 trainners of blind school were train by me and my team./>
I also provided guidance to have the Espeak speech synthesizer translated in Tamil.
I have contributed to the development of Orca screen reader in many ways. I provide architectural advice to the core development team and also help do lot of bug fixing.
My most important contribution to FOSS till date is in the form of GNUKhata which is aimed to replace popular proprietory accounting softwares, specially in countries like India.
I am currently focusing on building a web app for the same software with a view to have it deployed on a large scale such as a clowd based installation. My team is actively adding new features and making radical changes to the software so that we can not just provide an alternative to proprietory financial softwares, but also create facility for rural banking and micro finance.
Apart from this, I have successfully conducted huge FOSS orientation workshops in many schools and colleges. I lead a dedicated team of FOSS experts for conducting trainning and orientation. The most successful of these workshops have led to migration of the SNDT (UMIT) college labs to FOSS. The Sipna Engineering college of Amrawati has also decided to shift their entire lab to GNU/linux and I am actively helping them in this migration process.
We are also doing a successful series of workshops and training camps at MDM Aurad (near Latur) for FOSS orientation. I am currently mentoring the Students of that college for doing FOSS based projects.
What will your workshop be, exactly ?
The workshop will be on Pylons. I will introduce Pylons and its advantages for rappidly developing powerfull web applications. The participants will learn how MVC based projects can be developed using Pylons. An overview of all the components provided by default will be provided. This will include the controls using webob, Templating using Mako and creating modles using SQLAlchemy.
What do you hope to accomplish by conducting this workshop? What do you expect ?
The aim of my workshop is to introduce the Pylons web application framework with its flexibility and all the power features it has to offer.
If a few machines are provided for hands-on, then I would be happy to give the participants a real experience of writing a small web app with one or 2 forms.
The stress will be to make participants learn the Model View Control methodology of development using the Pylons framework.
Since you are involved in FOSS migration, what is your advice to organizations interested in migrating to FOSS ?
Advice is simple. It is just a matter of unlearning some useless things you learned while using proprietory OS and learning a few new softwares and ways of getting help and support. This is a small time investment for gaining lifetime security, power and freedom from virus related problems.
I have migrated many organisations and My suggestion to those who are willing is to properly explain their unwilling colligues the fact that most softwares in FOSS are an absolute replacement copy for their proprietory OS, There are just a few differences which with proper trainning and orientation can be learned quickly. The overall bennifit is prompt and is significant in terms of monitary gains and efficiency in daily opperations.
What made you choose python over other languages ?
Python and Java were my top choices. But, Python is a FOSS based language and keeps getting new features regularly yet maintaining backwords compatibility. Python has a huge community and I have observed that professional quality help is available even on mailing list and IRC. It is known to be lightweight yet powerful, easy yet dynamic and what impresses me most is its clean syntax.
Besides the “batterys included “ way of pythons versions, specially after 2.3 have saved me a lot of time fetching suitable modules and installing/ configuring them. Most of the tasks are done out of the box. It performs well on software involving huge load. For example Orca screen reader is written in Python and performs extremly fast. With proper application frameworks and a good IDE, Python is a potent Rad Kit.
Why did you choose pylons over other pythonic frameworks ?
Every web framework has its place. While other frameworks do the task within the domain for which they have been developed, Pylons is not just actively developed but has a level of flexibility which hardly any framework has.
For example you can easily replace any of the components provided by default. If you don’t like the mako templating module for views, you can easily replace it withh genshi or kido. Don’t like SQLAlchemy, all right just go ahead and replace it with what ever you like or don’t use any ORM at all. Similarly the way Pylons lays down the project modules, it is easy to deploy and performe advanced configurations on a production server.
How FOSS projects can be made more usable for differently-abled people ?
Right now FOSS has a lot of facilities for differently abled people. Specially the Orca Screen reader is state-of-the art technology and in some cases has even gone ahead of its proprietory counterpart. What needs to be done now is to integrate more and more such technologies and make them to work together. For example I am currently working volanterily on a project to combine OCR and TTS so that a blind person can scan a printed document and then do an OCR. Then the extracted text can be sent to a text to speech software for reading out to the blind person.
Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?
No, this is my first time and I have herd a lot about it from previous visiters.
