Dear Bangalore Community
I'm writing to inform you that I plan to leave my current role supporting Wikimedia in India. I am going to be exploring opportunities and evaluating options that are closer to my career aspirations and my personal circumstances. I will be working through to ensure that there is a smooth transition - and this is likely to take 2-3 months. I am writing now because I felt it appropriate and opportune to inform you as early as possible.
I want to start off by thanking the Wikimedia community and movement for giving me this extraordinary opportunity. Working on something like India Program has been something that has been professionally enriching and personally fulfilling. Over the past 1 1/2 years, I have been supported by so many of you - and I want to thank you for everything you have done! The passion and intellectual firepower of our community has been my constant source of drive and guidance. There are so many examples of powerful stories from all over the country: the incredible efforts put in by the IEP Campus Ambassadors in Pune; the army of volunteers that drove the outreach push across the country in the first few months of this year; the beautiful stories of fantastic community initiatives from far and wide across the country and sub-continent, and indeed the world; the remarkable stories from so many communities - large, small and tiny ones!
I want to thank the team that I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with - Nitika, Noopur, Shiju & Subha. You guys have been wonderful. The work that we are doing is experimental and we have been innovating every day, and I know the circumstances have not always been easy. Take strength and inspiration from the large number of community members who have been touched by you and appreciate your efforts and value your work.
I will send an actual "over and out" message later. In the meantime, I will continue to work on everything that needs working on.
Happy Editing!
Warmest Regards,
hisham
Dear all,
We are participating in the 5th elephant event in Bangalore focused on big
data, analytics and visualization.
http://fifthelephant.in/2012/http://fifthelephant.in/2012/#partners
The organisers have given us a fee stall and space to participate as a
community partner.
Team of volunteers would be showcasing Wikimedia projects, Wikidata and
also creating awareness about volunteering, the India chapter and
membership.
Wikipedia techies Arun Ganesh, Yuvi, Srikant (logic) will be participating.
They will be supported by Arjuna, Naveen, Radhakrishna and self.
regards
Arun
*Details about the Event (from Organisers)*
The Fifth Elephant <http://fifthelephant.in/> is a community-powered
conference organized by HasGeek <http://hasgeek.com/> to demystify the big
data ecosystem in India. The conference takes place on 27 and 28 July at
the NIMHANS Convention Centre in Bangalore. It brings together speakers who
have worked extensively with technology, statistical and mathematical
tools, and user interfaces for mining, analyzing and representing data.
The conference attempts to showcase the technology landscape which today
makes it possible to work with data and leverage on its predictive powers.
On the first day, participants will get an understanding of the
technologies available for managing big data, analytics and visualization.
On the second day, the conference will showcase talks that explain how
technology is being applied / can be applied in retail, medicine, IT,
finance and governance to manage and analyze data.
The Fifth Elephant features speakers from Red Hat, Splunk, Google, Strand
Life Sciences, IBM, Flipkart, HP Analytics, Mu-Sigma, Amazon, PayPal,
MediaNama, Open Knowledge Foundation, among others. Keynote talks will
cover topics such as how Google crunches big data at Google scale,
community architecture and big data at Red Hat, the genomics project and
challenges of big data in personalized medicine, and the process of
building Watson and natural language processing.
Apart from keynotes, the conference features talks on building search
engines, messaging architectures, use of Hadoop in mining and managing data
collected under the Aadhar/UID project, data explosion in medical imaging,
open data in life sciences, financial market and economic data, to name a
few. To view the event schedule, visit:
http://fifthelephant.in/2012/schedule <http://fifthelephant.in/2012/schedule>
The conference also brings together community partners such as the
Wikimedia chapter, the Internet Archive, the Open Knowledge Foundation and
the Centre for Internet and Society. The presence of these partners expands
the horizons of our understanding of data not only in the context of open
data, but also the systems and frameworks that exist for data gathering,
sharing and licensing.
For more details, write to info(a)hasgeek.com