Please note:

1. Tamil is not nisspelt as Thamizh or Tamizh, that is intentional.

2. This mail is an important one. It could pretty much give birth to a massive digital movement that could aid Wikipedia and other projects like OSM, and more.

3. This mail is a mix of discussions that happened over the list, the phone, and of a few surveys done by me in Sathyamangalam and Gobichettipalayam taluks of Erode district and a few in Ramnagar, Coimbatore City.

 

Dear all,

As you all should know by now, the Tamil Nadu government has already started distribution of laptops and other paraphernalia.

This year, the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu [ELCOT] has already distributed 7000+ out of the targetted 9.12 lakh.

The students covered include School students, +2 students, UG and PG [Except M.Phil and PhD] students.

The breakup of it is 60% goes to school and higher secondary/pre university students, 32% to Arts and Science college students, 3% to Polytechnic students and 2% to Engineering students.

Voters in the Nilgiris have already recieved laptops for their wards. [I, however, inspite of being a student in Tamil Nadu, will not be recieving one as my Voter registration is in K'taka]. However, my friends will recieve them, and I can see how we can go about in getting them onto Open Source projects.

As discussed, the laptop will have the ELCOT logo all across it both physically and digitally. The Motherboard and other physical ICs will have the ELCOT logo engraved on it, while you will see the logo on booting, with Jayalalitaa's photo as a default screensaver[rumoured], similar to ELCOT TVs.

The laptop runs on Bharat Open Operating System, or BOSS [again, as discussed earlier], developed by a GoI entity, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing [C-DAC]. For a fourth gen Linux distribution[it was launched in 2007], it is pretty lousy, bugged and has plenty of flaws.

 

9,12 lakh Laptops will be completely distributed by the end of the Academic year.

In relation to this, a couple of us wrote to the Tamil Nadu Electricity Generation and Distribution Company [TANGEDCO] regarding voltage and supply issues as there is no point in having a laptop, with erratic power supply and heavy fluctuations, [We came across a case of a laptop charger getting fried in Gobichettipalayam].

 

As stated earlier, new textbooks under the Samacheer Kalvi provide links to Wikipedia articles and feature images from the Wikimedia Commons.

This should be a morale booster for us, to provide better photographs and media on the Commons and to make sure that the articles in question are error free, even if it is on the English Wikipedia.

 

 

After all this nonsense, I ask a few questions to several groups of people:

 

1> The chapter, the Foundation office, and board members. This includes Hisham Mundol, Bishakha Dutta, Achal Prabhala, Shiju Alex, Nitika Tandon et al.

Are you willing to launch any school student oriented plan in South India, [not limited to TN]?

I'm not asking for anything similar to the Campus Ambassadors program, but more of a series of Seminars, workshops, academies, meetups, tutorials etc. We need your support for such a mass scale program, as individually we cannot achieve anything.

 

2> South Indian wikipedians, especially the Bangalore, Chennai and Kerala communities.

Are you open to helping us out?

Especially Kerala, you are the most advanced in the Indic wiki sphere, will you please help out your neighbour TN?

 

I'm willing to do as much as possible from my side[I'm not too good at arranging meetups, when I say Wikipedia, people stare at me blankly, and I can't explain it to them in Tamil, even though it is my mother tongue].

 

 

Please do consider this Golden opportunity.

There is plenty of potential out here.

The laptops run on Linux, which means, a big boost to Open Source software.

The primary target is school students, which means, more young editors [and oldies in their late teens like me].

 

I couldn't think of how to say this, but somehow I just typed it and sent it.

 

Note: If you consider this as SPAM, please IGNORE it. There is no need to send me a mailing asking me to stop SPAMMING the list like last time.

 

 

--Regards,

Srikanth Ramakrishnan,

Coimbatore.

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If there is a Wolfram Alpha, there should also be a SheepRavanBeta no?

Between 1970 and 1990, India did nothing, but increase her population.

The city of Kuzhambathur was famous for Kuzhambu ... The British were unable to pronounce and hence it became Coimbatore.