what is being done by NIT surat students volunteers:
a) the tech-project portal will be at sristi site and not nif because nif does not deal with projects from formal sector or professionals.
b) we should have ratings by experts distinguished from the one by the peers. two separate ratings.
c) the most popular projects may pop out or be seen in a different window just for those who wish to see which are such projects,
d) should the plagiarized projects be removed or kept with such a label? see what your friends say?
e) we should make it possible for projects at one institute be taken up for value addition at another institute. so, some relay function should be developed so that one can see how the ideas in one place by one student moved to another place and still another place and got developed further. That will be the real value add ( chinzah: similar platform/option should exist for scai projects, we can adapt this portal design easily for scai projects too. we need to track scai project and site activities every week).
f) there should be a good search engine installed at site so that it can link not only projects having common words but also common theses) this is a longer term project and will take a few years perhaps),
g) we can send a log list to every student whose project is visited by any user. If the students want, they can get visitors log.
h) there should be ‘ideas for project‘ link: here nif or any small scale industry or even others can post ideas on which they wish students to take projects, they can also mention what support ( workshop, mentoring, financial support etc., ) –feed forward
i) licensing link: here those who wish to license some technologies at the site can post their request and the portal can mediate a tech transfer at fair terms; here faculty guide may also have to be involved. do we have link for faculty guide under each project?
j) all those projects which are open source should be marked by a bold tag and can be highlighted in a separate window. our hope is to have at least 70 per cent projects as open source.
To suggest that majority of technology students buy projects from outside is quite unfair. Surely there are a large number who do it, thanks to indulgent faculty members, but then i am sure there are many who are trying to be original.
It for the above reason that i started four years ago a small project of poooling student projects abstracst and full reports from various collges. Volunteeers of NIT surat have fanned out to 200 colleges already and i am getting very good repsonse. I also discussed this idea with Dr Kolaskar and Vivek of Maharashra Knowledge corporation who have also promised help.
If each TUC coordinator can help in thsi task, we can accomlish thsi task even more rapidly.
I am hoping to get 50k projects by the end of 09, and we have to get eventually 600,000 projects on this national techProjectindia portal.
this will provide an opportunity to link the problems of msme as well as grassroots innovators with the students. This portal will also enourage students to build upon each others’ ideas, put premium on originality and help harness the power of kho kho model of product development.
Hope that this idea will grow and we will then have a larger pool of ideas to select, secreen and nurture
volunteers are welcome
anil