hello friends Trevor, FN and I were thinking of reviving the very noble concept of the "Project Resource Center" which trevor n Dr. Nag started last year.The idea was that we have pros on the mailing lists who can very well mentor free s/w projects. we can have a place where students can come and choose projects and interact with their respectve mentors and maybe also have meetings with them on regulr intervals. This would help both the community as there will be more development and also the students coz they can find projects to work on. The idea is quite noble and it did help us a lot last year.

This, I think would be a good time to start the PRC again bcoz in a short while, the BE students will start looking for projects to do as thier final year project and we can use this opportunity to put them onto free software projects. This would help them in their acads and we can gather up some more free software for the community.

A good way to start would be to... o prepare a list of the people intereseted on the mailing lists in india who are ready to mentor proejects.

o List down the projects that can be given out. a few options might be... -contributions on indlinux (what say karunakar??) -some development on libyahoo on which mr philip tellis has been working... - gknowledge (dr. nag, can we have some modules on which some students can work??) - etc etc (ooh! this is a nice project '-) )

Lets take this all over India this time and try to get more and more people(both students and mentors) on this. Who else can do the work of spreading the word better than FN :). FN, can we have the word spread to all the mailing lists in the country. I m posting this on the mumbai and pune GLUGs. Goa and Bealgaum GLUGs are the one i know of, you ofcourse would know of many more such destinations where you can have this mail. It would also be great if you can have the PRC mentioned in the next issue of LFY(if thats not too much of a trouble.)

I think we will have to conduct a few more workshops around us if the idea has to be spread to the majour colleges. I will try and push to have one workshop organised some time in july in South maharashtra(would be either in RIT, Sangli or DY Patil COE, Kolhapur (bhaskar, u getting this??) ). May be the PLUG can have a few workshops done in engg colleges in pune and spread the idea, what say pluggerz??

suggestions and ideas invited.

regards GNUrpreet