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Interview of Arvind G S (CTO) in Espirito Livre Magazine - Portuguese

Espirito Livre Magazine published an interview with Arvind GS - CTO and Director of Project Fedena. You can download the new magazine directly by clicking here. The magazine and interview is completely in Portuguese.

English translation of the interview is given below.

Arvind, introduce yourself to readers and talk a bit about his work in Fedena Project.

I am co-founder and CTO of Foradian Technologies – An internet engineering startup based in India. I am a graduate in Electronics and Communication Engineering. After 2.5 years of experience in IBS Software Services as Senior Software Engineer, I was bitten by the startup bug and started Foradian Technologies. 

Other than the normal responsibilities as a CTO, I am the Project Director of Fedena – an opensource school management system. I have the responsibility of Project Planning, Software Development Management and Analyzing Feature Requests/Upgrades/Application Enhancement of the project.

Why did you choice the name "Fedena" and what motivated its creation?

Athena is the Greek Goddess of Education. We coined the name Fedena as a coalition of Foradian + Athena. It also has a meaning - the coolest thing alive, usually meaning something come from royalty or from wealth

When you had the idea to create a project for school management?

We were thinking of developing something that will impact the society in a better way and also help us in getting some good revenue and create a great brand value. Education is one of the main things that affects the life of people and is an integral part of day to day life. It is a never ending area also to do business.

When you decided to make it open source?

Even from the initial phase of the project, we thought of releasing it as open source. We have greatly benefited from Open source technologies and so thought of giving some thing back to the society. We at Foradian, greatly believes in the power of open source. 

We made the application Open Source mainly due to the following three reasons

  1. No such open source solution till date
  2. No simple and user friendly alternative
  3. Our dream that everyone should get benefited from it.

Many people believe there is no quality education and digital inclusion without free software. Is there any connection, free software and education? What do you think about it? 

Yes, I too believe that Free Software has a great role on Quality Education. But more than Free, Open Source applications can create a better impact as the software can be modified to suit your requirements. It is with this intention Fedena is made Free as well as Open Source. Free software is going to be the future.

How additional features are implemented in Fedena project? 

Since the application is open source, developers from all over the world are contributing to the project. We at Foradian will analyze these contributions and incorporate the valid ones to the project.

People used to give their inputs and feature requests through the community portal at projectfedena.org

Is there any project to create a library of languages?

Yes, we are currently enhancing Fedena to support multiple languages. Once the implementation is done, it will be very easy to integrate any language to Fedena 

Why did you choose Ruby on Rails to development of Fedena project?

Foradian believes in agile development method. ROR is one of the best frameworks which support agility. The increased productivity for developers and inbuilt security features made us choose ROR for developing Fedena 

How much time was spent since the project until the final version?

Fedena is still not in its Final version. Currently it is in 2.0 Version and the Version 2.1 is ready for release. We are aiming Fedena to be implemented as a virtual university which will happen by 2013. Our next main target is version 3.0 with e-learning implementation, which will take on moodle. The actual time spent till 2.1 version of the project is around One and a Half years.

Do you have plans to create a commercial version of Fedena project?

We already have Fedena Pro Services, by which we develop custom features for our Pro service partners.

Why do you keep a list of contributors on your site?

We believe all those who contribute to the project are a part of the project. We display their profile to show due reverence to their valuable contributions to the project

How anyone can hire a consultant for implementation of this project?

Fedena is built in such a way that anyone with a little technical knowledge will be able to the implementation. The detailed installation instruction with video tutorial is already available in the community portal. Also the forum is highly active with which everyone can get their doubts clarified. 

Would you like to give any recommendations for people to get a better utilization of the project?

Download fedena and install it in your schools to manage school activities. Promote the application if you found it useful. Help some schools nearby you to install it and use it. Translate the help file to other languages. Give suggestions and feedback to us at www.projectfedena.org

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6 responses   //   Posted over 2 years ago

Rupakara - First font with Indian Rupee Symbol at Unicode agreed code position - Free Download

Rupakara is a new font created by Michael Everson to give support to the newly invented Indian Rupee Sign, which has been assigned to U+20B9 by Unicode.

You can download the font for free from http://www.evertype.com/fonts/rupakara/

We are thankful to Michael Everson not only for this font but also for his proposal to Unicode for assigning a code position to Indian Rupee symbol on emergency basis.

Michael Everson is the world's leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts. He is famous for his constant efforts to add a wide variety of scripts and characters to the Universal Character Set. His proposals have added thousands of characters to ISO/IEC and Unicode standards. He received the Unicode "Bulldog" award in 2000 for his technical contributions to the development and promotion of the Unicode Standard.

You can get more information from his website - click here and the Wikipedia page - click here
We can be proud that he designed a font for our rupee symbol and he is trying really hard to get the Rupee Symbolto the ISO standards as soon as possible. Let us give him all support in this struggle.

Interview with Michael Everson

What you think about India's new Rupee Sign?
I like it. I think that Udaya Kumar Dharmalingam should be commended for his unique design. It is instantly recognizable -- a strong, bold symbol.

Which symbol do you like the most, the Dollar Sign, the Euro Sign, or the Rupee Sign?
I can't say that I have any preference insofar as the shape of any of these symbols is concerned. Since I live in the eurozone, I like euros very much, and would like to have more of them!

You were one of several who submitted proposals for the Indian Rupee Symbol. And your proposal is the one which was selected. When we can expect an official announcement from Unicode?
Actually there were three proposals submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee. Mine was the first, because of two reasons. The first reason is that, I have proposed other currency signs for encoding before, and I knew how important it was that a stable code point was chosen. The second reason I submitted a proposal very quickly is that the UTC meeting was coming up and I did not know if the Government of India would prepare a proposal quickly. As it happens, they did, and the Department of Information Technology of the Ministry of Communications & IT put in a proposal as well. Another person also proposed the character, though he proposed it for encoding in the Devanagari script block, while I and the Government of India both proposed the Currency Symbols block. My proposal differed from the Government of India proposal in that I used a Times-based glyph for the symbol and proposed a specific code point. The Government of India proposal used the "official" glyph. In the end, their glyph and my code point were chosen. It was a good example of standardizers cooperating.

What is special about the code position U+20B9?
Nothing. It was the next available space in the Currency Symbols block.

The people of India are eager to use the symbol in gmail, facebook and twitter. Can we start using it?
Here is the whole story. "Officially" speaking, it takes time for a character to be encoded. In fact, the INDIAN RUPEE SIGN will not even be sent out for ballot until after the meeting of the ISO Working Group in October. But now that a code point has been chosen, nobody wants to change that. So even though the character is not "official", it makes sense for us to encourage the use of that code point and to avoid the use of other code points which were used in the very first Rupee Sign fonts (such as your own).

In order to use the new symbol you have to have a font (like Rupakara) installed that uses it and your application has to "let" you use the code point even though it is not formally defined. I know it works OK under the Mac OS. Some Windows programs are not very forgiving about unassigned code points.

There are millions of keyboards and thousands of PCs using unlicensed windows. How we can help these people type the new rupee symbol in their existing system so that a lot of e-waste can be avoided and some money can be saved?
Well, I don't know, really, since I use the Mac OS. I know that Microsoft makes a keyboard layout editor (Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator or MSKLC), and Tavultesoft makes a keyboard layout editor (Keyman). Also in the short term what was called the "Character Map" in Windows XP and Vista can be used. (I don't know what it is called in Windows 7.)

What is the meaning of "Rupakara"?
Rūpakāra or रूपकार is Sanskrit for "maker of images". I understand it is also the Hindi word for a "designer".

What is special in Rupakara for India?
Well, I made Rupakara first and foremost for support of the INDIAN RUPEE SIGN. But I decided it made sense to also include all the letters used by librarians and linguists and indologists for transliterating Indian languages (and Sinhala) into the Latin script. This includes the vowels with the macrons on them, the consonants with dots underneath, and so on.

Have you visited India?
I am sorry to say that I have never yet visited India. The nearest I have been is Kabul to the west and Yangon to the east.

Your message to young technical startups of India like Foradian Technologies?
Keep up the good work!

Your advice/message to budding font designers of India?
Make sure your fonts work under Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS.

We are amazed by your in depth knowledge in many Indian languages.
Although I studied Sanskrit (and a little Hindi) at University, I don't speak Indian languages... but I do know a lot about Indian scripts.

Especially we are amazed to see your script proposal for "Tulu". Foradian Technologies is situated in Tulunad and some of our directors are well versed with Tulu.
Really! I hope very much that your group can help to supply me with more information -- and books? -- about the Tulu script.

How you get time for all these?
It's what I do. It would be easier to do it -- and more -- if I were funded better, but I do what I can. Sometimes it's a struggle, though.

MacBook displaying a Javanese letter and sitting next to a mechanical Javanese typewriter

What is your motivation?
It's my dharma. I seem to have a real talent for script analysis and encoding -- so I do what I can to ensure that more and more writing systems and minority-language characters are encoded. You see, most of the scripts and characters that make the big corporations money have already been encoded. It's the smaller communities that need support. I try to do that.

What is the most challenging work you completed till date?
Some of the encoding projects I have worked on have been quite challenging. The N'Ko script of West Africa was difficult. Egyptian Hieroglyphs took a long time too.

What are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future?
I've been working on a number of very different projects. Some of them are encoding projects. I'm working on a major Coptic font soon to be released called Antinoou. Recently I released a font called Allatuq, which supports many characters in the style of a child's handwriting.

I'm also a publisher of books inspired by Lewis Carroll. I've published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in seven languages and have been working on more. And I've published books in the Irish and Cornish languages, and have some been working on some dictionary projects as well. Most recently I've been looking into language support at the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. Perhaps there is some work to be done there.

Our future blog posts will contain information on how you can use Rupakara font in a very simple and easy method without changing your existing keyboard. Download the Rupakara font and start using the Rupee Symbol.
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35 responses   //   Posted almost 3 years ago