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
- No such open source solution till date
- No simple and user friendly alternative
- 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
