Business analytics is one word which I started hearing from 2005 or so. This is much more jazzier form of the plain Management Information System of the early years of the computer. In simple terms, it means getting an insight from the customers dealings in the past and coming up with better alternatives and ideas to meet the customer needs. While this is being pursued by the private commercial organizations, there is a lot that government or public organizations need to do to provide a better experience for the customer. i will illustrate the same with a real life example of reserving a berth on Indian Railways.
Recently I was to travel to from Bangalore to Hyderabad and utilized the online reservation system of Railways to book a seat. While I have got the confirmed reservation for my onward journey, the status for my return journey was WL 119/WL92. So I had to make a decision on whether I should continue with my reservation for return journey or find alternate modes of travel. I had no means of knowing the chance of confirming a seat or a berth with the status that I was presented. As Railways has multitude of quotas including Tatkal and categories of reservation, I doubt whether it would be possible for even Railway officers to give any probability of confirmation. The only useful information is the final reservation charts for the train on the same day of week/month in the recent past. But these are not made available on the internet. If an analytics application is developed utilizing the past history of final train reservation charts for the same day of the previous week/month/year and the availability of total seats, it will help provide guidance to the travellers when they have to book a ticket.
Referring back to my case, I just went ahead with reservation with a prayer on my lips.I tracked the status regularly, and few days before the status got changed to RAC and then finally I was alloted a berth in the train after the TTE found few vacant berths after the train had commenced its journey.
Text: CC by SA 3.0
Image: From Wiki Commons :Indian_metre_gauge_Train.jpg
Business Analytics for Railways reservation system
Computer Literacy for School Children
Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan seeks to achieve universalization of elementary education by 2010. SSA also seeks to provide Computer Education to bridge Digital Divide.
I am contributing to a session on Computer Literacy for School Children during Barcamp Bangalore 8 on Mar 7-8 2009. In this we will explore the status of computer education in Schools and discuss how to usher in 100% Computer Literacy for School Children. We investigate the status of the school education, the approaches to bring down the cost of hardware and discuss the key issues towards 100% computer literacy for school children. The presentation is given below
Firefox indic session - A report
As Mozilla is sponsoring this barcamp, Firefox stickers were issued to all the participants when they registered for the day. I presented Firefox indic session at Barcampbangalore7 on 14 Sep 2008. There were just 3 people in the audience when the session started. It soon became 10 to 15 people. The presentation went on for exactly 45 minutes, in an interactive mode.
Couple of students from Amritha Institute of technology were keen to understand the status of Tamil localization of Firefox. After the session, I showed them the relevant Bugzilla bugs and suggested the next steps like contacting the lead localizer and using IRC for all their questions. Several people wanted to know about easy ways of contributing to localization. I pointed them to Narro
project. One guy wanted to know why we are doing this, as there are not many people using localized versions. I explained that this is a chicken and egg problem and we need the localization to break the barrier, which will result in a positive feedback loop, making the technology reach most school educated Indians, even if they do not know English.
Firefox indic localization session at Barcamp7
Barcampbangalore7, is scheduled for 13,14 September 2008. This is going to be my third barcamp. As is the norm in technology, by the third attempt, any product becomes successful or looses the race. So is any initiative. I thought I should start real contributions to the Barcamp.
I have been working on Firefox Telugu localization for over 9 months and went through a lot of learnings about contributing to the open source world, be it setting up wiki pages for project, creating email-lists or tracking fellow contributors and chasing the coordinators to increase the prirority for our initiative. The Telugu version of Firefox was to have released with Firefox 2.13, but is now likely to be available with firefox 3.0.2 beta . As several other Indian languages are also planned for release, I proposed a session in the upcoming barcamp on this topic.
I propose to cover the following
- Brief history of Firefox, Features of firefox,
- Localization tips
- Other initiatives to strengthen Indic localization.
I welcome other contributors to join me for this session.
