[Tugindia] Suggestions

[Radhakrishnan CV]

Seeing the enthusiasm now generated among subscribers and the kind of
ideas coming forward, I am tempted to suggest something that will
carry this forward into actualizing those ideas and to keep up the
enthusiasm.  Why not we consider the following:

1. Let us make a development council inside TUGIndia where people can
   volunteer to assist. Even if you have only an hour to spare per
   week, it is sufficient to do a lot of things (52 hours per year!),
   if not TUGIndia miserably loose this valuable volunteer time.

2. We shall have separate web page for development work.

3. Members of this council can take/share responsibilities to: 
   
   * collect various packages written in Indian institutions if they
     agree to share the code among their fellow human beings, enlist,
     document, create web pages, provide links.

   * enlist the work done on Indic scripts so far, provide links,
     brief documentation if possible.

   * enlist the missing items in Indic scripts and seek volunteers and
     coordinate the work.

   * write OTP's for Indic fonts for Omega. Rajkumar has already
     started for Malayalam. We have a good and lively link with Omega
     team, which means Indic scripts will find their way into Omega as
     soon as we write these OTP's.

   * MusicTeX which is a wonderful sytem to typeset music scores
     should be explored to typeset scores of Indian music. AJ Alex
     <alexaj@vsnl.com> has done a good job on this which should be
     followed up and pursued vigourously, which provides a great
     avenue for documenting Indian music. See the work of Alex at:

        http://www.tug.org.in/download/janagana.ps.gz

   * write HOW-TO's as suggested by Ajit.

   * conduct the online examination.

   * write white papers, tutorials

   * follow up Ajit's excellent suggestion on TOAST.

   * weekly update of new CTAN releases in a separate web page. We
     have atleast ten updates/releases every week, which no one is
     eve aware of.

   * rejuventate TUGIndia Journal which is suspended for want of
     contrbutors and volunteers. I am sure, KG Kumar can lead this
     project successfully. TUGIndia Journal has a good reputation and
     many people have asked me why we'd stopped it. Since, we have new
     adventures being tried on like regional chapters, other programs
     like micro enterprises project of government of Kerala based on
     TeX, we need a medium to communicate within TeX community and
     outside as well to update them on various matters including
     emerging technologies.

   * suggest, design and write packages that should percolate into the
     global document universe. For instance, integration of POVray
     into LaTeX is a good choice that people might love to have.

If we don't start the job now, listers might be frustrated after some
time for reasons of loud talk, but nothing substantial is happening
around.  I would earnestly request the following to form the
development council and provide adequate leadership in various matters
so that others can join the team.

 1. Ajit Ranade     (Mumbai) 
 2. S Rajkumar      (Trivandrum)
 3. HS Rai          (Roorkie)
 4. Amitabh Trehan  (Delhi)
 5. Manjusha Joshi  (Pune)
 6. S Venkataraman  (Chennai)
 7. AJ Alex         (Trivandrum)
 8. Kaveh Bazargan  (UK -- our ambassodor to TUG)
 9. Dinesh Karia    (Ahmedabad)
10. E Krishnan      (Trivandrum -- Chief architect of TUGIndia tutorials)
11. KSS Nambooripad (Trivandrum -- Chairman, TUGIndia)
12. Palash P Pal    (Calcutta)
13. SC Phatak       (Bhubaneswar)
14. CV Rajagopal    (Trivandrum)
15. Yogananda       (Bangalore)
16. Giri Narayana   (Bangalore)
17. Satish Babu     (Trivandrum -- great organizer who chaired TUG2002)
18. KG Kumar        (Trivandrum -- media man to talk to the world)

I believe, all these people are reading this mail. Once you form the
team, people will be inspired to join and help the team.  We have a
representative selection of people across the country that makes a
wonderful team together. What a bunch great human resource! A few
hours of your time per week cumulatively can do wonders! :-))

Any thoughts?

Best.

-- 
Radhakrishnan