Reaching out to others! Free & Open Source Software, Kannada, L10n, L18n Data Science, Cloud Computing & more…

Omshivaprakash H L

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

 

As an Individual & FOSS enthusiast I started my journey in FOSS activism, Open Access & Open Knowledge diaspora around my Mother Tongue Kannada in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. A language spoken by a larger population in the southern region of India. I started writing tech (especially on FOSS) under my blog Linuxaayana (https://linuxaayana.net) way back in 2006. This helped me build a like minded bloggers community and huge readership who wanted to hear more about the possibilities of tech in Kannada. As a part of my first community engagement, I was able to drive the first localized install fest called Gnu/Linux Habba in Bengaluru. It was the first of its kind for FOSS in Kannada and it attracted more than 300+ participants into a small workshop area. Since then, I have been engaging in building communities around Kannada for technology development, Free and Open Knowledge initiatives etc.. 

 

Founder member of Sanchaya (https://sanchaya.org – 2010) Kannada Language Technology Research & Study Forum. 

 

“Sanchaya” is a not for profit forum  working to enhance technical capabilities for Kannada Literature Research. ‘Sanchaya’ was born with an intent to make an impact in the area of Kannada & Technology. ‘Sanchaya’ is exploring the possibilities of using technology in Linguistics and Literary research. Tools designed and developed by ‘Sanchaya’ are available for the larger community through Internet and Mobile platforms. ‘Vachana Sanchaya’ is a platform built to enable research on Vachana Literature which is already available for the public. We have dreams to build many more such initiatives. Projects binding both Literary & Technology Knowledge through our platforms are based on the inspiration of creating atmosphere around Free Information & Free Knowledge through Free Software. Sanchaya is a not for profit platform working around building the technological capacity around Kannada Literary research.

 

At Sanchaya, I have envisioned a series of language technology projects to build research tools around Kannada literature called Vachana Sahitya from the 10th-12th century. The project named Vachana Sanchaya (https://vachana.sancahya.net) allows common men to research 25000 Vachana’s (form of sayings from the poets from this era). This tool has helped various researchers & literary enthusiasts to appreciate literature through technology. This work has been extended to various other literature to build a larger digitized corpus in the public domain. Around Sanchaya, experiments around community epublishing called Arivina Alegalu, Hejje (Ted Talk like Event) were conducted to appreciate knowledge dissemination from the so-called common man or a community participant.

 

Digitization has been playing a major role in all our volunteering projects recently 

 

Pada Sanchaya (https://pada.sanchaya.net) large lexicon for Kannada to fulfil the need of word corpus required for spell/grammar checker tools for language, better reference tools for students to be fulfilled through this in coming days. 

 

Pustaka Sanchaya (https://pustaka.sanchaya.net) – Index for public domain books & others for easy reference. We also worked on making inaccessible – romanized public library projects accessible by crowdsourcing metadata for Kannada. When DLI (Digital Library of India) & OUDL (Osmania University Digital Library) projects became inaccessible – I worked on making these books available on archive.org with the unicode metadata crowd sourced & reviewed. 

 

– Books Digitization Project –  From March 2019 – I have volunteered to digitize out of copyright books at Indain Academy Of Sciences, Bengaluru with the help of Internet Archive (https://archive.org) ttscribe scanner provided by https://public.resource.org ‘s Carl Malamud – a brief on this can be found in his blog at http://blog.archive.org/2019/10/20/jai-hind-jai-gyan-india-on-the-internet-archive/ . In the last 6 months we have been able to scan more than 1200+ books in 10+ different languages. I have also been able to work on getting partnerships with individuals, couple of organizations to get continuous stack of books for this project. – These books are now available at https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3A%28ServantsOfKnowledge%29 

 

– Here are the list of other projects run by Sanchaya around Kannada Classical Literature

  1. https://daasa.sanchaya.net/
  2. https://sarvajna.sanchaya.net/
  3. https://kavirajamarga.sanchaya.net/
  4. https://ranna.sanchaya.net/
  5. https://janna.sanchaya.net/

 

We intend to build a centralized search to help visualize the development of the language as described here in my slides “Conserving Linguistic Heritage the FOSS way‍“ https://sanchaya.org/conserving-linguistic-heritage-the-foss-way/

 

Founder Member of Sanchi Foundation (https://sanchifoundation.org 2014 )- a not for profit organization working for the documentation of audio-visual heritage.

 

Sanchi Foundation has been working towards documenting folk, classical art forms and other streams of indigenous knowledge on priority basis. We hope this effort will help us create a community, which contributes to documenting our times and lives, which will eventually become the collective source of knowledge. We want to make our documentation available for public use for free. So all the documentation done through Sanchi Foundation will be released under Creative Commons licenses and released to public usage. However, it would be restricted from commercial usage. We are a not for profit organization. Our work happens through  donations from generous donors. We also depend on community participation for documentation.

 

We have over 190 videos curated over 5 years now. Most of them are around theatre practices, performances, and special discussions, speeches around arts and culture. We have a collection of many old theatre performances, folk art forms like Yakshagana, Kathakali and many such important representations in our archive. We are constantly in the process of increasing our collection with important audio-visual documents.

 

Web site: sanchifoundation.org

YouTube: www.youtube.com/sanchifoundationonline

 

Volunteering in Open Knowledge & Open Access Projects

Wikipedia 

I have been editing on Wikipedia since 2007 (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Omshivaprakash ), sysop on Kannada wikipedia where my contribution varies from editing, creating community projects, editathons, providing technical leadership for various wiki projects. I’m also active in Indian Wikimedia community by participating in various knowledge sharing engagements around wikisource, wikipedia, digitization projects etc. 

 

Bidar Fort QR Pedia Project has a vision to help the locals with socio-economic benefits while preserving the local art called Bidri

 

https://rotarynewsonline.org/qr-code-for-bidars-whispering-monuments-2/

 

Mozilla

At Mozilla, I volunteer as a Rep from Bengaluru, https://reps.mozilla.org/u/omshivaprakash. I have been actively contributing to Mozilla Firefox L10n project. 

 

WordPress

At WordPress, I volunteer as a Community Editor, Translator for Kannada, 

 

& Many others

 

Books

  • Creative Commons Kannada 101 

ISBN: 

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Commons-Kannada-101-Omshivaprakash-ebook/

 

MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS

 

I have written technology, open access, open knowledge,  policy & privacy related articles  to various local newspapers & magazines in Karnataka. 

 

CONFERENCES/WORKSHOPS ATTENDED AND PAPERS PRESENTED

  • FOSS United- FOSS Meetup – March 2021
  • Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021
  • MiniDeb Conf – 2021
  • Creative Commons Lightning Talk 2020
  • Wikisource Advance Training 2019
  • 78th Akhila Bharata Kannada Sahitya Sammelana -2012, Gangavati, Koppala
  • 81st Akhila Bharata Kannada Sahitya Sammelana -2015, ShravanaBelagola, Hasana
  • Mathru Bhasha – one day national conference by Kannada Development Authority
  • Vachana Vijayotsava 2014 – Bidar
  • <Yet to be updated>

 

Awards & Recognition 

 

  1. DH Changemaker 22 in 2022

News18 Kannada – Varshada Kannadiga 2021 – Science & Technology – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPqNwjHPtz0 | https://youtu.be/rv2HflZm4nk 

 

Prajavani Varshada Kannadiga 2020 – https://20in20.prajavani.net/h-l-omshivaprakash-technology-yuva-sadhakaru-bengaluru-rural 

 

Languages spoken: Kannada, English, Hindi

Project Portals

 

Personal Portals 

 

Social Presence

 

 

Professional Work Experience 

I have more than 18 years of   experience in the information technology sector as an educator, mentor, consultant, operations head and international business development manager. With a sound knowledge of IT & Cloud systems and an innate ability to map customer goals to resilient IT solutions I have architected & built successfully running Cloud infrastructure for a wide range of industries including eCommerce, Social Engagement, Media, Tech startups etc.  

Experience

 

Current: Building own startup 

 

2003 – 2020: Carmatec IT Solutions Private Limited, Bangalore –

Director Business Development

In Past –  Cloud Architecture and Tech Stack Consulting, Business Development, Previously worked as VP Technology, Head, Technology & Training – Technical Manager – System Integrator, Solution Specialist, Team leader, System Administrator

 

2001 – 2003: NIIT Rajajinagar, Bangalore (2.4 years) – Faculty, CNA

 

EDUCATION

I hold an MBA Degree from The Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India University, Tripura. iGNIIT Certified from NIIT.

 

Certifications:

Creative Commons Certified Educator 

ITIL® Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management

CloudU Certificate

SUN Certified Network Administrator (SCNA) for SOLARIS 9

SUN Certified SOLARIS System Administrator (SCSA Level 2) for SOLARIS 9

SUN Certified SOLARIS System Administrator (SCSA Level 1) for SOLARIS 9

AWS Business Professional

AWS Technical Professional

iGNIIT Certification from NIIT

E-Certification Courses in .Net from NIIT Netvarsity

Oracle DBA Certification Course from NIIT