I was born and brought up in Bangalore. I completed my Education in Bangalore. I did my graduation with majors in Computer Science.

Brought up from a orthodox Brahmin family learnt Vedas in my early days. I am also very much inclined to spirituality. I practice 'Reiki' everyday and have interest in Meditation, Occult Sciences and other spiritually related stuff. For more information about these stuff you can visit http://reiki.org.I also have a keen interest in Astrology and in knowing how it affects every person in his day to day life. Probably one day I would like to write a book on these subjects.

Generally speaking I am a very shy and reserved sort of guy, but once I make friends I don't have any problems in communicating with them. In my school days I was a philatelist collecting stamps (got influenced from my brother). I very recently got to know that I have a great passion in photography. I should say that I got good acclamations from my 'Servelots' team members that I am a good photographer. I would be the official photographer whenever 'Team Servelots' goes for a trip. If you are interested in viewing my favourite photo clips please visit http://www.myfavorites.photosite.com.

I dreamt of getting into Medical Sciences as i was very much interested in learning the human architecture rather learning the computer architecture. As the adage goes 'Man proposes, God disposes', I landed up in Computer Science. However, I don't have any regrets in learning about Computers. I like more of home food than hotel stuff. My favorite is curd rice and pickle without that I don't get sleep :)

I have a great passion for sports be it Cricket, Tennis, Formula 1 or Football. My favorite Football club is Manchester United and my favorite player is Thiery Henry. I am also a great fan of 'Debian' a kernel built on Linux OS because of its package structure. I also have keen interests in getting to know more about networking and OS configuration like how routers work, how to configure them, about the DNS servers etc.. (Thanks to our system administrator). I refer to http://compnetworking.about.com for more information on routers, DNS servers etc...

I joined Servelots in September 2004. Since then, I am working with the development team of Pantoto. I am enjoying my work here in Servelots. I have worked with many clients like 'Dharani Trust', 'Saathii', and 'CED'. The very interesting part is that I got an opportunity to interact with the clients like 'Dharani', get to know what they want and then implementing the same. I also had my part in building communities with my team members. I would say I learnt a lot of the technical aspects when the entire Pantoto code was revamped and Re-Engineered. I really feel very happy to be a part of the team in releasing the new Pantoto code base. The best Part in Servelots which I will not forget in my life-time is about having Lunch at Servelots and playing cricket with team members. All the team members get their food and share with each other. I don't know whether I would get a team like this when I go out of Servelots.

I would also like to mention about our cute dogs at Servelots: Prati and Neelkant.

'Happy working at Servelots' :)

I was born in this beautiful city of Bangalore on June 11 1982. From that auspicious day its been a joy growing up in this garden city for the past 23 years. According to me, this is the best place in the world to live even with all the traffic chaos and other problems the city is facing. Films, a phenomenon passed on by cousin to me has been integral part of my life since my childhood. It would be hard now, for people associated with me, to believe that I used to imagine stories and team up with my friends to make our "dummy" films since early part of school days. This would have been my chosen profession by interest, but as usual since parents in India want their son/daughter to choose a more "secure" career I took up my studies seriously to earn a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science from Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering (Visveshwariah Technological University) in the year 2004.

Cricket has been my passion since my childhood as it is to millions of Indians. I enjoy both playing and watching cricket.

Mine is a very large family with lots of cousins, uncles, aunties with the usual jealousy, anger, tension between some of them as in a typical Indian family. Coming to our own sub-family, I am the eldest son as usual with lots of responsibilities, with my brother Vishal being more carefree and less responsible. My mom and my grandmother are the guiding force behind us. I joined Servelots Infotech Pvt Ltd on Febraury 22, 2005 to pursue my IT career. Programming is an an eternal joy I enjoy forgetting everything else in my life and keeps motivated me to sit days together continuously. It gives me immense pleasure when a task conceived by me is completed successfully.

My experience at Servelots has been wonderful, I have learnt so many things with help of my wonderful and helpful colleagues and of course Google. The thought that my work helps NGO's excites me a lot. Working for one of our client SAATHII which focuses on issues like AIDS and our Tsunami Portal (knowledge bank for tsunami rehabilitation) has made me put my work in a much better perspective. My new code base experience was absolutely great. Working with Jason was such a delight it completely transformed me in terms of the way a "program should be written". Working on technologies like hibernate has improved my learning curve tremendously.

With this release our Pantoto software is in a much better state to serve the "information management" needs and hope it further improves and there will be lot many features in next release. I would like to sincerely acknowledge all my colleagues who helped at many stages in new code-base, especially Sapana for being considerate enough to give me more time and extend my deadline very often.

Special thanks to Surekha, Raghavan, Arun, Geetha, Jason and Dinesh.

I have been with Servelots for the last one and the half year mainly taking care of the project management tasks. In addition, I am also involved in proposal writing , talking about Pantoto to the potential clients, training existing clients, creating Pantoto communities etc. Currently I am on a sabbatical to take care of my daughter and trying to contribute as much as time allows me from home.

I did my high school from Kendriya Vidyalaya, Hyderabad, after which I graduated with an engineering degree from Osmania University. I went to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for my Masters in Computer Science. My first job was with Verizon, which last for about a year and half. I learned client management and team management here. Eager to get more technical than managerial, I joined CommerceOne and there I started my acquaintance with Java for the next year and a half. When the parent company went down with its stocks, so did my project and team and I was lucky to into American Management System (AMS) on time. At AMS, I worked mainly on the Federal and State govt. projects. We usually had aggressive deadlines which meant working long hours and over the weekends. At the end it taught me how big projects are executed and how different parts of the team has to work together for the deliverables.

My husband and I decided to return back to India to be close to our family and to do what we liked to do. I have always wanted to do something, however small it might be, that will have a positive impact on our society. So I decided to take up an offer at Servelots and Janastu after having being in the corporate world for about 6 years. Servelots provided me the platform of combining my skills and experience with my desire to work with the Indian civil society organizations.

At Servelots and Janastu, I have had the opportunity to work with organizations like SAATHII (www.saathii.org), Dharani Trust(www.doccentre.org) , Shramik (www.shramik.org) and many others. Additionally, Janastu was awarded the PAN Asia ICT R&D grant for March 2005 for integrating GIS/Mapping solution system in the Tsunami Knowledge Center portal. And recently Janastu along with SSAEL , received Global Village Energy Partnership, in this project Janastu will be responsible for creating the Knowledge Management tools.

Even though most of our projects are smaller in scale, the impact they can bring is huge. The Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and the NGO/NPO sector in India is not well targeted by the IT industry. These organizations work at the grassroots levels, so there is a lot more that IT can do to bring about change. Servelots and Janastu have focused on empowering the SMEs and the NPOs/NGOs with IT. We use the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), which helps us to keep our development costs low. Our own product Pantoto, which is an information and communication management system, is freely available at SourceForge. Being a part of the FOSS community has also given me a new perspective on the software and the business development around it.

The best part of my job has been to meet, interact and know so many wonderful people, who are working with their organizations to make India a better society. I look forward to many more years of meeting such people at Servelots and Janastu.

I am an Engineering graduate in Computer Science and Engineering. I graduated from Bharathidasan University, Trichurapalli(http://www.trichy.com), Tamilnadu.

I am basically from Tirupati (http://www.tirumala-tirupati.com/tirupati.php), the town of world's costliest God, lord Venkateswara, alias Balaji(http://www.tirumala.org/). My interests as a kid were automobiles. Driving is my passion and would love to drive any vehicle from a two wheeler to a 16 wheeler. I became passionate towards computers when my father used to be the language consultant for a Machine Translation Project called Anusaaraka (http://ltrc.iiit.net/~anusaaraka/). You can try this tool at http://ltrc.iiit.net/~anusaaraka/test_release.html .

My career started from Language Technologies Research Center, IIIT, Hyderabad in 2002. I joined as a project associate in the same Machine Translation Project for which my father was language consultant. I was involved in designing the user interface to display the translated output which is in Indian Languages. During this course, I learned about encoding schemes, font etc. It was a good learning experience and very few will get an opportunity to learn such a things. This is the place where I became aware about open source software and open source movement. Even though I was not totally clear about the movement, I always wanted to develop software tools that would benefit a larger group of audience and everything for free of cost.

I joined Servelots as an Indic Sarai(http://sarai.net) Fellow in 2004 with the objective of localizing Pantoto Communities Software. I am supported by Sarai for developing a tool set for support of Indian Languages on web applications [link to your proposal on the web]. This project was in collaboration with Surekha Sastry. These tools include typing tool on the web, conversion utilities between different encoding schemes, An Analyser for Indian Languages etc. The typing tool was developed as a Firefox extension and is being used and extended by many users. We have received a tremendous response and appreciation for the Indian Language typing tool.

Ever since I joined Servelots, I started working on Pantoto Community Software. I have had several learning experiences at Servelots from technical aspects to non-technical aspects. Since the Pantoto Communities Software was being used by NGO's working on different social aspects and since NGO's work with local people, it was a good place where the typing tool will find some scope. Many NGO's are now able to manage their information effectively using Pantoto Communities Software and using one software many common things can be achieved which will be extensively used in any type of NGO. Revamping of Pantoto Communities Software code gave me an opportunity to learn new technologies like
Hibernate, Jakarta-i18n library etc and I am happy that it is so easy and clear to understand and extend. I was also able help people to install the Pantoto Communities Software on windows platform. Troubleshooting errors for Pantoto installation on windows gave me an opportunity to gain a troubleshooting experience. It also helped me to sense the understanding of people's mind while they read the instructions and helped me to write the instructions with less confusion.

The Indic Project has been supported by Sarai, Delhi. Being a part of this project has given him an opportunity to contribute back to the open source community.

I have participated at several events related to Indian Language Computing/Support. I was a speaker at Foss.in/2005 event held in Bangalore in December '2005 and presented the Morphological Analyser for
Indian Languages, its need, its applications, technical details and an example on how to integrate it with any java based web application like Pantoto Communities Software.

My sincere acknowledgments to Anusaaraka Group, Sarai, Servelots, Users and Contributors of Indic IME Firefox Extension.

I am a graduate in computer science and engineering, graduated from Hira Sugar Rural Enginnering College, Nidasoshi (Vishweshwariah technological university), in the year 2003.

I am basically from Chikodi, Belgaum district. My aim since childhood was to become an engineer which later narrowed down to computer engineering! I joined C.B.Kore polytechnic, Chikodi as a lecturer, in 2003, where I got an opportunity to meet various people.

Joining Servelots in 2004, I have built a blooming carrer in the world of java. Finding better ways to implement my inovative ideas for the open source content management system, Pantoto. Developing communities, working on different skins of Pantoto, localization of messages has been a good experience for me at Servelots.

After joining Servelots I have got to know more about open source software and I have got an opportunity to attend FOSS event held at Bangalore, on December 2005 and the imporatance of FOSS (Free Open Source Software) for developing countries like India.

My sincere acknowledgements to Servelots.

I am from Hospet, close to the historical ruins of Hampi, the site of medieval Vijayanagar Empire. I did my schooling and Bachelor in Science (B.Sc) from Hospet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospet). I then did my post graduation, MCA from Bharathidasan University, Trichy. My interest as a kid was to become a doctor. But I got interested with computers after I saw my brother play with a small pocket computer that my dad bought for him.

My job career started from International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad in 2002. I was a project associate in Anusaaraka (English to Hindi Machine Translation system). I was involved in developing the user interface to display the output in Indian languages. Working under the project Anusaaraka introduced me to computing in Indian languages. It was a good learning experience for me working with encoding schemes, fonts, etc. Ever since then, I have been interested in Indian language computing. The other thing that I was introduced to working at IIIT was about the open source movement. The open source movement is a large movement of computer scientists, programmers, and other computer users that advocates unrestricted access to the source code of software. Openness in the field of information technology got me interested in working for projects which use open source technologies.

I have been working at Servelots Infotech, Bangalore since March 2004 when I joined Servelots as a Sarai consultant. Ever since then, I have been involved in the development of Pantoto which is an open source CMS. As a Sarai consultant I have been working with Srinivasa Raghavan developing Indic toolset (http://mail.sarai.net:8080/indic). Some of the tools developed during the course of consultancy are the Indic IME toolbar (http://indicime.mozdev.org) for Mozilla based browsers, Morphological analyzer for Indian languages (http://tinyurl.com/a7ps8), conversion utilities from ISCII-UNICODE-UTF8 (http://sarovar.org/projects/codeconverters).

Working at Servelots has been a good experience for me at different levels. The first level of experience has been working with different NGO's that pursue activities to promote the interests of the poor, protect the environment, provide basic social services, or undertake community development, etc. Being involved in the development of Pantoto communities software and the different NGO's that I work with, has gotten me excited about the reach of Information Technology. Information Technology that can reach the common non-IT savvy people by providing tools to help manage their communities. And the skills of providing Indian language support to these tools fits really well here because we are looking at the common man/community who can use the information technology to meet their needs. My responsibilities at Servelots range from development, managing the team, discussing and implementing new technologies, re-engineering the product architecture wherever necessary etc.

The Indic project has been supported by Sarai, Delhi, at the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies. Being a part of this project has given me an opportunity to contribute to the community by providing a toolset for Indian languages. The tool is a Indic firefox extension, which allows the users to create content in Indian languages in web pages. Using this tool, users can create/share information in Indian languages across the world wide web.

I have participated at various events. I was a speaker at the Foss.in/2005 event and presented the Javascript Indic extension that was developed for Mozilla based browsers. This event was held during December 2005 in Bangalore. The focus of the talk was on identifying the needs of the people in the local context to use web based applications, how this tool helped meet the needs, some technical aspect of how the tool is implemented, the people who have used the tool and enhanced it for their own requirement, etc. (http://foss.in/2005/slides/Javascript_Indic_Input_Method_Editor.sxi). I also gave a talk at Mount Carmel College (MCC), Bangalore propagating and motivating students about the power of open source software.

My sincere acknowledgments to Anusaaraka Group (http://ltrc.iiit.net/~anusaaraka/), Sarai (http://floss.sarai.net), Servelots, extended Servelots Team, Jason, and my family and friends.

Susan is a PhD in Computer Science (Amsterdam, 1997). She has a multinational background: born in USA, brought up in Turkey, graduated in USA (1992). Her interest is mainly in building purposeful online communities and democratization of information. From Sept. 1999, she has worked on realizing the PANTOTO Communities software.

I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Iowa, and have also been in academia, research and industry in the USA and the Netherlands. I have worked in the areas of object-oriented programming, generation of software from specifications, and structuring information for its multi-faceted use on the Internet. Development of the Pantoto Communities software and its application domains have gotten me excited about various activities and groups in social development sector. Janastu is an NGO that is setup to promote active involvement with projects in the social development sector.