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.dharanitrust.org), SSAEL(www.shrishakti.com), FireFlies, Swabhimana, CED (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.