Full Name: Jonnalagadda Chandra Kiran
DoB: March 14, 1979
Age: 28
Education: Yes

Objective

I help technology startups find their feet, assisting in various capacities from part-time trainer to chief technologist.

Associations and Fellowships

• Co-organiser, Barcamp Bangalore, an unregistered collective organising open events.
• Student, Diploma in Cultural Studies at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (August 2006 - April 2007, extended to 2008).
• Member, Zope Foundation (June 2006 - Present).
• Member, Plone Foundation (February 2005 - Present).
• Trustee, Brundavan Educational Trust, which runs the Tapovan ICSE school near Jigani Industrial Estate, Bangalore Rural (2002 - Present).
• Independent Fellow, Sarai, studying how user interface affects online discussion and the resulting community (December 2004 - August 2005).

Experience

January 2006 - Present

Consultant, Government Services at Comat Technologies, coordinating technology infrastructure for Comat’s Rural Information Kiosks initiative and assisting with various projects.

February 2004 - Present

Information architect, focusing on the area between database storage and user interface. Working with:

1. The Institute of Bioinformatics (overall span July 2002 - July 2004; see below).
2. Mahiti Infotech (see below).
3. The Centre for Study of Culture and Society, on building a courseware site for their online MA in Cultural Studies course, subsequently revised to cover the online PhD programme (October 2004 - June 2005).
4. The Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, student cultural committee, on building a community site for the Unmaad 2005 cultural festival (October - November 2004).
5. Partecs Participatory Technologies, as a consultant technology architect at their Pune and (since July 2005) Bangalore offices. Responsible for design and managing implementation of the second generation of their software. Started as a part-time consultant, took up role of project manager (May 2005), and hired a cultural studies scholar to create a more coherent product specification (August 2005) before leaving over disagreements on time commitments and product direction with the company’s owner (December 2004 to October 2005).

Occasional contributor to print publications, including Chip magazine (cover story, June 2004; column, December 2004), and The Hindu Literary Review (On Blogging, May 2005).

August 2003 - January 2004

At Synapse on a Wanderer scholarship, built a media server — a repository of media files with advanced categorisation and retrieval features — for internal use, using Plone. Also worked on other Synapse projects for Punjab Tourism, and consultant to the Institute of Bioinformatics for improvements to the Human Protein Reference Database.

October 2002 - June 2003

Research Trainee at the Akhilesh Pandey Lab at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, USA, continuing work done at the Institute of Bioinformatics (IoB) on building the Human Protein Reference Database, an object database for storing annotations of the human proteome. During my involvement with the project at IoB and the Pandey Lab, I designed the technology back-end, programmed most of it, initiated connections with other organisations that parts of the non-core work was outsourced to, and hired several members of the programming and Web design team that now maintains the database.

July 2001 - September 2002

Freelance technologist. Long term consulting assignments with:

1. Pixel Computers, on deploying and maintaining Linux-based office servers for their clients, including Rittal India.
2. Mahiti, on mentoring their programmers with their Web development (Python/Zope, Java) and systems maintenance (Linux, FreeBSD) work for several of their clients, including TaraHaat, Ashoka Fellows and GIVE Foundation.
3. Infomart, on regular systems implementation and maintenance. Currently running a mail relay server, primary and secondary name servers located in Singapore and Bangalore, and a Web server for all their domains.
4. Institute of Bioinformatics, on building an object database for storing gene and protein related information from the human genome and proteome.

Writing assignments with:

1. The Times Group (publishers of The Times of India).

Short term assignments with:

1. Stylus Systems, on training their programmers on using the Zope application server and setting up an Intranet server on Linux.
2. Inner Wheel Club of Bangalore, on developing their website.
3. VimSoft, on migrating their office network to a Samba domain.

November 2000 - June 2001

Worked with Synapse in Goa on improving personal communication skills and understanding media management. I learnt more than I contributed here.

September 1999 - October 2000

Worked with CHIP magazine’s Internet division (later spun off as Jasubhai Interactive) to setup lunateks.com, a technical discussion site that used the weblog format. In November, started working on the Indian edition of ZDNet.com. Was technology implementation project leader, technical designer, administrator and co-developer until the site’s launch in April 2000. Tools used were Linux as platform, Zope as Web-front, MySQL as database backend, and Majordomo as mailing list manager. Co-designed the second version of ZDNetIndia.com’s content management system (live in November 2000), but did not work on implementation.

January - August 1999

Technology writer with CHIP magazine (now called Digit). Encouraged the use of Linux in the organisation, starting with use as an Internet gateway, then as mail server for the Indian edition of Computer Reseller News (CRN). The mail setup was next upgraded to serve the entire organisation, spanning two offices in different parts of Bombay. The same setup is still in place, as of May 2002.

November 1998 - January 1999

Worked with CyberCash for two months as a trainee Java programmer. Learnt Java but did not make any contribution because the project I was assigned to was delayed by two months, to around when I left.

May - November 1998

Built the viewer for a CD-ROM version of the Bangalore Street Atlas. The viewer supported standard navigation, location bookmarking, printing, and could also interface with a GPS device for mobile use. It was built using Borland Delphi 4 on Windows.

Other Activities

April 2006 and March 2007

Co-organiser of the Barcamp Bangalore, an “un-conference”, an event that breaks away from the conference format by encouraging audience participation and defining a flexible schedule that changes through the day as the event progresses. The event is now scheduled for three times a year.

December 2005

Backpacker, visiting major urban centres in Southeast Asia to observe street life and public infrastructure. Spent about a week each in Bangkok, Thailand; Siem Reap, Cambodia; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Singapore. Together with the United States and India, I have visited six countries thus far.

May 2003 - Present

GIS enthusiast, attempting to place maps of major Indian cities online in a form where users can submit corrections and add annotations for all to see. The project stalled due to unavailability of high-quality map data, but has since picked up again in collaboration with the Collective Research Initiatives Trust. CRIT now operates the Mumbai Free Map and is seeking funding and partners for a Bangalore Free Map.

September 2002 - Present

Amateur photographer, moving up from a digital point and shoot to a film SLR to a digital SLR. Primary interest is street photography. Currently exploring options to make photography an income generating hobby.

September 2001 - June 2002

Club Editor, Rotaract Club of Bangalore. Our December edition of the bulletin won the best bulletin award at the Rotaract Multi District Conference in late November 2001 at Vishakapatnam, India.

March 1999

Co-ordinated writers for the April 1999 CHIP Special issue on Linux.

1996 - 1998

Got online. Worked with Watcom C, Visual Basic and Borland Delphi. In 1996, coded a terminal emulator using Turbo C++ on DOS that supported ZModem file transfer. Later during the year, coded a QWK offline mail client using Visual Basic on Windows for use on local bulletin boards. In 1997, coded a 32-bit game library using Watcom C, Turbo Assembler and Rational Systems’ DOS4G/W, on DOS. In 1998, started working on the second version of the mail client using Delphi but abandoned it after getting a commercial project.

None of the code I wrote during this period is available online though because (a) I often based my code on free code available online with ambiguous license agreements, (b) DOS and 16-bit Windows are both obsolete operating environments now, and (c) situations where the code was useful are obsolete now.

1991 - 1996

Started programming at age 12. Between 1991 and 1996, worked with TURBO BASIC, QuickBASIC, i386 assembler, Turbo Pascal and Turbo C.

Public Appearances

March and April 2007: Group discussion on e-governance in Karnataka at Barcamp Bangalore 3. Also co-organiser.

March 2007: Discussion on the nature of blogging as personal communication media vs mass media at the FOSS Meet at NITC, Calicut.

September 2006: Discussion on the public nature of conversation online, at BlogCamp.in, Chennai.

August 2006: Talk on blogging as journalism and recent events involving online censorship, to first and second year journalism students at Bishop Cotton Women’s College, Bangalore.

April 2006: Discussion on lessons in community management as learnt from the Bangalore LiveJournal community, at the Bangalore Barcamp.

February 2006:Talk on new media journalism at Students in Media workshop, St Joseph’s Evening College, Bangalore.

July 2005: Talk on blogging as a career at the Careers in New Media event organised by Comet Media in Bombay.

January-February 2005: Facilitator of the Open Publishing track at Asia Source. We introduced participants to the Plone and Drupal content management systems, and to blogs and wikis. The participants proceed to build their own camp website using Drupal.

December 2004: Two-day workshop on blogging for students of the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Yelahanka, Bangalore.

December 2004: Talk on Python’s dynamic nature at Linux Bangalore/2004.

May 2004: Introductory talk on Python and Zope at Ankura ’04, the annual tech-fest of the National Institute of Engineering’s IEEE student branch in Mysore.

December 2003: Introductory talk on the Plone CMS at Linux Bangalore/2003.

May 2003: Presentation on ZODB, the Zope Object Database, for the Bangalore Linux User Group.

April 2003: Introductory training session on XML-RPC and SOAP for Yahoo! Engineering in Bangalore.

June 2002: Update on what is new in GNOME 2 for the Bangalore Linux User Group.

January 2002: Presentation on Zope for the Bangalore Linux User Group.

November 2000: Talk on configuring mail servers for the Bangalore Linux User Group’s tech tracks held parallel to IT.COM 2000.

June 2000: Conducted a training session on Zope for first year Master of Computer Applications (MCA) students of SNDT University in Juhu, Mumbai, India, on behalf of the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE).

May 1999: Panel member, Linux Seminar, Mumbai, India. Fielded questions from the audience regarding corporate Linux usage. The panel was headed by the editor and associate editor of PC Quest, then CHIP magazine’s (my employer’s) closest competitor.

March 1999: Attended a Microcomputer Users Club meeting on Linux in Mumbai, India, as a press reporter but ended up becoming one of the speakers for the evening because the original speaker did not turn up.

Peer Reviewed Publications

2004

Navarro, JD et. al. BioBuilder as a Database Development and Functional Annotation Platform for Proteins. BMC Bioinformatics. 2004 Apr 20;5(1):43. [PubMed Id: 15099404]

Peri, S et. al. Human Protein Reference Database as a Discovery Resource for Proteomics. Nucleic Acids Res. 2004 Jan 1;32(1):D497-501. [PubMed Id: 14681466]

2003

Peri, S et. al. Development of Human Protein Reference Database as an initial platform for approaching systems biology in humans. Genome Res. 2003 Oct;13(10):2363-71. [PubMed Id: 14525934]

Navarro, JD, Niranjan, V, Peri, S, Jonnalagadda, CK and Pandey, A. From biological databases to platforms for biomedical discovery. Trends Biotechnol. 2003 Jun;21(6):263-8. [PubMed Id: 12788546]