Shalini A

Technology and Community Coordinator and Research Associate

Janastu.org and Servelots.com

+91-9986971886 | shalini@servelots.com

Servelots and Janastu are an Open Source group working at the interface of Technology and Society, progressively moving to the needs of low-literate, decentralized communities where we explore the role of technology in shifting structural inequalities to sustainable equitable societies. In this holistic view, I coordinate provisioning of crafts centers, community radio and community ownership of wifi-mesh networks and services keeping in mind the gender issues in rural villages.

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Servelots Infotech Pvt. Ltd Sep 2008 - till date

Position: Coordinator

• Hands-on experience in the application development & enhancement for the open source projects.
• Worked on various research oriented projects which required software development, field work, testing and monitoring, and report writing.
• Apart from the core projects, I am also a part of the network/system administrator group of the group.
• Working on gender equality and livelihoods with crafts and technology.
• Managing and monitoring the server, maintenance, migration and writing scripts are some of the key jobs.
• Also been in a role for managing the finance/accounts for more than 5 years.
• Participation in Digital Rights and Internet Governance and Community Networks meetings.

WORK EXPERIENCE .

Product Design and Development

● COWMesh - Technical Lead, 2014-2017 & 2019-present

      Place of execution: Tumkur, Bidar, Maharashtra, Mirzapur, Kotegiri, Sathgatta

• Setting up a wireless mesh that users can join using available devices, such as low end feature phones, Smart-phones and even old television sets via the addition of a low cost computing device such as a RaspberryPi and with the routers configured with existing open source Mesh firmwares.

● Work 4 Progress Technology Challenge - Tech Lead, Dec’19 - July’21

      Place of execution: Mirzapur district, Eastern Uttar Pradesh

• Challenge was awarded by “la Caxia” banking foundation in partnership with Development Alternatives to build an ICT based solution to overcome the lack of connectivity, mobility and safety in workspaces for young women(aged 18-15), thereby giving them an access to alternate income generation opportunities.
• I was part of developing a DIY ‘Webinar Pi’ Kit, a Raspberry Pi that serves as a node in the mesh but in turn is also catering to a small group's need of doing online classes and other learning needs. I was providing online technical support to the girls and was also engaging them in virtual sessions.

*● Physical Computing courseware - Srishti Design School - 2021

• Developed courseware and training material for design students on "Physical Computing", a course on making interactive and utilitarian devices.

● Follow the Sheep - Research Engineer at Centre for Exact Humanities Department, 2012-2014 and 2014-2015 IIIT-Hyderabad &, Technical Lead, Foundation for Ecological Security

      Place of execution: Belgaum

• Built an Android application for the Follow the Sheep project which allows to track, record waypoints interactively on the map with photo, text-note and voice recordings. The recorded tracks in the GPX format along with the media files can be uploaded to the server. Provided software assistance, maintenance and training on the field.

● Exploring local crafts around the villages of Tumkur District and was part of skill development programmes run by the organization.

● Wordpress Website design and configuration for Dr. Chaluvaraju, Kannada University, Hampi based on the field data, maps and media documents as part of Digitizing Hampi project.

• Building cultural heritage walks on Hampi murals using imaging techniques such as RTI tools, open source Mapping tools to collect GPX traces, Image tiling.
• Built a skeleton structure of Girija Kalyana ontology and web work on mural annotations with the team.
• Coordinated to build the vijayanagara.in website using Mouchak CMS. The project is about archiving Hampi in the digital form.

● Swtr, Semantic Web Tweets - an annotation tool to annotate images, tiled images and text on a web page.

● Alipi, a re-narration web tool, is a generic Web-framework for developing and rendering narratives that assist in accessing Web-content across cultural boundaries. Alipi specially addresses the needs of the print-impaired community by indicating structure in a web page and helping following it visually.

● Building modules for PANTOTO - communities managing community content, a community software that can help capture, maintain, and analyze data in a simple and sustainable manner, without the need for continuous technical support.

Network/System Administrator:

● Functions as the systems administrator for linux systems and servers.

● Configuring CMS such as WordPress, Omeka. Django, Mouchak for the development and production environment.

● Docker based configuration on the server. Testing and maintenance of the production server.

● Configured Raspberry Pi devices for COWMesh project an experimental project with the development of the locally-governed wireless network. Also building Mesh out of PI’s and routers.

● Configuring and setting up the routers with the open source softwares.

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

Operating systems: Linux

System development: C, Python scripts, Java

CMS: Django, wordpress, PANTOTO, Omeka

Web: HTML5, CSS3, Python, Javascript

Databases: Mysql, Sqlite, Mongo, Postgres

EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATION .

B.E in Information Science and Technology From Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkur, Year-2007

LANGUAGES .

English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu