best way to foster cooperation is to start at the grassroots… and when a few shining examples of partnering emerge, and there are testimonials about it…. people will start to take notice.

Quote “I am not sure what your impression about the addas in Kolkata are”
I am referring to coffee houses where people sit for hours talking politics not the OCC tech ones. I really do not know about the OCC ones but do you who where the original pioneers .So these thoughts are out of the box not related to existing processes.

Quote “Maintaining both in such an open community is really the role of a few key people in the community who can actually drive the whole community, not by commanding, but by mutual moderation.”

I totally agree with you on this . A community is grown by empowering the members .And no easy task ,I have seen many communities die out or become inactive due to top down hierarchies and complex management structures.

Quote “as far as I know, the quality is good but the participation is fading out. ”
Though my previous post was speaking in general ,I was studying some OCC google groups and comparing the activity today compared to a year ago when the original founders were active.

Quote “Again, this is due to (i) scarcity of critical mass & (ii) hence, lack of bandwidth.”
Good points. Critical mass on a community IMHO is driven by the enthusiasm of the existing members .your views..

One the point of lack of bandwidth I disagree the best example is the thriving communities of Usenet since 1979
http://www.giganews.com/usenet-history/index.html

looking back at all the successful start ups we can see it was started by a group of people who were passionate about their idea and stuck to their guns.

So please take these interaction on the comments as just brainstorming.IMHO bouncing ideas off others just widens your idea scope and also streamlines the idea .

@Vijay @Paul
And as far as sustainability is concerned, what is the definition of sustainability? According to me, for a community, sustainability is all about ensuring consistent quality and consistent participation. Maintaining both in such an open community is really the role of a few key people in the community who can actually drive the whole community, not by commanding, but by mutual moderation. And mind it, maintaining these sounds much easier than it is.

@Paul
I am not sure what your impression about the addas in Kolkata are. But being one the initiators of the addas, as far as I know, the quality is good but the participation is fading out. Again, this is due to (i) scarcity of critical mass & (ii) hence, lack of bandwidth.

@Startup
I pretty much agree with you regarding realising how many people are actually interested in joining. But, that is what this post is all about, isn’t it. This post is a continuation of Vijay’s post about having better startup-oriented training through a community method to increase this number of people interested in startups.

@Nikhil
Thanks for pointing out on Rashmi’s & the HelloIntern initiative.
I feel the same and I am game about developing such a portal.
I am just trying to refine ideas & features and this post and its comments are really helpful in doing that.

@ Mitesh – I think it would be worth a try to actually start such a community portal. And this is not a completely new idea, some such efforts have been done in past have had success, albeit limited. For example jobsokplease started by Rashmi Bansal or helloIntern started by a couple of IITB grads.

My suggestion to you would be to GO FOR IT – am sure it won’t take much time to throw together a couple of lines of code to kick the thing off and throw a test for users thereafter. Don’t wait for people to suggest new ideas – just go through existing similar concepts, brainstorm with some of your close friends and start developing.

PS:I am an OCC member and I have experienced this myself.

OCC kAddas? I have no idea ? From what i see on the google groups those places are empty. Why? One of the reason is the right mix of people who can instill enthusiasm.A community life of community depends on the people of their community. If the community has enthu user but those user are not welcoming to outsider this community would die a slow death. Now how many of the occ communities have member who can really really spare their time to spread the word /network and make the community stronger? The time between two posts show how many dedicated members a community has.Just like twitter (compare with plurk)

Quote “It is very important to bring in an element of sustainability in the communities ”
I agree with what vijay has said “The single parent concept of a trainer-trainee wont work”

Are you saying that the FOSS initiative and linux/drupal projects are not sustainable or those members need something else to be sustainable? I remember Microsoft saying the same thing a couple of years ago.

If you look to the programmers in Europe they thrive on information sharing online and offline none of them go to class like computer programming course (A lot of them do study computer science).

A computer programming course would backfire if the students do not get their value for their money. And with social media the news would spread like wildfire .Would you find really really good committed trainers? Computer programming has to be an ongoing process it cannot be limited to 1-6 months.

There are ways to have a low cost adda(I am not talking about occ as I have not see much happening there. The low cost adda is the coffee places in kolkata (big area ,lots of like minded people , lots of chatter and info sharing) a place where you are not told to leave like places in mumbai.The only difference this place would be filled with computer and enthu members who know how to channel the initiative in the right direction without leader/mods/visionaries this place would end in chaos.
A place where a kid can come and assemble his own computer , install linux and code with mentors ready to share and learn.

I think Paul has a point. If we had an idea like the barcamp concept, would we have let it go for free or would we be trying to monetize that too? would we be worried that barcamps/communities cant be sustained since there is no financial motive?

Communities rock. And Thats where civilizations were born, and thats where the next startup culture in india has to be born. The single parent concept of a trainer-trainee wont work – especially if you want to create a robust workforce, I think.

@Kunal:
The company I am working for may not be termed as a startup. It is a 5 year old company which has crossed the phase. But I am not really getting a whopping figure. To be frank, I am getting a very low amount. Kunal, you are on a very senior position and I feel you are somehow missing out the viewpoint of a fresher.
Why do you think I am sticking with my current job, when I know I can get better in the bigger companies?
I have been allotted a project that is completely to myself, I have done the back-end design completely, am through with the functionalities & now I am working on the UI. And believe me, I have a lot of flexibility compared to my friends who work in Capgemini or Mastek, etc. Although I do miss out on learning how the bigger companies work, but I identify that my learning curve here is certainly steeper than those larger companies, and hence I am happy to stay back.
This is what the section Freshers v/s Experienced in my above post addresses. The freshers who are open towards a lower salary for a steeper learning curve and a higher level of exposure, definitely think in that direction because they see it in a long-term view. And that is why we come to a figure of as low as 3-4% of freshers suiting startups.
Another way we can look at this, Kunal, is the gulf. This may be a very nice gulf-creating element which can be improvised upon. Startups don’t anyways need the software engineers who don’t understand what they are doing. Believe me, a majority of my batchmates working in bigger companies like Accenture, Infosys, etc. have learnt some of their actual software stuff in their company trainings and still thrive to pass the company tests. They’re useless for startups. Startups need people who can self-train themselves. I hope u get my point.

given an option to join a startup and an established company what would ur choice be?

how many ppl would join i would really like to know…

Cheers

Training in india sucks. In the 1990 we had mass training institutes like Apple and Niit which dished out people with half baked skills. Their skill where half baked because
1) The training had no industry experience (also remember a good programmer does not make that person a good trainer).
2) The interaction ,course material and computer time was limited
3) Some places made student code on paper (no debugging etc)

People should stop looking to make money out of every single idea this would help in the long term. Addas->Good programmers->Cutting Edge dev->Revenue come….