R K Misra's online initiative ChangeIndia.in. Runs on Joomla and uses Fireboard a forum module for Joomla. The site is hosted at Y! India and E-mail at Google. Changeindia.in doesn't have clean URLs its kind of hard to have custom paths defined in Joomla. No candidates announced for Karnataka elections. RK is a great believer in Private Public Partnership's potential to change India amongst other things he advocates.

lok-paritran.org uses Drupal as the CMS for its site and uses Drupal's in-built forums and looks like they have Gallery integrated into their drupal installation. Though they have clean urls they are not taking full advantage of Drupal's ability to define custom URLs and the clean URLs don't extend all the way to the Forums. Its not clear to me what exactly is Lok-Paritran's agenda, lots of high sounding philosophy and no practical agenda un-like RK's PPP mantra. And shudder they use a M$ Word document to announce their Bangalore candidate list.

Funny how many of us think that Joomla is a pretty CMS but drupal is a workhorse with lots of features and a clean codebase. It would be interesting to draw conclusions about politics of people who use Joomla, Drupal or raw PHP :-)

Jaago.in is built using PHP and shudder these guys are appealing in a very demagogic fashion to the middle class's insecurities and sound downright populist with Rs. 2/KWh electricity provisioning they are promising. There is no candidate list they have announced for Bangalore yet. Their frontpage boasts of a typical GOI like site welcome screen with a enter into link and a flash object.

Wahjava says: so in next elections, no need of polls, just check out the CMS of their site, and compare it on some CMS ranking site, one whose CMS has higher rank should be declared winner :P

We are an experienced startup team looking for interns/parttime/telecommute workers for some exciting web 2.0 projects we are executing.

If you love to use Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr etc. and would love to create similarly exciting social networking and Web 2.0 products for the web then here is your chance to be a part of action. Google.com came out of an initiative by two students to create a university wide search. We believe in such initiatives, where there is a compulsion to use the web for something useful.

Whats the deal :
You get:
1. Equity amount depending upon the time commitment you can offer and efficiency of your effort.
2. Experience in bootstrapping a Web 2.0 startup
3. Understanding how to create web scale, high usage, social networking site
3. Lifetime bragging rights, "I helped create this cool site you so love to use"
4. Learn and utilize highly marketable Open Source and technology skills like Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Memcache, nginx, flex etc.

We get:
1. Self motivated force multipliers
2. Potential employee pool from which to hire after we get funded.

What are we looking for :-

1. Hardcore geeks into Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails and even Java or with willingness to rapidly learn Ruby on Rails framework.
2. Creative folks who create publicity material with Adobe Photoshop/Pagemaker/Gimp etc. including websites/brochures/copy during college technical fests and would like to try their hand at Human Computer Interaction workflows for a Web 2.0 site and learn in depth XHTML+CSS+Javascript, AJAX, Jquery, YUI etc.

Who should apply :-

0. These are telecommute positions.
1. This is not a training we are looking for fairly self-motivated individuals who can learn on their own without any hand holding. It doesn't matter if you have no industry experience.
2. You should have access to a broadband connection with no download limits and either your own personal PC where you can use Linux environment (or a Virtual Machine with Linux). Or a University/College infrastructure where you have private diskspace (for storing the code) associated with your login account on a secure file server.
3. You shouldn't be encumbered by any Intellectual property, Proprietary rights and Non-disclosure agreements to work in your own time on any project and be able to assign the moral rights of the same to us in lieu of equity into a startup company. We may at our discretion release parts of the projects executed under Open Source Licenses.

So if you want to contribute to an exciting early stage startup for equity then e-mail us at tarundua at tarundua dot net

IIM Ahmedabad has launched a Summer startup camp based on the widely covered summer founders program by Ycombinator and some startup school like activities.

1. What is it that they are offering ?
You(a bunch of geeks in groups of 2 to 4) come to Ahmedabad and write a cool new Web 2.0 'ish application with something unique within 2-3 months while networking with the VCs/Entrepreneurs/Large company types and by the end of 3 months raise some funding for the company you build around that product.

2. What is it that interests them most?
That entrepreneurs are able to attract some top talent from the IIM-A to help them commercialize the idea. Which is splendid as IIM-A is the top management institute in India. The camp is aiming to create these additional exciting paths for these students as well as for entrepreneurs apart from creating some exciting case studies for the program.

3. What do they care about ?
Your ability to create a ready to launch application in 2 months timeframe.

4. Does IIM-A take any stake in the startups that get created ?
No, they are benign. They care to spur geeks to be entrepreneurial, build something cool and want to be able to say 'hey look this was incubated at IIM-A and helped by IIM-A graduates'. Nothing better than a billion dollar corporation incubated at your institute. Call it enlightened self-interest. Perhaps they'll have a shot being India's Stanford.

5. But can startups really be created for Rs 8000 per person per month?
Ofcourse not. You can't really buy server space to even host a 'working' demo application for that money but perhaps pay for hosting your subversion repository. You can stay hungry and stay foolish until you build your application and after you have raised your first round comes the time to spend money on those Google Adwords and dedicated virtual servers, Amazon storage and whatnot.

6. Microsoft is a partner does that mean say goodbye to OSS web2.0 stack ?
No way, infact the program prefers you use OSS technologies to build something quickly. Anyway its too expensive in terms of time to struggle with Microsoft technologies to rapidly build a scalable web 2.0 startup.

7. Do they pay for travel in and out of Ahmedabad ?
No travel expenses are not covered by the program.

8. Is it the greatest thing to have happened in India ? Arguments from the devil's advocate ?
Its kind of difficult to answer. A lot depends on the quality of networking organized by the program. Rupees 24K and a place to stay is definitely not a great deal for an experienced professional but probably means something for a student whose parents told him he can't have their hard earned money to blow on a 'business'. The educational aspects of a program also would be very helpful to students I suppose but may not mean much to a seasoned software professional about to quit his job.

The application form for e.g. asks for your percentage shudder!! some of the greatest hackers in India who I know haven't even bothered to complete their degree. In a way the program expects students or very young professionals to join in since they assume you might have commitments of the type "GRE/GMAT/weddings/mandatory internships"

-- Advice to young professionals and students, please don't hold me responsible if you end up jobless and paisa-less after following my advice.
9. Should a student forgo a campus placement to join in this program ?
Depends on your risk taking ability, If you don't have any family responsibilities which require you to start earning in high 5 figures immediately, I would say sure why not ? If you were smart enough to be placed in a campus interview then after this program you'll be definitely be considered a better bet by smarter product companies/well funded startups even if you weren't able to raise funding for your idea and decided to box it.

10. Should I quit my job in a well established 'outsourcing' company/captive Center of Excellence to startup?
Again depends on your particular circumstances, people like me consider outsourcing companies as a kind of career dead-end in itself. With the dollar-rupee arbitrage disappearing despite frantic efforts of the RBI it might be one of the best decisions you have taken in your life. I would also recommend that you read carefully your Non-disclosure and proprietary rights agreement you signed with your employer before you decide that perhaps a sabbatical would be better than quitting the job.

11. Bonus Tip: You can apply with more than one idea, the program coordinators will choose the best one they like.
Suggestions for camp coordinators
If you really care to see demos of applications built by software professionals provide each team applying with a separate virtual hosting server on demand to allow them to demonstrate their code. It is expensive(time) to host fully functional code on shared hosting hosts where you typically don't control the environment for your application.

Around march Google organizes Summer of Code targeted at students by funding Open Source Projects to enable them to pay interns who deliver on specific features/projects. GNU amongst many other OSS projects participates in the program.

From GNU GSoC project ideas page

<Quote>
This page has the project suggestions for GNU's participation in Google Summer of Code 2008. Project proposals for 2006 and 2007 are archived separately.

STUDENTS - BEFORE YOU SUBMIT YOUR PROJECT PROPOSAL:

Please read the GNU Project's guidelines for Summer of Code projects.

Most importantly, please make sure you include all the information requested. If you have questions, please ask
summer-of-code@gnu.org.

</Quote>

PS: I am not connected to GNU, Google or GSoC