Several students from svnit and elsewhere responded to the ongoing discussion between me and Hiranmay. Bhavik, Praveen, Biswranjan, Vishesh, and Satyaprakash are among those who are also involve din building techpedia.in or techepdia.sristi.org , and have also suggested some ideas to make it more vibrant, meaningful and purposeful.

Some of the ides put forward are: a) projects could become free solutions, open source of small industry. May be we could out them under Technology Commons ( TC) so that for small and self employed entrepreneurs, grassroots innovators, these are free to copy but for medium and large industry, these can be accessed only through license agreements. We need to debate it more; b) techpedia should become a firm managing knowledge in a big way. It is a good idea and I hope some of the young minds involved in it will join the founding board of this as section 25 not for Profit Company. If it ever has to become a for-profit company to attract private investors, then it should do so after exhausting all possibilities of raising funds from public and private industry in it current structure as a part of sristi – a not-for-profit society and trust. Major motivation for sristiin triggering this portal is to help our young minds in India connect with real life problems, small entrepreneurs and grassroots innovators who often are not able to access big academic institutions for solving their technical and managerial problems.

to be continued

Anil K Gupta