Hi ownCloud team and community, I am Prastut Kumar, a CS sophomore at Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai India. A big fan of Don Norman's work in cognitive science, my major interests lie at the intersection of Design and Technology (Society, Internet- Security, Privacy). My belief and research experiences have helped me fuel interest in design and development of interactive Internet based digital platforms. Contributing to ownCloud motivates me for 2 strong reasons:
- *The vision: *ownCloud goes way beyond transitional projects and gives a tough competition to Google Drive or Dropbox. That's a lot to say in one statement. The privilege to allow anyone to install and operate it on a private server with *no *limits to storage space is a noteworthy notion but to actually achieve it is another thing. There are still millions of people not connected to the Internet. A report by IAMAI said that Indian Internet users rose to 402 million by December 2015, an increase by 49 per cent compared to last year. This meteoric rise in Internet user base, which will mostly be people with less incomes (mid-urban, rural areas), will bring in more leading and pressing questions on data storage, privacy and content. - *Focus on design > user centered design: * When I first visited ownCloud's website, I was amazed at the website presentation of content, and by far the most eye-candy website for an open source project. This is what I wanted to do when I initially made my mind to apply to GSOC, to fix the website of the project. :D. I then went through the project ideas and felt much emphasis is being put on user-experience and interaction design, something which I intend to pursue in future. I wish to work on the following projects, ranked in terms of interest: - *Reference Management App (similar to Zotero): *I am currently working as a crowdresearch in "Dameo", a project by Stanford HCI group and through their tasks had the opportunity to read through multiple papers. Though I haven't used Zotero, I understood the need of having this project. I have almost completed my Angular course from Coursera so it would be an amazing opportunity to apply that knowledge in practice. My Js experience stems from interning at 2 startups, and a self initiated project Cambuzz <http://cambuzz.co.in/>. - *Browser extensions for ownCloud: *Before GSOC I was contributing to Privly <https://priv.ly/>, which gives you control over your content with various extensions. Therefore I can use the knowledge learnt and contribute in making the chrome extension for ownCloud. I wish to also propose a project, though I am not too sure how would I be able to implement it. - *Docs for ownCloud: *Similar to Google Docs <https://www.google.com/docs/about/>, if ownCloud provides this functionality it will lead to the following: - Trust and ownership of the content being put. - People are able to work at the same document at the same time. - Rest of the features being same: People can view documents, edit, share them all on there own private server. Handy Links: - Github: https://github.com/prastut - Website: http://prastut.github.io/ - Design portfolio: https://www.behance.net/prastutkumar Thank you for your time and consideration. (Look for my PR's in a few days time. :D) Regards, Prastut
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