Today's article is a guest post by Aparna Kalantri, a Pune-based mum-preneur. See the end of the article for more about her.

I am in the process of setting up my own small business after my maternity break (is the break ever really over? :-). I have always been a high achiever in life, was doing very well in my career (IT in Oz), and had a steep career graph going for me. After having my baby, I decided to consciously take time-off. Now, the 9-5 (or is it 9-9?) routine does not suit me. But I still wanted to fulfil my individual potential and live out my best life, and would like to work professionally, but at my own pace. So now I am in my ‘onramp’ stage, and would like to share some of my thoughts on ‘Entrepreneurship after having kids’.

First in my series is – ‘The soft challenges of doing part-time entrepreneurial work’ (esp. with limited human resource even if you count the baby in :-)

• Ideas-Focus: The problem is not lack of ideas (as one would have expected), but rather too many of them. When I started, there were too many ideas that I wanted to do all at once. Having worked in a fast paced corporate environment (pre-babies of course), I was efficient at using the current working system to make the ideas happen. The shift now is to develop a new system on your own to make things happen. It takes time to adjust to the ‘new working you’. What can we do about this?
  • Learn to focus on and develop a few (couple) ideas. Need to analyse what is going to be my niche. Once the core idea sets in, then you can work on the allied services.
  • Need to use the strategy of ‘release and review’ with your customer base. But here we need to understand the effort/ output ratio. Come to a satisfactory stage/ get initial reviews from industry experts/ and release. Update and chart your course as per the feedback.
• Instant gratification: Remember the pat-on-the-back by your boss for an excellent presentation/ or the extra-bonus/ or the successful release at 4 in the morning/ or simply the cheers at the morning coffee run? As trivial as they may seem these are important things. As a part-time mumpreneur, there may be no-one to provide this encouragement. These advantages of working in a collaborative effort are missing. Also, initially success may be slow in coming (incubation and setting up period more). This for a mother is more challenging due to the internal pressure she faces in order to succeed (to justify her effort away from her family).
  • Very simply – ‘Pat yourself’ :-) There are times when only you know how you’ve gone through that difficult day with being a mum, home-maker, wife etc. and have still managed to complete that little work. Be kind to yourself.
  • Surround yourself with positive people. Get honest feedback from the ‘knowers’.
• Perceptions: Ever heard the expression ‘Just a mother / housewife’ – that is what I’m talking about. When you are doing a job, it’s easier for others to understand the structure of your life. So (generally) the expectations & their perception of you is very different. Our society, I feel, is quite biased in this regard. (That’s another discussion for another day). Since I work mostly from home, and schedule around my toddler’s timings, people don’t know where to draw the line with expectations. They tend to take our time for granted a lot more, and also do not understand that the work we do is as important (if not more). I am sure that this is probably something to do with the signals that we give out, but nevertheless it is an issue.
  • Highlight what your efforts are, and what you have achieved through them. Sometimes this doesn’t come naturally to us, especially if what we have achieved is not as much as before. You need to be able to tell people and believe yourself that it is important and a priority.
• Being immersed in your work/ Losing flexibility: Remember the reason why we chose to do this type of work? We wanted a lifestyle of flexibility and independence in terms of time and accountability. In order to make it big fast, or to fuel the great early success, we tend to work on this more than a full time job. The work takes over our mind & time, and we find it difficult to switch-off when we need to. The goal of being more present (physically & mentally too) for our family / or of leading a more independent lifestyle is lost. For this we can apply various time/ priority management strategies.
  • Do not try to ‘have it all’ by doing it all. You must to understand when the business is big enough for you to recruit / partner with a team and delegate. Apply appropriate task management strategies.
  • These priorities in life may change depending upon various factors – there may be busy and slow periods. From time-to-time ask yourself and your loved ones – ‘Is this working for me?’/ ‘Are we happy with this?’.
• Networking: I remember I had wanted to attend a Pune Open Coffee Club forum presentation. It was 45 minutes from my home. I was looking forward to it. During my maternity leave, this was an event to look forward to. To connect to my non-mummy/ non-nappy conversation mode :-) I observed that for most of the other participants it was just another casual meeting they had made way to after a busy day. Just one of the things that they did. For me, this meant pre-arranging for baby-sitting, making sure the feed/ nap times are taken care of, and arranging for stuff so the baby stays happy. Phew!! All this for a free forum meeting (which turned out to be really good, BTW). Now you understand the effort that we have to go through with networking. And I haven’t even talked about the soft-networking aspects (the golf games/the tennis games/ the tweet-ups/ the catch-ups/ the evening beer meetups etc. :-)
  • Sometimes you just need to take that break from ‘mummyhood’ in order to connect to your other self. Even if it is a lot of effort, do take the time out to network. When you do make sure you don’t let the mummy-brain take over your personality :-)
  • Use technology. When you cannot physically go out and network, use the abundance of technology at your disposal. Be careful that you are networking effectively and not just being part of groups which add no value to your goal.

So the above are some of the few things that I have tried and have worked for me during my on-ramping experience. Would love to hear what you all have to say. There are a lot more things in this series to talk about – we’ll see how we go :-).

About the Author – Aparna Kalantri

Aparna has recently moved to Pune. She has studied B.E. (computer science) from Pune University and then moved to Melbourne. There, she completed (with top honours) her Master’s in IT from Swinburne University. After her degree she worked in Melbourne & Sydney in banking domain doing various IT roles. After having spent seven years in Australia, she (along with her husband and a little baby) moved back to India (Pune).

She is in the process of setting up her own ‘Personal Excellence Centre’ for women. She is passionate about self-development activities, and has been involved in many such workshops in her corporate career. She aspires to help women achieve their full potential and live their best life. She too believes in living consciously and freely.

You can follow her on twitter at @aparnakalantri

What is Participatory Budgeting?

The Participatory Budget of the PMC provides an opportunity for citizens to give suggestions for works to be taken up in the next financial year. Citizens can make suggestions for streetlights, footpaths, public toilets, waste sorting shed/ biogas plant/ bulk compost unit, drainage etc, in spaces where such works are permissible and needed. Participatory Budget has been carried out in Pune over the last three years. It is a mechanism for citizens to give inputs for works to be carried out through the ward offices. The final decision regarding the budget of our city government is of course taken by our elected representatives with inputs from the administration.

What is the process citizens are to follow?

Citizens can make their suggestions online in the E-Budgeting application available on the PMC website from 26th October to 09 November 2009. The form is available at www.punecorporation.org

Suggestions can also be made in the prescribed forms available at ward offices.  All ward offices are also making arrangements for online entry. When submitting the paper form, citizens must ensure that it is duly in-warded at the ward office and the tear-off receipt with inward entry number is given. This number will be needed to the unique id number after computerization. Those submitting suggestions online will directly get the unique ID number on completion of the entry. This number will be needed to track the suggestion and what decision is taken about it.

Of course, citizens have to be clear that submission of suggestions does not necessarily mean that the work will be accepted. The PMC has to check the feasibility and the Prabhag Samiti will be making their decision too.

What is the benefit of Participatory Budgeting?

Participatory Budget is a refinement in the ‘institutional design’ of the democratic process to make it more responsive to citizens’ needs. Our democratic process is that we citizens elect our representatives to take decisions that are well thought out, in keeping with societal and environmental concerns, and responding to our needs. However, a necessary condition for representative democracy to function well is that citizens actively provide inputs to elected representatives. This happens in many ways through RTI, the media, NGOs etc. Draft master plans and new policy drafts are kept open for a specified period for public input. The most direct method is of course discussions with corporators. However, in a city where the ratio of representation is about 15000 citizens to one corporator this may pose some problems.

The participatory budget process helps to deepen our existing democratic framework. It is an evolving mechanism to enable the democratic process to function better. The underlying idea is that citizens get a formal opportunity to deliberate upon the needs of their areas and submit requests to the respective administrative ward offices.

What are the achievements so far?

A few thousand people have participated in the exercise over the years. Last year over 1300 suggestions for works were received. Over 35 crore worth of projects were incorporated into the main budget.  There is recognition that some project ideas are mundane (fix a pavement); but the fact that citizens have to ask for these is a telling comment on how these very aspects may be ignored in conventional budgeting processes. There are the not-so-usual ideas as well – sorting sheds, composting units, benches, hawking zone platforms, etc.

Is PB happening anywhere else?

In many parts of the world! Participatory Budgeting started in Latin American countries struggling to build or rebuild their democratic institutions and to eliminate corruption, improve transparency and accountability of government. The innovation of ‘participatory budgeting’ has been praised internationally as an example of “good” governance.

In Brazil, citizens deliberate on five thematic areas: transport and traffic circulation; education, leisure and culture; health and social welfare; economic development and taxation; city organization and urban development. Meetings are held in each neighbourhood, where residents draw up their list of priorities for investment in infrastructure. These inputs are provided to the municipal budget council who determines the distribution of funds for each priority among districts. The municipal budget council and the district budget fora also monitor spending year-round.

In UK, talking about participatory budgeting, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Hazel Blear said “councilors must not feel their democratic mandate is bypassed, and instead recognize that it will strengthen their relationship with their local community”.  Also, that, “I think the world has changed. I think voting every four years and basically handing over responsibility and power to other people and then doing nothing again for four years, I think our democracy is not like that any more.”  Ms Blear may well be talking about our city!

Intructions for Participatory Budgeting

PMC’s Citizen Suggestion Form is available online at www.punecorporation.org

(scroll down to ‘What would you like to do’ (above Swine Flu)

General instructions for suggesting works

1. Please fill in all columns
2. Citizens should note that suggesting a work does not necessarily mean its inclusion in the budget; the projects inclusion/ exclusion will be determined on technical and legal considerations
3. All suggested works should be specific (location, description, quantity, category etc) (attach maps, photos where needed – fill a physical form in this case)
4. Only projects that pertain to neighbourhood or locality level works are to be suggested, not city level infrastructure
5. The cost of suggested works should preferably be below Rs 5 lakh
6. Projects of the following type are admissible: pavements, water supply, drainage, bus stop (in consultation with PMT), parks and gardens (only repair works), bhawan (only repair works), public toilets, lights (roads and traffic), roads (only resurfacing)
7. Projects of following type are not admissible: pedestrian bridges, speed breakers (prohibited by Supreme Court), garden (new provision), construction on land not owned by PMC
8. Non budgetable projects should be avoided – For e.g. appointment of staff, minor repairs, clean up etc
9. Deadline for submission is 09 Nov 2009
10. When submitting the paper form, citizens must ensure that it is duly in-warded at the ward office and the tear-off receipt with inward entry number is given. This number will be needed to the unique id number after computerization. Those submitting suggestions online will directly get the unique ID number on completion of the entry. This number will be needed to track the suggestion and what decision is taken about it.
11. Suggestions can also be made in the prescribed forms available at ward offices.  All ward offices are also making arrangements for online entry.

For more information, visit

www.janwani.org

http://government.wikia.com/wiki/Participatory_Budgeting_in_Pune

http://www.desd.org/efc/Participatory%20Budgeting.htm

About the Author – Sanskriti Menon

Sanskriti Menon is a Programme Director for the CEE Urban Programmes and Central Regional Cell of the Centre for Environment Education. CEE is an organization that works towards improving the awareness of environmental issues in our education system. It is supported by the Ministry of Envirnoment and Forests. Sanskriti also runs greenteacher.org, and she is also one of the primary driving forces behind the huge success of the Pune governance wiki.

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4pm-4:30pm: Dubzer’s experience with DEMOFall’09 AlphaPitch – Santosh Dawara

Dubzer, a SaaS offering that allows publishers to quickly and easily create translated versions of their websites without requiring any technology development or software changes, debuted at the AlphaPitch event at DEMOFall ‘09. We have covered details of this here. Santosh will talk about the whole experience, how they got in, how they prepared, the expenses, and the benefits.

4:30pm-5pm: Onion.tv’s experience with TechCrunch50 – Nilesh Diane

Onion.tv, another SaaS offering that allows publishers of video content to add tags, notes, tables-of-content, and other rich meta-data to their videos, was selected for the TechCrunch50 DemoPit. We covered the details of that here. Nilesh Diane will talk about their experience, and other Pune startups can get a feel for what they need to do to be in the same situation.

5pm-6:15pm: How to bootstrap enterprise sales in the US Panel Discussion

We have three panelists – Abhijit Athavale, Devendra Deshmukh, and Amit Paranjape  – each of whom have over 10 years of experience doing enterprise sales in the US. Each panelist will speak for about 15 minutes about specific topics related to the theme (as given below), and answer questions from the audience. After that we’ll have about 30 minutes of a general Q&A where startups can ask any questions to the panelists.

Details:

• Devendra Deshmukh, will talk about “How to set up a sales channel; How to increase your reach; and also talk about his early experiences in this area while setting up eZest.” Devendra is a founder and executive director of e-Zest Solutions Ltd., e-Zest Inc. & e-Zest (UK) Ltd. He is also a co-founder of Webizus Technologies, the IT (Information Technology) consulting company. He has experience of working with Indian software companies in both the operational and business development functions. For more, see his linked-in profile.
• Abhijit Athavale will cover: “How to hire a Sales Rep; Why and how much time to spend in the field; The difference in sales and distribution and why it matters.” Abhijit is President and CEO of Markonix, and a high-tech marketing consultant. He has 16+ years of high-technology industry experience. Prior to Markonix, Abhijit spent over 11 years at Xilinx, Inc. in various engineering, applications and marketing roles. In his role as a marketing consultant, he has held executive management positions at Taray, Inc and Sanved DA. He has a masters degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University and a bachelors degree in electrical engineering from University of Pune. He is an accomplished speaker and author of several publications including a book. For more, see his linked-in profile.
• Amit Paranjape will talk about: “The dynamics of enterprise sales (understanding your customer, his ecosystem, his business) and the kinds of problems you run into if you don’t understand all of this.” Amit has been in senior positions with enterprise product companies for over 12 years, most of it with i2 in Dallas, USA. He has extensive leadership experience across Product Management/Marketing, Strategy, Business Development, Solutions Development, Consulting and Outsourcing. For more, see his linked-in profile.

The panel discussion will be moderated by me (Navin Kabra). If you have any specific questions or areas that that you’d like the panelists to cover, please send them to navin @ punetech, or leave a comment below.

6:15-7pm: General Networking

Practise your startup pitch, bring your business cards, mingle, portray the confidence that you don’t always feel, ask the seniors for free advice, convince the juniors that working nights and evenings for your startup will be the most fun thing they’ve ever done, and feel out your peers for potential co-founders. Ask the panelists questions that you were too shy to ask in public, practise your startup pitch, set-up follow-up meetings with potential advisors, mentors, CAs, HR outsourcers, php coders, facebook app developers, potential angel investors, and people who will help you get in touch with potential angel investors. Or just talk about beer, or Pune’s new microbrewery, or ask around for new and interesting restaurants in town,  practise your pitch, and find new and interesting people to be friends with. And, did I mention, practise your pitch? All of this…possible only at a Pune Open Coffee Club meeting. Be there.

Logistics:

What: Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on How Pune’s startups can sell in the US enterprise market. Featuring presentations by Dubzer & Onion.tv’s recent success at DEMOFall’09 and TechCrunch50, and a panel discussion with Abhijit Athavale, Devendra Deshmukh, and Amit Paranjape
When: Saturday, Nov 7th, 4pm-7pm
Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Map.
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.

(Twitter has quickly become one of the most important new methods of communication, and Pune’s techies have taken to it quite enthusiastically. As its popularity grows and more and more people find out about its utility as a medium of communication, conversation, networking, as a source of news, or as a source of information about interesting hobbies or people, the number of people on twitter is growing. One of the questions most people have is – “Whom should I follow?” and the related question “Who are the top twitterers of Pune?” That is a difficult question to answer because everybody’s criteria are bound to be different – and existing “objective” mechanisms of measuring this are not really that good. Last week twitter released lists, and Dhananjay Nene argues that lists are a new way of measuring the “follow-worthiness” of twitter accounts. With this in mind, he analyzed who would be Pune’s top twitterers according to a number of different criteria. His he published some results of his investigation on his blog /home/dhananjay, and it is reproduced here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.

This should be interesting to you for a number of different reasons. First, of course, this gives a list of the top twitterers in Pune. It is also an example of how a simple question can get quite complicated when you try to get computers to find the answer – and the approaches taken by different algorithms and their results are interesting to see. Finally, I think this is a sign of things to come – I’m convinced that twitter will be an integral part of the communications of the future, and twitter lists are an important way in which we will separate out the spammers and idiots from the useful content on twitter.

And, oh, by the way, are you following PuneTech on twitter? You should – there is info+links in the PuneTech twitter that will not be found on the PuneTech site. (And if you’re not on twitter at all, then please crawl out of your cave and get with the program.)

Anyway, here’s Dhananjay’s article.)

So twitter launched lists and many believe these will be a new mechanism for computing reputation instead of the current defacto followers. It is not a restricted knowledge that using follower counts as a measure of effectiveness of twitter is a extraordinarily error prone and brave exercise due to the obvious. Given the appearance of twitter lists, I was keen on figuring out if there is a way to reasonably measure effectiveness of a twitter id. This post details the exercise I went through. While there could be discussion around the exact semantics of such a computation and whether the results are consistent with everyone’s expectations, let me assert that I find the result sufficiently superior to anything else I’ve seen or I’ve been able to imagine so far. And that may stem from or despite the fact that two of my twitter handles (@dnene and @d7y) feature in this list.

As an input I took the top 50 handles from pune from twittergrader.com. Why top 50 ? Only part of the process was automated – the remaining required manual input. I did not want to spend too much time on doing data entry. This also gives you the twitter grader grade. I subsequently looked at the reputation of the handle in Klout, looked at the lists which included the handle and finally also looked at the twitter rank as expressed by yet another site twitter-friends.com. I computed rankings using each of these. I finally created a sum of all the ranks, and create a composite rank based on the sums. The interesting aspect of this computation was not just the end results but also some of the intermediate results.

So without further ado – here’s what I found

Ranked as per twitter grader

1. shinils
2. arthut
3. indianguru
4. sandeepjain
5. tmalhar
6. brajeshwar
7. rohit_shah
8. ghoseb
9. rkartha
10. prateekgupta
11. ajinkyaforyou
12. gauravsaha
13. inkv
14. aparanjape
15. scepticgeek
16. meetumeetu
17. nishantmodak
18. czaveri
19. phpcamp
20. ngkabra

The rank based on followers or twitter grader ranks was not well correlated with the other ranks. In my mind there is a sufficient rationale to question the effectiveness of both followers count or twitter grader as an ability to reach or influence or engage with others, even though twitter grader grade is slightly better than a folliower count. Thats why the other ranks turned out sufficiently differently ?

Ranked by Klout

1. brajeshwar
2. scepticgeek
3. gauravsaha
4. ichaitanya
5. sahilk
6. indianguru
7. irohan
8. rkartha
9. phpcamp
10. dnene
11. ghoseb
12. ngkabra
13. prateekgupta
14. d7y
15. trakin
16. aparanjape
17. adityab
18. punetech
19. inkv
20. nishantmodak

To my lay reading this had a stronger emphasis on people who engaged with others, were conversational and had a high update count as well.

Ranking by Twitter Lists

1. sandygautam
2. indianguru
3. scepticgeek
4. dnene
5. brajeshwar
6. phpcamp
7. ghoseb
8. adityab
9. inisa
10. rkartha
11. aparanjape
12. gauravsaha
13. prateekgupta
14. meetumeetu
15. punetech
16. ngkabra
17. trakin
18. freemanindia
19. aaruc
20. rush_me

To me this reflected not the spread of the following as much as the strength of the following. Notice how @sandygautam who very tightly focuses on psychology and is well respected twitterer in that area moves to the top (in a rather dominating way I might add)

Rank using Twitter Rank computed by Twitter-Friends

1. scepticgeek
2. ghoseb
3. prateekgupta
4. gauravsaha
5. aaruc
6. dnene
7. rkartha
8. adityab
9. aparanjape
10. sandygautam
11. trakin
12. d7y
13. meetumeetu
14. irohan
15. aditto
16. clickonf5
17. rush_me
18. sahilk
19. punetech
20. brajeshwar

This is an interesting metric and while I couldn’t help clearly identify what drove this, would be certainly willing to lend a ear if you want to come up with a suggested rationale.

So the final 20 pune power twitterers based on a composite of the 3 metrics, which in my perception is not terribly different than a list that I would come up with using my gut feel (though perhaps with different rankings) is … drumroll … drumroll …

Pune power twitterers

1. scepticgeek
2. gauravsaha
3. ghoseb
4. dnene
5. rkartha
6. brajeshwar
7. prateekgupta
8. indianguru
9. adityab
10. aparanjape
11. sandygautam
12. phpcamp
13. trakin
14. sahilk
15. d7y
16. irohan
17. ngkabra
18. punetech
19. meetumeetu
20. ichaitanya

Note : All the computations results are visible in the attached PDF. Also in a few case klout ratings or twitter friends rankings were not available. In such cases I have applied a klout rating of 0 and twitter friend ranking of 999999. Obviously it reduces the probability of such handles appearing in the overall rankings substantially – but there was no other reasonable option I could think of.

Disclaimer : At the end I am certain there can be a number of views on how such an exercise could be conducted. There might even be some complaints. Being aware of that, I list results of what I believe to be a “fair” exercise. Whether it is a “just” exercise is left to the reader. Also be aware that I have two of my twitter handles in the list above. You may choose to believe my assurance that I did not tweak the logic based on a first pass of results – the logic I decided to apply was not changed once the results were visible.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Measuring Influence on Twitter (daveduarte.co.za)
• Why People Twitter – in one word (socialmediatoday.com)
• Lists Coming For Everyone – What To Do With Them (thenextweb.com)

There are a bunch of interesting events in Pune this week. If you’re following the PuneTech calendar, you already know about them, but if you don’t here is a quick lowdown

MCCIA’s PuneExpo:

The theme for this year’s PuneExpo is “Business @ Innovation”

Initiated in the year 2002,this annual exposition is organized by the Mahratta Chamber of Commerce ,Industires and Agriculture(MCCIA) in the city of Pune and is regraded as one of the largest of its kind in India.Owing to its integrated nature that is not segment-specific,participant demography in the past has spanned sectors such as automotive, engineering, IT, electronics and electricals, polymers, food-processing, agriculture and wine-making, as well as service sectors such as insurance, banking and finance, education and research, thus proving to be an effectively platform for cross-sectoral interaction.

Wed, Nov 4 to Sunday Nov 8. At COEP Grounds. Details.

PuneChips: Talk by Cliff Cummings on SystemVerilog FSM, Assertion, & RTL tricks for Design Engineers

PuneChips is a sub-group of PuneTech started by Abhijit Athavale and is focused on the semiconductor/VLSI/chip testing & automation/EDA industry in Pune. They usually hold events on the first Thursday of every month. This month’s event is a talk on SystemVerilog a combined Hardware Description Language and Hardware Verification Language based on extensions to Verilog. As companies start migrating from Verilog to SystemVerilog it is becoming importatnt that they learn the tools of tread to effectively use it.

Thu, 5th Nov, 6:30pm, at Venture Center, NCL Innovation Center. Details.

PMI Monthly Meet: “Business Process Management” and “How to develop personality of a leader”

The Project Management Institute’s Pune chapter is one of the most active chapters, and they hold a seminar with two talks on the second Saturday of every month.

Saturday, 7th November, 10am to 12:30pm, Cummins Auditorium, Patrakar Bhavan. Details.

Bootstrapping sales & marketing in the US – POCC event

USA is still the largest market in the world for IT products. Our next meeting will cover practical advice and challenges around selling in the US. The aim is to have an engaging session that will help first-time entrepreneurs take back valuable ideas that they can apply in their own Businesses.

Saturday, 7th Nov, 4pm-7pm, SICSR. Details.

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Introduction to Malware Analysis

By DaH4cker

A short presentation on the techniques & tools used for malware analysis followed by a live example. I will be showing behavioral analysis approach which includes setting up a inexpensive, flexible environment & tools required for understanding inner-workings of malware.

Automated open mail relay, bypassing Captcha and Crypto

By Aseem Jakhar

Case study of an ironic web implementation.

Details

1. Dr. Anupam Saraph, CIO of Pune City, will speak on the IT quality issues in the e-Governance domain.

2. Mr. Gautam Pal, Director, ETDC, will be sharing his thoughts and experience on e-Governance initiative across the country and the quality framework, Conformity Assessment Framework (CAF)

We have a ZFS building as a module and the following primitive operations are possible.

• Creating a pool over a file (devices not supported yet)
• Zpool list, remove
• Creating filesystems and mounting them

But we are still not at a stage, where we can create files and read and write to them

See the full article, for more details and some interesting issues related to the license compatibility between ZFS and Linux.

About KQInfoTech

Pune-based KQInfoTech is an organization started by Anurag Agarwal and Anand Mitra, both of whom chucked high-paying jobs in the industry because they felt that there was a desperate need to work on the quality of students that is being churned out by our colleges. For the 2 years or so, they have been trying various experiements in education, at the engineering college level. All their experiments are based on one basic premise: students’ ability to pay should not be a deterrent – in other words, the offerings should be free for the students; KQInfoTech focuses on finding alternative ways to pay for the costs of running the course. See all PuneTech articles related to KQInfoTech for more details.

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SystemVerilog FSM, Assertion, & RTL Tricks for Design Engineers

In the semiconductor and electronic design industry, SystemVerilog is a combined Hardware Description Language and Hardware Verification Language based on extensions to Verilog. As companies start migrating from Verilog to SystemVerilog it is becoming importatnt that they learn the tools of tread to effectively use it.

About the speaker – Cliff Cummings

Cliff Cummings is President of Sunburst Design, Inc., a company that specializes in world class Verilog, SystemVerilog and synthesis training. Mr. Cummings is an independent consultant and trainer with 27 years of ASIC, FPGA and system design experience and 17 years of Verilog, SystemVerilog, synthesis and methodology training experience. Mr. Cummings has completed many ASIC designs, FPGA designs and system simulation projects, and is capable of answering the very technical questions asked by experienced design engineers.

About PuneChips

PuneChips is a special interest group on semiconductor design and applications. PuneChips was formed to foster an environment for growth of companies in the semiconductor design and applications segment in the Pune area. Our goal is to build an ecosystem similar to PuneTech for companies in this field, where they can exchange information, consult with experts, and start and grow their businesses.

PuneChips has been started by Abhijit Athavale, president and CEO of Markonix, and a high-tech marketing consultant. He has 16+ years of high-technology industry experience. Prior to Markonix, Abhijit spent over 11 years at Xilinx, Inc. in various engineering, applications and marketing roles. In his role as a marketing consultant, he has held executive management positions at several companies. He has a masters degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University and a bachelors degree in electrical engineering from University of Pune. He is an accomplished speaker and author of several publications including a book.

For more information, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PuneChips, and/or join the PuneChips mailing list.

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In emergency situations like pandemic outbreaks, power failures, riots, strikes, infrastructure issues, it is important that your business does not stop functioning. A plan to ensure this is called a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), and it is of prime importance to your business to ensure minimum disruption and smooth functioning of your operations. Earlier most companies would document business continuity plans only if their clients asked for it and would focus mainly on IT recovery. But scenarios have changed now. Corporations of all sized have now realized the importance of keeping their business functioning at all time and hence they are working towards a well defined business continuity management framework. Business continuity (BC) is often understood as a process to handle events that could disrupt business. However, BC is more than just recovery. The plan should also ensure proper business resumption after recovering from the disruption.

Business continuity management is a continuous life cycle as follows:

Click on the image to see it in full size

How does one start with BCM?

Business Impact Analysis (understanding the organization)

The first step is to conduct a Business Impact analysis. This would help you to identity critical business systems and processes and how their outage (downtime) could affect your business. You cannot have plan in place for all the processes without considering financial investments needed to have those in place. CEO’s inputs and client BC requirements also serve as input for impact analysis.

Defining the plan (Determining BCM strategy)

The next step is to identify the situations that could lead to disruption of the identified critical processes.

The situations could be categorized as:

• Natural and environmental: – Earthquakes, floods, hurricanes etc
• Human related: – Strikes, terrorist attacks, pandemic situation, thefts etc
• IT related: – critical systems failure, virus attacks etc
• Others: – Business Competition, power failure, Client BC contractual requirements

It might not be feasible to have plans for each and every situation, as implementing the defined plans needs to be practically possible. After the situations have been identified one needs to identify different threats, threat severity (how serious will be the impact on business if threat materializes) and their probability of occurrence (likelihood of threat materialization). Based on threat severity and occurrence levels critical risks are identified.

Implementing the plan (Developing and implementing BCP response)

The identified risks and additional client specific BCP requirements serve as inputs to the creation of BCPs. BCPs should focus on mitigation plan for the identified risks. BCP should be comprehensive, detailing roles and responsibilities of all the response teams. Proper budget needs to be allocated. Once the plan is documented the plan should be implemented.

The different implementation as per BCP could include having redundant infrastructure, signing up Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with service providers, having backup power supply, sending backup tapes to offshore sites, and training people in cross skills, having proper medicines or masks for addressing pandemic situations.

BCP should also have proper plans in place to resume business as usual. Business resumption is a critical and very important aspect of business continuity framework.

Testing and improving plan (Exercising, maintaining and reviewing)

Once the plans are documented and implemented the plans should be regularly tested. The tests could be scheduled or as and when the need arises. One can simulate different tests like moving people to other locations, having primary infrastructure down, testing UPS and diesel generator capacity, calling tree tests, evacuation drills, having senior management backups to take decisions, transport arrangements etc.

The tests will help you identify areas which need improvement in the BCP. The gaps between the expected and actual results need to be compared. The test results needs to be published to senior management. The plan needs to be reviewed regularly to update latest threats and have mitigations for the critical ones which will result in continuous lifecycle. One can schedule internal audits or apply for BS25999 certification to ensure proper compliance to BCP requirements.

Pune faces threats of irregular power supply, pandemic out break etc which could lead to business disruptions. One needs to have detailed plans for critical threats to ensure continuity of critical operations. The plans should also have detailed procedure to ensure proper business resumption. Plans may be documented but actual action during emergency situations is very important.

Important note: Contractual requirements

When signing off specific contractual requirements with clients, certain precautions must be taken as follows:

• Before signing stringent SLAs it should be checked that there is a provision for exclusions or relaxations during disaster situations as you will not be able to achieve SLAs during disaster scenarios
• When BCP requirements are defined in client contracts the responsibilities or expectations from the clients should also be clearly documented and agreed to ensure effective execution of the BCP
• BCP requirements can only be effectively implemented when proper budget allocations are planned. So for specific BCP requirements cost negotiations with the client are important. Usually this is ignored, so it is important that the sales team should be appraised before agreeing on BCP requirements with the client.
• Do not sign-off on vague BCP requirements. They should be clear, specific and practically achievable
• Before signing off any contract which has a penalty clause, it should be reviewed thoroughly to ensure that compliance to those clauses is practically possible

About the author: Dipali Inamdar

Dipali Inamdar, Head – IT security in Geometric Ltd, has more than 11 years of experience in Information Technology and Information Security domain. She is a certified CISA, ISO27001 Lead Auditor, BS25999 Lead Auditor and ISO2000 Internal auditor. She has worked in sectors spanning BPO, IT and ITES companies, Finance sector for Information Security and Business Continuity Management. She is currently operating out of Pune and is very passionate about her field. See her linked-in profile for more details.