Panel: Chandrasekar , Chairman IGF India
Secretary:  Markus
Panelist : Bertrand De La Chapelle
Michael Lewis , Qatar Tel. Cybersecurity Research
Marc Goodman , Director , International Cooperation
Patrik FaltStorm
Jayantha Fernando, ICT Head , Srilanka
Gulshan Rai - Head of CERT, India
Alexander Ntoko, Head Corporate Strategy , ITU 

Internet is a two edged sword where one one hand there is a world of good that has been derived out of it but at the same time there is a silent dark force that creeps into our lives with renewed threats to our homes, businesses and the world of good. Its good time that we discuss about the forces of the dark thereby creating an awareness. The advent of Internet has made the world a global village. Organizations tend to increasingly move from a paper based environment to paperless environment. That necessitates organizations to go online.  Cybercrime has a great challenge of the world having become a global village in a manner that a person sitting in one part of the globe is able to commit crime in a different part of the globe and there seems to be not proper framework, legislation, rules or procedures to bring such perpetrators to accountability. In a typical cybercrime we dont have a crime scene, criminal, weapon and the victim at the same geogrphic area . There needs to be a multi jurisdictional approach across governments, international organizations and businesses to curb such activities in this pervasive online world.

As devices seems to grow complex and compact so it the list of devices and tactics that are developed by the perpetrators. Nearly $ 2Bn is transacted daily online and this is at risk due to the dark forces. So financial incentives of cybercrime is increasingly lucrative business. There are great questions on whenever we are involved in a security breach what should be our response both formal and facilitated approach. There needs to be a clear defined mechanism that should clearly outline the systems of response that need to be invoke and the points of contact that need to be established between the organizational response centers and external security teams so on. There ought to be a strategy and you need to know who your friends are and with regular exercises fine tune the system to ward of probable incidents.

Traditional crime that has moved online is Cybercrime. Then there are newer crimes that are a result of the technology like phishing, DDOS , Botnet , crimes in virtual world. Then there are threats to existing networks and systems either by a disgruntled employee or someone who has better knowledge of the systems. Then there is online propaganda for terrorist activities or posting of videos that are capturing those moments. An organization follows this approach typically

             Cyber threat      >>        Action           >>       Feedback        >>        Reaction      >>       Prevention

Yourself, Computer Incident Response team, Computer Emergency Response team are a few of the involved stakeholders in this system . Each of these take holders are proficient in only a set of activity. There needs to be interaction between each of the stakeholders and there needs to be a contiunuous dialogue between them. Whenever there is an attack to the system there needs to be a level of increasing transparency from the victim organization to divulge critical information to each of the stakeholders and different stages to effect a better tracking and prevention mechanism in place. Organizations need to have a balancing act beween the rights of users and the transparency of information to the stake holders external to the system.

Gulshan Rai the Head of CERT in India gave a clear outline of the online behavior of indian users in impacting the economic potential of India. His talk was towards increasing threats that the online world has faced . SPAM is increasingly becoming a common phenomenon in India. Increased cases of Phishing of the banking sites has come to the lime light.  India was the 12th country to implement the IT Act at 2000. But there is a lot of evolution in terms of technology that has happened eversince and those things have been addressed in the update on the act as per the Draft 2006 that  is yet to be approved. Data Security Council of India is a government initiative to educate the public servant and governmental offices in areas of incident management and areas of cyber security.  

Alexander Ntoko insisted on the basic premise / understanding for a need of a uniform global response through an initiative called Global Cyber security agenda that clearly represent the common interests of all the stakeholders. Accordingly they were focussed on 5 major areas Legal Measures, Technical and procedural measures, Organizational structures, Capacity building and finally International cooperation.

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The Underdog showcases wikicamp 2007 in this video as a part of the movie that revolves around Jimbo and Wikipaedia . This movie also covers some unseen footage about wikicamp. For the team at TKF take some time out to watch the clip as it brings out some fond memories of the past. Good day Folks !

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Last weekend was a very engaging schedule starting from Friday evening when we had a very engaging discussion with Sanjiv Augustine on Agile programming and SCRUM practice prevalent in the market. Participants in the discussion were practitioners from Wipro, Thoughtworks, EDS, Cap Gemini, Cognizant and our core team of Sid, Narain, me and Yessel. The discussion happened in our recent venue (Gandhinagar Club) which is proving to be convenient both in terms of organising and economy of scale.

"Doing the same things everyday will not deliver new results. To change the results you ar egetting , you must change the things you are doing " - Robin Sharma

The entire discussion was towards quelling fears and doubts of Project managers of traditional waterfall model towards Agile practice and SCRUM. Discussions of this kind tend to throw light on the project management practices followed in different companies here. Interesting enough to hear that lot of IT companies are adopting towards Agile practices enterprise wide with an objective to drive quality to meet global standards.

It translates into a unwritten message that all these MNC’s readiness to adaptability and change management .Change is the most dominant force in the business climate today. Technology is changing , markets are changing and even our products are becoming obsolete by the time they hit our markets because the competition is always testing something more advanced. To meet such competion our service providers need to be resilent to meet such evolving changes with great agility and speed. Related to IT projects it visibly shows the readiness of our service providers to accept client changes at any point in the project and always work towards earned value metrics.

Earned Value management is a great advantage in Agile practice because the preparation of priority list by itself is done based on the features that delived value to the product owner /customer is placed under the same order such that the features that hold higher value are placed on top of the priority list thus as each sprint progresses greated value is delived to the customer thus making earned value management a great advantage on agile processes.

The evening was made very interactive by games based on the agile process that saw some active participation from the audience.We might see more of such programs in the months to come .

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After a very long gap we will start a series that will take an effort in educating readers about SCRUM. Today we will discuss how agile methods can be followed on outsourced projects

Structure A: Product Owner is in US, team is in India

  • One Common Approach : ScrumMaster colocated with team in India
  • Product Owner in US travels to India for project kickoff
  • All real-time meetings with Product Owner are visual with help of Videoconference + Webex (Use a webcam if you have to )
  • Mailing list for Product Owner and all team members, with most project-related emails cc:ed to this list (Verbose subject lines to emails )
  • At least 1 weekly 1-hour real-time check-in between Product Owner and team
  • In-person planning and review regroup in India or US between Product Owner and team at least once per quarter
2-week Sprints
  • Team holds daily standup meetings in own location
  • ScrumMaster emails blocks list to Product Owner for assistance clearing in US

Sprint Planning

  • Team has 1 hour real-time meeting with Product Owner to discuss goals of Sprint, broad review of Product Backlog Items (example: Weds night IST)
  • Team spends 1-3 hours doing preliminary analysis and breakdown of Product Backlog Items (example: Thurs afternoon IST)
  • Team spends 1-3 hours real-time with Product Owner completing analysis and breakdown of Product Backlog Items, and makes commitment (example: Thurs night IST)
  • Sprint begins (example: Fri morning IST)
  • Sprint Review and Retrospective
  • Videoconference + Webex (example Weds morning IST)
Stucture B: Team split between two locations
  • For example, 3 developers, 1 tester, and 1 analyst in US, 5 developers and 1 tester in India
  • 2 ScrumMasters, one in each location
  • Lighter load than a full ScrumMaster – may be a team-member
    2 separate daily standup meetings
  • Notes from each team’s standup emailed to the other and read at the beginning of the meeting

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Filecrunch has been gathering a lot of momentum lately with traffic to the site and hits increasing from 125,000 users last month to 200,000 users this month. Way to go . Above is the snapshot of the traffic taken for the last week. This splurge in traffic has really posed a challenge to the development team to wait out for things to quieten down for them to announce the next release.

On a parallel front our other site Shoepursuit has started attracting a lot of traffic to lately. With the commencement of the shopping season we expect both the sites to garner a lot of hits and make things thus busy. Way to go team !

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This weekend Fuente will be presenting a paper on this topic "Whether India is really really ready for Web 2.0 products ? "  Fuente has been in the thick of things related to product development and project management for the last 30 months and since July 2007 we have been on development of a Web 2.0 product called " CIRAKA" on a stealth mode

On a parallel mode another news is that Barcamp has come to Kerala and is hosting their first edition this November 24th. It’s probably going to be hosted at the Technopark Auditorium, Trivandrum, Mani who has been a part of the organising team of barcamp kerala has informed us at The Knowledge Foundation of this hushed up event.

Some of the topics proposed to be covered are

1 Simple Game Development with Python Ruby Vishnu Gopal, MobME
2 OpenSocial - Mobshare Album inside orkut Kenney Jacob,Kenney Jacob, MobME
3 Achievable futures- Software Testing/QA Robin Thomas, QA/Process Consulting
4 Bluetooth Remote Control Product Demo Hari Krishnan, Leads Technologies
5 Asterisk- Open Source Telephony Platform Bipin B,MobMe
6 PHP Wiz - The Easy Way! Sreekanth G S, Freelance Solutions Developer
7 ONP:Open Network Project Linoy Joseph, Angelsvista
8 Android - Google’s Open source Mobile Platform Renjith Ramachandran
9 Protein Based Memory Storage Devices Jidhu Mohan.M,Sj group

Good luck to the guys on a great initiative !

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This weekend i had ample time to catch up some quality reading and i canced upon reading this book by Lawrence Lessig : "Code 2.0" A book that every blogger needs to read, for that matter all those who create digital content and live most parts of their life on the virtual world needs to know.

Related to reading of this book I also happen to do some research online on how cyberspace has exploited our younger generation and i came upon this interesting article in the New york times here . This could happen in any of our home in very unsuspecting manner. After you read this real life account one starts to realise the need for a framework, constitution that can govern the realm of cyberspace. After reading the NYT story the book reading becomes all the more interesting 

 "Liberty in cyberspace will not come from the abscence of boundaries, Liberty there as anywhere will come from a state of certain kind. We built the world where freedom can flourish not by removing from society any self conscious control, but by setting it in place where a particuler kind of self conscious control survives - called constitution"

This constitution is necessary not for governemental control (big brother attitude towards giants like microsoft) but this constitution seeks to determine what collective values we build in the cyberspace and what values are to be protected here. This post will continue as series and will delve over topics like about copyrights and on the other hand Privacy and how we safeguard that such values are take care of ? Good day !

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Google has already captured the Search market across the cyberspace amidst bitter competitors like Yahoo, MSN so on… Now that it has become the undisputed leader in that space google aims to capture another big space "Personal Health care " Google seems to have immense plan on storage in terms of the commercial health care market. Net savvy users have the habit of using the search capabilities of Google and similar search portals to understand complications in personal health and related issues.Marissa mayer When it comes to storage of personal medical records and data online and access anywhere, google stands at a better place for providing such services online. Marissa Mayer, Head of Search at Google was speaking on a recent Web 2.0 Summit at San Francisco outlining the huge plans of Google. She also reportedly said that Google’s healthcare initiative backed by her has currently developed a prototype that allows for storage of health records and related data online. The features and the application are currently put to test within a closed user group of beta testers . The Search giant also provide features like " Find a nearby doctor" facility for identifying professionals and expert resources locally. Online diet regimen features are also made available.This would also serve as a excellent platform for revenue to the giant. The objective of the entire exercise is to make the healthcare data portable and easier to access from anywhere anytime. Google is not the only company that has been working on this platform. Competitors yahoo and MSN have been busy acquiring medical storage and search related companies on a frantic spree. Will this be next wave from google ? More about the same is available on the video here :

[youtube video="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPj3oRBYOUw"]

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By November 30th 2007 , Fuente will be gaining the training excellence of having Certified Scrum Master on roll to take lead on its web projects team. The training will be under Pete Deemer, former head of development at Yahoo Labs. Certifications on Scrum are provided by Scrum Alliance and are a great advantage for practicising project managers particularly on Web development and Web 2.0 projects. This initiative is one among the list of ongoing steps that Fuente undertakes to ensure that we serve world class quality to our customers worldwide. Good Day ! 

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BarCamp has been a great Sensation across the world on knowledge dissemination among techies and geeks.  Interesting the latest edition of Barcamp seems to have taken a key topic for discussion . Knowledge Management and its measurements and metrics. We can look forward to an exciting session on the same during the event . Pls rush to register ! This is one Kamp not to miss !

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