Kunwar Vikram Jeet Singh

Vikram is running for the posts: President, Treasurer

****************VIKRAM'S VISION IN WORDS*********************


-Outlook on what the tasks for the next EAAA Coordination Board, with or without me should be:

1. To promote a healthy communication between the alumni and current students of EuroAquae. The EuroAquae programme is currently in its sixth year running and already the EA alumni is working in many high-profile companies in various corners of the world. The newer students can benefit from the experiences of such professionals and the EAAA CB can act both as a platform and a catalyst in such communications.

2. Building on the previous point, the EAAA can provide a platform for promoting and sharing information about upcoming events that might help bring the EA students and alumni face-to-face with each other and help in sharing of information, ideas and experiences.

3. To streamline the layout of the EAAA forum. The EAAA forum needs to be made more professional and bug-free, if you know what I mean, and needs to be more user-friendly so that finding information is easier. Also the forum should act as a melting pot for new ideas and as a means for discussing problems that the students and alumni are facing in their professional and academic lives and to help others with theirs. Everyone should be able to keep up with what's going on through RSS/Atom feeds and communication through email should be limited to those cases where it just cannot be avoided. Alternatively, if one does want to receive all the information through email, it should be possible to do so through a subscription service that is strictly opt-in.

4. Respect the privacy of the individual and to not to reveal the email addresses of all the recipients of emails from the EAAA CB. This way email addresses cannot be harvested by spammers in case someone's account is compromised.

5. Consistency and answerability in the activities of the EAAA CB. The activities of the board members should be well defined and they should be answerable to the alumni and students. Also the problems of the students, wherever it is within the powers of the EAAA, should be speedily resolved with the delegation of tasks, wherever required, done internally so that the person with the complaint isn't asked to go bark up somebody else's doorstep, to resolve the matter by himself or to make best of the current situation. In case it out of the power of the EAAA to resolve the problem the person with the problem should be given a valid reason as to why his request cannot be acted upon. In a nutshell, bureaucracy and red tape should be kept to a minimum and the Coordinate Board should provide a friendly face to the members of the EAAA.

Regards,
Vikram

Hi everybody, please ask questions to Vikram by clicking on post reply at this topic. Please note the voting starts on the 18th of October 2009. The voting will be done through this forum.

Hi I thought of starting to ask the questions to the candidates.

1. After the graduation, the people tend to get busier and busier, therefore I wonder how good your time management skills are as they will have to be of a good quality in order to combine work/studies/research, EAAA involvement and personal life?

2. Good time management skills are not enough, it is important to work as a team. Therefore how do you see yourself working in a team of 6 people or more (see the question number 4)?


3. During the last past two years, I saw that the willingness to be initiative plays a very important role. How initiative are you?

4. The number of the graduates of the EAAA is growing, and it is getting harder to manage the potential demands of the six generations (in two years there will be eight generations), therefore after a brief discussion among some of the members of the CB of EAAA, we decided that it would be good to create an Executive Committee which will comprise some 10 – 20 people, each of them having a certain responsibility such as updating a website, preparing the Star of the Month articles, checking and responding to the messages on the forum. The Constitution of the EAAA already has the provision of such an Executive Committee. The Constitution can be downloaded from here (opens a PDF file). What do you think of such an idea?

Thank you for your responses.

Kostya

First of all an addendum to my statement in the original post above:

Quote :

6. Transparency in the functioning of the EAAA.
Problems that are not of personal nature should preferably be submitted in a dedicated area of this forum. This has two main advantages: firstly, because of being in the public eye, this will help in speedily resolving the problem and the people can appreciate the efforts that the board is making on their behalf. Secondly, since it is visible to all members anyone can provide a useful insight about the situation.

Vikram wrote:

The EAAA forum needs to be made more professional and bug-free…

I see that the job has already started, which is a very good thing.

Kostya wrote:

1. After the graduation, the people tend to get busier and busier, therefore I wonder how good your time management skills are as they will have to be of a good quality in order to combine work/studies/research, EAAA involvement and personal life?

Well I think that the problem lies with the composition of the EAAA. I am in total agreement with the opinion of a certain person who thinks that most of the activities of the EAAA should be the responsibility of a dedicated staff and not the alumni themselves. Ideally the board should be just a democratic body to bring the voice of the alumni to the decision makers with as few additional responsibilities as possible. But rants aside, I think that a majority of the duties of the board should not take more time than it takes to answer an email. Meetings, gatherings and some other special activities require more time but they have the added benefit that you are among friends so it doesn't have to feel like work. But yeah, if someone finds it difficult to take out half an hour from their daily activities, they shouldn't be contesting the election in the first place.

Kostya wrote:

2. Good time management skills are not enough, it is important to work as a team. Therefore how do you see yourself working in a team of 6 people or more (see the question number 4)?

Well, EuroAquae is one large family and it shouldn't be any problem working with other family members. A team works best when the roles of the team members are well defined. A sports team for example cannot be composed entirely of forwards or entirely of fullbacks. Each position has its own importance and is totally indispensable for the proper functioning of the team but that it doesn't mean that if a fullback has the chance to score a try or a goal then he shouldn't.

Kostya wrote:

3. During the last past two years, I saw that the willingness to be initiative plays a very important role. How initiative are you?

Well, let's just say if there is a good idea floating around and it is within my power to put it to execution, then I lose no time in doing so. One might even say that I'm a radical or shall I say a surd. (Sorry about the complicated pun, but) I hope that it is good enough an answer to your question.

Kostya wrote:

4. The number of the graduates of the EAAA is growing, and it is getting harder to manage the potential demands of the six generations (in two years there will be eight generations), therefore after a brief discussion among some of the members of the CB of EAAA, we decided that it would be good to create an Executive Committee which will comprise some 10 – 20 people, each of them having a certain responsibility such as updating a website, preparing the Star of the Month articles, checking and responding to the messages on the forum. The Constitution of the EAAA already has the provision of such an Executive Committee. The Constitution can be downloaded from here (opens a PDF file). What do you think of such an idea?

A very good idea in principle, but some of the activities outlined are a bit questionable. I don't really like the idea of having a "Star of the Month" but this is just MY personal opinion and I'll go with the majority on this (or most other issues). I think that the Constitution Committee should be formed but its activities should be carefully decided through careful deliberations.
I would also like to add something about emails. Hydroinformatics doesn't mean getting inundated in a deluge of electronic mail. Newsletters are passé. Look at this article for example. Emails are intrusive and demand attention which means that communication through email should be kept to bare minimum. The idea is for people to be able to pull information as they desire instead of pushing it to them, or may I say force feeding it to them. If there are more emails than necessary then people will simply stop paying attention to them and important information, when it comes, will be lost. (The story of the boy who cried wolf springs to mind.) Instead, it is better to have a website where one can automatically check if there are any updates. Even this forum has the possibility of subscribing to topics through an RSS feed or through email. Let the people themselves decide how they want to get information. And on a fourm like this, there can be community participation as well, which is good for a democratic organisation such as the EAAA so that the people at the steering wheel don't drift too far away from what the majority of people actually want.

By the way, if the CVs are available on the EuroAquae site, would a moderator mind removing the link to my CV because this site is indexed by bots and will end up on search engines. Perhaps it's too late already

Hi Vikram, link is removed as requested and actually all the CVs will be removed from the EuroAquae web-site once the elections are finished.

Following up your answers:

You are saying that some people should not be taking place in the elections if they are not serious about beining members of the board. What would you do to guarantee the that such people are not taking part in the election, so to say prevent this from happenning as only time will tell who was serious about the role and who not.

That is why there is this idea of the Executive commitee where people will have some given responsibilities and others will be able to "query" their activity from time to time. Quering is of course a bit a serious word as we are the association for the friends, however the experience shows that even those who were active in the elections, but were not elected did not take the active role in the association afterwards....

Also you are saying that some discussions could take place on the forum....the experience again shows that people start checking the forum after the mass email has been sent out. Also users are free to create their own sub-topics on the forum.

Could you please explain a bit more about the benefits of the RSS feed technique?

Thank you.

Vikram, in addition to my previous questions.

I know in the last two years you were involved in different activities with graduates, not necessarily under the umbrella of the CB of EAAA, but very useful. Could you please expand on these?

Also which opportunities for attracting funding to the EAAA do you see? Which view do you have on having some external funding?

So far all the activities were sponsored from the pocket of the graduates taking part in these activities or from the Erasmus Mundus Alumni (EMA) association for those who took part in the activities of the EMA (participation in their promotion events and General assembly meetings).

Thank you in advance.

Hi vikram

I like some of you opinions about EAAA.
Here are some questions:

1 Which qualites are neccesary or important for being a president of EAAA?
2 Which qualities do you have regarding question1?
3 What do you plan to do if you are the president pf EAAA?

Thank you in advance.

mi

Kostya wrote:

What would you do to guarantee the that such people are not taking part in the election

Unfortunately there is no guarantee that the people who are contesting the election are really serious about their role on the Coordination Board or not or whether if someone reduces his activities in the future that it is because of genuine reasons or not. There is however a provision in the constitution that anyone who hasn't been active for a given amount of time will be considered to have resigned. One can always fall back on that provision and find new members who will be willing to do more. As for the executive committee keeping an eye on the CB, that's a fine idea, but then there should be someone who keeps an eye on the committee. So where does it all end?

Kostya wrote:

....the experience again shows that people start checking the forum after the mass email has been sent out

I don't have the stats on that one, you guys have, but it's for sure that if I get some information in email, the email itself won't prompt me to visit the forum unless there were some link in it or something saying that there's additional information on here. It is however a poor excuse to keep sending unnecessary emails and an even worse way of generating traffic. There should be incentive for people to return here and I think that one can easily ask people what they want by creating a poll on these forums.

Kostya wrote:

Could you please explain a bit more about the benefits of the RSS feed technique?

Well, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. More information on the English version of Wikipedia. But in simple terms, what does it do? Let's suppose that you have a favourite news site. Now you visit the website 10 times a day to check if there is some new news item there, but the news items aren't necessarily arranged in a chronological order because they are arranged in the order in their order of importance according to the site owners. So you have to carefully check every section to see if there is any new news. But any news site worth its mettle also has an RSS feed these days. As new articles are added to the site, they get added to the RSS feed and any feed reader can be used to read this feed (and sort it any way you want). So it is something like using an email client to check for new articles instead of checking it yourself at irregular interval. This way you can also keep track of what articles you've already read and which not. Most modern web browsers automatically detect if a site has an RSS feed. Safari shows a blue icon that says RSS at the right edge of the address bar, Opera and Firefox show the bright orange RSS icon at the same location. I can't say anything else about the other browsers. Also Safari has an inbuilt RSS reader and Opera too can handle RSS feeds through the inbuild Opera Mail.
The best thing about RSS is however that it is plain simple XML so you can manipulate it any way you want like any ordinary XML document.
Looky here what I found:
RSS feed?
Now I'm no expert, but just looking at the address bar of my browser I can see that this forum is hosted by activebb.net and at least an email should've been sent to the hosting provider to make further queries before closing the discussion.

But anyway, that is just one aspect where there is scope for improvement. The thing is that one really should use the right tools for the right purpose. Let me put forward a few scenarios.

1. Someone went on a holiday and wants to share his pictures.
   
2. A EuroAquae alumnus got promoted as regional head in some country.
   
3. Person A uses software from some well knows company, but is having some problems setting it up for his own purpose. He wants to ask people who have experience with the software or people who work in the company that made the software for help.

Now let's see what we should be using in these cases:

1. Social Networking sites do a pretty pretty good job in this case and that functionality should ideally not be duplicated on forums such as this one.
   
2. A forum can be used to announce this, but not the ideal way to do it. I would treat this particular case as a news item and the best way to give out and to keep track of news is blogs. Good thing is most blogs also have an RSS feed.
   
3. This is where forums shine. It's completely voluntary, but if people are willing to help out then it is faster and more efficient than even sending out an email to the company manufacturing the product. I've seen sites which provide points to people for helping others out, so people have an incentive to help out as well.

Kostya wrote:

which opportunities for attracting funding to the EAAA do you see?

There are different ways to attract funding:

1. A subscription model where everyone pays a membership fees. I think that this is a really bad idea so I won't say anything more on this.
   
2. A donation model like that of most FOSS projects where anyone who feels like paying pays whatever he wants to pay. The revenue flow may not be regular and not so high but it is better than not having any revenue source.
   
3. An advertising model but for that one needs to attract eyeballs to the ads. There are two ways of doing this, however:
   1. Directly approaching companies to advertise stuff on EA affiliated websites.
      
   2. Display ads from a third party provider such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. the way many blogs and other websites do.

No a question to the board:
How come we don't have any money but we still have a treasurer, but we have websites and forums but no dedicated person taking care of them?

Kostya wrote:

I know in the last two years you were involved in different activities with graduates, not necessarily under the umbrella of the CB of EAAA, but very useful. Could you please expand on these?

Let's see:

gaedeann wrote:

In addition, I will be based in Cottbus for the next few years which gives me the opportunity to be close to at least one EuroAquae partner and some current students.

Ditto, but also in the past tense.

Most of my activities have been because I'm closely associated with EuroAquae in Cottbus. Let's just say that:

• I've helped out in the past with some assistance in lecturing.
  
• I was a team supervisor in the last edition of HydroEurope, perhaps not a very good one, but still.
  
• I've attended a board meeting of EuroAquae representing Cottbus in place of Frank Molkenthin who couldn't attend the board meeting due to personal reasons.
  
• Due to participation in a few the social activities of the students, I have acquaintances in every batch of EuroAquae till present.

Activities that I've missed or will miss due to prior commitments or health reasons:

• Represent EuroAquae at Vilnius for the EMA meeting.
  
• Attend the latest round of board meetings in Cottbus.
  
• The evaluation of EuroAquae to take place in Cottbus in the beginning of November.

But all these activities are outside the scope of EAAA CB and I'll continue to do them in the future as well, as long as possible.

Anwyay, sorry about the very long post but I hope that it answers your questions.

miwu wrote:

Which qualites are neccesary or important for being a president of EAAA?

Well Mi, to paraphrase what J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in the Lord of the Rings, heroes aren't born heroes. They are just ordinary people who found themselves in extraordinary situations but instead of running away, they just saw the situation to the bitter end. Same is also true for CEOs presidents or leaders of any sort. But from questions that have been posed to the candidates on these forums one might say that these qualities might help:

• Ability to communicate with other people
  
• Work as a team
  
• Have a cool head during hard times

and the usual clichés used to impress the HR staff.

miwu wrote:

Which qualities do you have regarding question1?

None — most of the time, and sometimes all, depending on what side of the bed I got up that day.

miwu wrote:

What do you plan to do if you are the president pf EAAA?

First find out what I can do as President. Then the kinds of things that I've been harping on about above. But of course to be a pain in the neck I don't necessarily have to be on the Board and can continue to do so voluntarily from outside as well.

Hi vikram

Thanks for your reply.Wish you good luck....

mi

Vikram, thank you for your contributions!

Responding to your questions: As I said to Lan...the budget of EAAA has 0 pounds/euroes/dollars/rupis/yans/...etc on its account and actually we do not have an account, however we managed to run all our activities implemented etc!

The post of a Tresuarer is there because it is mentioned in the constitution and Ayyappa did do some work related to Finances when organizing different meetings in the UK, however the issue of creating a bank account is quite tough: it possibly will have to be created in France as we are registered in France and none of us are there, also they will probably start charging us, therefore we will need to have some funds and it will also involve some paperwork, which seemed unnecessary with respect to the issues we had to solve, however hopefully with the help of the people from the new CB and all those who took part in the elections, this important issues (creating a bank account and funding) will be resolved.

Whether you are called a treasurer or not, it is not really important (as some of you noticed) as what counts is the devotion!

The person looking after the forum is Ayyappa. You could see that he set the elections tool on this forum. However since we are all doing this work volunteerily and may be busy at different times, we all share the responsibilities of looking after the forum.


I hope it answers your questions!

Regards,
Kostya