As you know the event unfolding in Haiti after the major earthquake in January 2010 rallied Nepali community in US to raise funds for the victims in Haiti as a community to community help. That noble action also ensued the desire among all of us concerned to join force to attempt to come up with a broad Nepal earthquake disaster relief and preparedness recommendations that could be an exemplary initiative Nepali diaspora have ever taken in line with CAN-USA’s past actions to take up this issue.
This document is the proposed ANMF/ASNEngr/CAN-USA Joint initiative on Earthquake Disaster Relief and Preparedness in Nepal sponsored by the America Nepal Medical Foundation (ANMF), American Society of Nepalese Engineers (ASNEngr), and Computer Association of Nepal USA (CAN-USA). This document has been drafted with constant deliberation during past more than 4 weeks by these three organizations.
The proposed joint initiative by these three technical/professional organizations (ANMF, ANSEngr, and CAN-USA) to research and provide a set of recommendations which can be taken as a blueprint for actions in the ground for pre and post earthquake event in Nepal.
The actual action items resulting from the recommendations of this joint study are likely going to be far reaching and broad in nature and no single organization will likely be able to complete them by itself along. It will require a sustained and deliberate effort by all major non-resident Nepali organizations and national and international government and non-government organizations.
For this reason we are also seeking early support from major social organizations like NRN-NCC of USA and ANA to give us a moral support by signing this document. During early stage we would like to assemble a team of approximately 12 professionals representing these five organizations and other concerned organizations, including some in Nepal.
Sincere thanks to Suresh bhai for first draft of this document, and SumanJyu, AmbikaJyu and RogerJyu of NRN-NCC for providing early support.
Please use this thread to provide your valuable comments on the topic, your ideas and anything else which you think is vital for this study and would help this committee to do their work.
Greater San FranciscoBay Area Nepali Community1/15/2010
Call to order
Bineet Sharma called to order the ad hoc teleconference meeting of the Greater San Francisco Bay Area Nepali Community at 7:00 PM PST on 1/14/2010.
Roll call
A roll call was called by the facilitator. The following persons were present:
Amod Pokhrel CAN-USA
Anil Pandey Motherland Nepal
Ashish Hada Sahayata (Attended from East Coast)
Bineet Sharma CAN-USA
Bishnu Thapa NRN/NAC GS (Attended from East Coast)
Govind Sahi Community at large
Harihar Dahal Sunny Sagarmatha Society
Ishwor Sapakota Sunny Sagarmatha Society
Jain Thapa BACC
Nisha Thapa Sahayata
Pratik Pandey Community at large
Roger Adhikari Community at large
Suresh Ojha CAN-USA
Purpose of the meeting and discussion
Bineet stated the purpose of the meeting was to establish a coordination committee to methodically and deliberately approach the issue of bringing together growing Nepali community for this devastation suffered by Haiti. CAN-USA general secretary stated that this would be a good exercise for the Nepali community as KTM could be facing similar fate as the 8.0 magnitude earthquake is long overdue.
It was agreed after passionate discussion that earthquake preparation for Nepal is critical but there should be a follow-up meeting to discuss this issue specifically.
Anil Pandey cited an Emergency Fund ($4,500) which has been in the works for such calamity in Nepal. Roger Adhikari, Govind Sahi concurred that a bylaws are being written for proper disbursement of such fund. There was a concession that such hard earned fund may not be needed to be tapped for Haiti’s purposes.
Suresh Ojha asked for a research committee to investigate and analyze what could be needed in a similar situation in Kathmandu which shares a lot of similarities with Haiti. He also requested a quarterly meeting of all of the Bay Area organizations to share the information.
Roger Adhikari cited that there has already been couple of such meetings in the past. It was agreed that information on all future meetings should be widely disseminated to all interested parties.
a) Haiti Fund Raising Coordination Committee: An ad hoc co-ordination committee was established with Bineet Sharma leading the effort. Other members include Harihar Dahal, Govind Sahi, Roger Adhikari, Nisha Thapa, Bishnu Thapa, Ashish Hada, Ishwor Sapkota, Anil Pandey, and Jain Thapa representing their respective organizations. Other organizations are encouraged to nominate their members as soon as possible.
Action Items for the coordination committee:
1.Brochure: Bineet Sharma will work together with Bishnu Thapa and other members to draft a brochure. After approval by the full committee members the brochure will be used to solicit the donation from the community members.
2.DJ Night: Nisha Thapa is organizing a DJ night specifically to raise funds for the Haiti victims. She is contemplating travelling to Haiti later to provide her medical service as well. Coordination committee will work together with her to advertise her event and help in fund raising.
3.Donation Solicitations with community members: Coordination committee will work together with local community organizations to spread the call for donation through emails, meetings and other means.
4.Next meeting: Coordination committee will meet in a regular and ad hoc basis until this fund event is closed.
b) Nepal Disaster Research Committee: Suresh Ojha will head a research committee to investigate specific actions that the members of the Nepali Diaspora can take to prepare for the expected 8.0 earthquake in Kathmandu and make recommendations for an efficient and coordinated response once the quake hits. The goal is to present the recommendations by the ANA conference in July.The members of the committee include Amod Pokhrel, Nisha Thapa, Ashish Hada.The committee is expected to grow to include members from all facets of the community and multiple different disciplines.
c) Quarterly Meeting of Bay Area Organizations: The meeting already in progress organized by Roger Adhikari will suffice this purpose.The meeting notification will be circulated to include all interested organizations.
Adjournment
Bineet Sharma adjourned the meeting at around 8:45 PM PST.
Realizing the importance of CareerManagement (CM) among the students and the professionals alike, we have thought of giving continuity to the first workshop (CM 1.0) held during ANA 2009 in Oakland, CA. This time around, we plan to go virtual - expert presentations and interaction live on the web and recorded for future reference. CM 1.0 focused mainly on 3 areas - Graduate School Planning (Application, Standarized Tests etc), Job Search (Resume writing, Interview Prep etc) and Career Advancement (Planning for Career Growth etc). For CM 2.0, we would like to hear your opinion/ideas on focus areas and format of the workshop. Please give us your preference on the following options.
3 separate workshops (each for 3 areas)
1 single workshop (Integrating all 3 areas)
Job Search and Career Advancement sessions bundled into one workshop, Graduate School Planning being the other
2 separate workshops for Job Search and Career Advancement only (No need of Graduate School Planning)
Also, please provide us with any other suggestion/ideas you might have. We want CM 2.0 to be successful but more importantly impactful.
I wanted to share with you my experience with CAN in Nepal and few people in the IS&T industry and some beauraucrats that I met during my visit to Nepal last month. Few days after my arrival in Kathmandu, I was invited to program organized by CAN on the occasion of Dashain and Tihar. Contrary to my experience from years ago when CAN organized grand parties around Dashain, this program had paper presentations and discussions in a number of different IST related topics. Two separate Papers were presented on “IT Policy and Programs of Government of Nepal” and “Opportunities and Challenges of ICT in Nepal” in moderated sessions. The environment was very professional with the participation of representatives from Ministry of Industry and Commerce, HLCIT, Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology, Ministry of Information and Communication, NTC, Office of the Controller of Certification, and individuals from different background. I was invited as one of the speakers, and was impressed by the interest of the attendees for CAN-USA. In approximately 15 minutes of my talk time, I presented CAN-USA and our vision moving forward. My request to the attendees to help us in developing programs to best serve Nepal was very well received and I fielded a lot of questions on what we have done so far, what we plan to do etc. To my surprise, a lot of attendees had heard about CAN-USA although did not know in detail what we really do. People familiar with CAN-USA such as Sanjiv Rajbhandari and Ganesh Shah had good things to say about what we have done so far, and were hopeful we would have some more projects similar to the one we had under Transfer of Knowledge.
I could not attend the NRN pre-conference program organized at IOE pulchowk becuse I did not get the exact details of the nature and timing of the program in advanced and I was out of valley on the day the event was scheduled. But Binod Dhakal, CAN exec represented us and highlighted the joint efforts of CAN and CAN-USA.
In a different event, I had an opportunity to personally visit with most of the CAN execs for a discussion that lasted over an hour. The program was centered around greater collaboration between CAN and CAN-USA. Although we discussed along a lot of different things, here are the major points the discussions circled around:
1. The current optical fibre network is not sufficient to meet the upsurging demand for the information infrastructure. The CAN representatives wanted us to voice the need in order to bring the attention of investors from within the country or aboard.
2. The IT Policy has been drafted but the implementation has been slow and ineffective. The attendees of the meeting wanted us (CAN-USA) to participate in an effort to push the implementation and also in counselling/ suggestion to responsible govt agencies in Nepal or its representatives who visit the US.
3. CAN in Nepal has been expanding in terms of membership at a regional level but the benefits realized by its members have been limited. CAN wants to initiate a drive to request various government, non-government, and multinational agencies to involve local talents and talents of Nepali origin in multinational/international funded IST projects. Not a quota but promoting local entreprenueurs. Their question was how can CAN-USA help.
To summarize, people in the IST arena in Nepal are starting to know about CAN-USA and our programs. The broader IST community in Nepal has started to build expectations from IST professionals around the world and the best organization they know as of now is CAN-USA. CAN in Nepal is looking for more programs/projects/initiatives that will help their members and the IST professionals in Nepal. I think they are looking for some help to design approaches that would be beneficial to the members. They also expect us to highlight some issues such as IT Policy implementation.
Members Present: Gaurab R Upadhaya, Amod Pokharel, Prajesh Shsrestha, and Bineet Sharma
We had a very fruitful exchange of ideas with CAN executive member Mr. Gaurab Raj Upadhaya who works for Packet Clearing House of Berkeley as a Internet Economic Analyst.
Discussion topic covered were:
a) Ways to energize the base and stay in the radar of everyone:
- Automatic calendar update so that members know what is going on. Schedule can be sent using ICS format so that members can merge the schedule with their calendar (outlook, google calendar or etc.) (action item for Gaurab ji to demo)
- Providing food during meeting is a crowd puller idea
b) Create Facebook page (action item Prajesh Shrestha)
c) Monthly electronic bulletins which will provide current events/news to members in a regular basis (Bineet to initiate conversation with CAN Nepal to provide a resource, Gaurab ji to follow up)
d) TOK to be pushed. Banking industry could be next as one off TOK program to keep ball rolling while CAN scrambles with office space in Nepal for regular TOK programs
e) More ways to network - Gaurab ji to provide connection with Bikesh Sharma (Stanford Professor) and Om Prakash Gyawwali, a research scholar of Stanford
Now that we have 501 (3) (c) Tax Exempt status, let us brain storm on how to further our cause. It is important that all CAN-USA members are well versed on rules and regulations. Please read all important legal documents including the letters from IRS and FTB regarding the exemption status.
This thread is created for interacting with the instructors of Cloud Computing. Please post your question in comment section and one of the instructors will reply to you appropriately.
Just for the reference purposes here are few interesting questions which were asked during the first session:
Q. How relevant the cloud computing is for Nepal. Especially when there is 16 hours of loadshedding?
Q. How does the transaction processing work with Cloud Computing.
Q. Really a comment: Would you put some graphics in your presentation?
Our instructors will answer these and other relevant questions.
As a chair person of ANA 2009 Souvenir, I would like to request you to be the part of this magazine. I always value your time and effort given to the community and your precious knowledge will help us to make ANA 2009 Souvenir a masterpiece. I know it is not possible for one or two person only to cover up all the issues of ANA and Nepalese community of USA therefore I want you to be the part of Editorial team to make it happen.
Here are few ideas I have developed and discussed with the ANA convener, chair person and co conveners. This year for the first time I have proposed to cover up (if not all) most of the Nepalese organizations of USA to be enlisted.
Beside that there will be feature articles and columns on the topics as mentioned below, (if you think some topics are left out please feel free to suggest, This is not final just my proposal for this issue).
The topics are related to Nepalese Literature, Culture, Music, Arts, Social issues, Professional, Business, Immigrations Law, Education, NRN issues, General interests etc.
Therefore without your kind support and participation this would not be possible for us to publish Souvenir. Let me know if you have some more friends in your mind to join in this list. I sincerely hope you will accept my proposal to be the part of this team.
So far we have not formed editorial board; we will form it as soon as we get confirmation from you.
Advisors: ANA convener/Co convener, ANA Chair person,
Editorial Team: Dhruva Thapa, Sandeep Puri ,
English section: Mani Nepali, Amod Pokhrel, Narayan Pradhan
Nepali Section: Anil Pandey, Shekhar Dhungel, Basu Dhakal
Science and Tech: <Requesting Names>
Business/ Law:Rudra Sharma, Harihar Dahal, Dorji Lama
This course will explore the current buzzwords, technology and go through some of the case studies on companies currently using Cloud Computing. This
is suitable for those who are looking for a lucid explanation of cloud computing. In the first session , we will go through the various aspects of the cloud ( SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and look into their pros and cons. In the second session, we will go through some live examples on some of the popular services, e.g. EC2, S3 and AppEngine.
Since its birth on July 29th 2007, CAN-USA has been striving to work towards professional development of its members and ICT development of Nepal.The Professional Networking Program is geared towards either goal by bringing the Nepali community in the ICT (information and communications technology) sector together and reaching out to the broader American community.
Today, professional networking among the Nepali Diasporas is generally confined to friends and is mostly at a social level.CAN-USA aims to bring these busy technology and development professionals together so that we can help each other in our own fields.At the same time, some can employ CAN-USA’s platform towards ICT development projects in Nepal.Such a platform will also serve as a key resource to students and recent college graduate to advance in their career paths.
Plan
CAN-USA shall commence a series of bimonthly networking sessions, where individuals come to share their ideas and experiences in an informal setting.These gatherings could be held in semi-private spaces such as restaurants or halls.Generally, luminary speakers or another CAN-USA event will accompany the networking session.CAN-USA encourages Nepali and American professionals to come together, share their ideas and broaden their network.
Bay Area Professional Networking Series
We will begin the Professional Networking Program in the San Francisco bay area. Silicon Valley is home to many Nepali high-tech professionals, working in a variety of industries and organizational frameworks. The first professional networking session will be held on April 10, 2009 between 6-8PM at WFG Auditorium, 2077 Gold St, Alviso, CA 95002.During the session Transfer of Knowledge session on “Cloud Computing” will follow this professional networking.At Nepal site there will be elaborate inaugural ceremony at the ministerial level.
Future
These bimonthly professional networking sessions will be organized in different parts of the US.Another important networking session will be held during the 2nd Annual CAN-USA ICT Conference during the ANA 2009 convention.
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