User:Planemad

Leave a new message or catch him on his blog twitter or just mail him at arun.planemad@gmail.com 



My name is Arun Ganesh and Planemad on the web, great grandson of Indian freedom fighters Kamalambal and Kovai Subri. My ancestral roots are from the historic town of Suchindrum, a short ride from the southern tip of peninsular India where Swami Vivekananda had his vision for an Indian nation.

Papers qualify me as an Electronics & Communication Engineer from Anna University and an Information designer from National Institute of Design, but more importantly, I like to understand the earth and its contents.

I have been contributing maps, images and the occasional article to wikipedia since 2005 when I realized that crowd-sourced open knowledge has the potential to significantly impact the future of humanity. My contributions are now silently part of thousands of articles, been printed in newspapers, foreign magazines, books, research papers, advertising commercials, MIT OpenCourseWare, political hoardings, restaurant signages, television programmes, hotel reception desks, local guidebooks and other places where I have not looked yet.

WMF Contractor
I was on contract with the Localisation team from May-December 2012 as an Interaction designer to help make language tools more usable. For my wiki contributions in official capacity please see mw:user:aganesh

Gallery

 * list of contribution to commons
 * Flickr Photostream

Currently
Working on creating a free geodatabase of India using OpenStreetMap and building an online public transit information system for the country. Drop me a line if interested

Workshops/Talks
I love taking hands on workshops on map making and evangelizing open knowledge projects like wikipedia and openstreetmap.
 * GIS course at Indian Institute for Human Settlements
 * Talk on FOSS communities and OSM workshop at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University
 * Map making workshop at NERIST
 * Map making workshop at NIT Arunachal Pradesh
 * DC Data Engineering Meetup: Open Geodata Workshop
 * 'Mapping India: A complex idea' lightning talk at State of the Map US 2015
 * Keynote at State of the Map 2017