User:Vnatraj

 Natraj Vaddadi 

I have a Master's degree in Geology and have recently been introduced to Open Source software in Geosciences. Besides the work experience, I have been an adjunct faculty in Petroleum Technology for over 30 years now.

I am also a founder volunteer for Centre for Education & Research in Geosciences (CERG) an initiative whose main efforts are geared towards increasing awareness, understanding, appreciation and application of Geosciences and Geospatial technologies and their importance in an individual’s day to day life and communities at large.

I have attended FOSS4G-Asia, 2017 conducted in Hyderabad and since then have been engaged in training activities related to OSGeo related technologies. I am presently working on developing training content and workshops for the use of ODK for societal needs.Presently also developing learning materials especially for ZOO-Project and currently engaged in documentation for mobile and Web-GIS tools for Mapping and evaluation and organising training/workshops/ in collaboration with OSGeo India and OSGeo Thailand. I have also translated the ODK Collect app to an Indian language (Marathi) and am also working on the translation to two more Indian languages.

More recently I was a key facilitator at a workshop - Mobile-web GIS applications for Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) which was the first workshop jointly conducted by OSGeo Thailand. I am also presently working on two projects using ODK tools - Ground water wells and water harvesting potential in the Pune metropolitan area and mapping of Landslide prone areas in Western Maharashtra. For these projects we plan to use crowd sourcing methods for data collection

I am also planning a two day workshop in QGIS training as a part of Earth Science week locally for which I am the Principal organiser. As a long term plan, I plan to support the setting up of OSGeo-Live installations at Colleges in India. As a long term initiative, I intend to work on the popularisation of OSGeo tools in schools and colleges and promote these for societal needs.