Satish Babu

Satish Babu (Sathees Babu C.S, born: 1961) is the Director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), an autonomous academic/research institution of the Government of Kerala, India. He took charge as the first Director of ICFOSS on 1 March 2011.[1]

Satish Babu was the President of the Computer Society of India, assuming office for a year from 1 April 2012.[2] Prior to this, he was elected the Vice President and President-elect for 2011-12. He chairs the Special Interest Group on FOSS (SIG-FOSS) of CSI.

Satish Babu was the President of the South-East Asia Regional Computer Confederation (SEARCC [3]) during 2012, representing CSI. SEARCC is a regional grouping of national computer societies in Asia-Pacific, with seven full members (Australia, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan) and six observers.

He was the Chair of IEEE Kerala Section [4] during 2011 & 2012, and holds several international positions in IEEE Computer Society, including Member, 2012 Nominations Committee [5] and the R10 (Asia-Pacific) Co-ordinator of Geographic Operations.[6] In 2014, he heads the Awards and Recognitions Committee (ARC) of the MGAB of IEEE Computer Society. He was declared as a Golden Core Member of IEEE Computer Society in 2011.[7] In November 2013, Satish was awarded the IEEE MGA Achievement Award "...for continuous efforts in member engagement and development by promoting humanitarian technologies and fostering collaboration between the IEEE Computer Society and the Computer Society of India."[8]

Satish Babu is a volunteer in ICANN. He is a member of three of ICANN's Working Groups as of July 2013: Capacity Building Working Group, ATLAS2, and Meeting Strategy Working Group. He was elected to the 2014 Nominating Committee of ICANN in July 2013,[9] and as the Vice Chair of its Asia-Pacific Regional At-Large Organization (APRALO)[10] in June 2014.

Education

Satish Babu studied at Sainik School, Kazhakuttam, Trivandrum, Kerala, for his Higher Secondary Examination (1977), graduated in the four-year program in Dairy Technology from the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI),[11] Karnal, under the Kurukshetra University (1982), and did his Post-graduate studies at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA),[12] Gujarat, in 1984.

Career

In 1984, Satish Babu joined the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies (SIFFS),[13] an NGO working with small-scale artisanal fishers of South India, and a fledgling at that time. He worked there for 17 years, initially as Executive and later on as CEO. SIFFS, under his leadership was one of the earliest organizations to utilize computers, especially for its commercial activities such as boat building and Outboard Motor programmes. SIFFS was part of several international networks. As a part of one such network, ICSF, Satish organized the first-ever Internet training for fishers in Latin America at the Catholic University of Lima, Lima, Peru, in May 1997, a very early example of South-South knowledge transfer in ICTs.[14]

In 1999, he, jointly with three other colleagues, promoted InApp Information Technologies,[15] now a CMMI Level 5 IT Services Company with offices in US, Japan and Europe, and a development centre at Technopark, Trivandrum.

Satish Babu was one of the earliest Free Software activists in India. He was a part of the IndiaLink programme of the Indian Social Institute, Delhi, which attempted to connect NGOs through email on the Internet in the mid-1990s. In 1994, he set up and ran the Trivandrum node of the IndiaLink email network, called FishNet (fishnet.frlht.ernet.in). FishNet used the Waffle/UUCP BBS software on an MS-DOS PC, and provided free email services to anyone equipped with an acoustic modem. The uplink to the Internet was to ERNET in Bangalore, through FRLHT, a Bangalore-based NGO. FishNet continued its services until Internet was made available in Kerala through local dialup in 1996.

He was also one of the earliest and most prominent advocates of Internet in Kerala, and announced to the world in 1996[16] the arrival of public dial-up Internet in Kerala, through a post on the soc.culture.indian.kerala Usenet board (while Internet was available from 15 August 1995 in India from VSNL, users from Kerala had to dial long-distance or use X.25 until 1996, when local dial-up was enabled).

He was the spokesperson and chief organizer of the 2001 "Freedom First!" Conference that introduced the concept and vision of Free Software in Kerala and India.[17] Later, he was a co-founder of the Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE [18]) and its Executive Secretary during 2003-2010. He joined the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) as its first Director, in March 2011.

Following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Satish Babu went back to SIFFS, and worked part-time for three years in the rescue, relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction phases of the Indian Ocean Tsunami response in south India. He continues to be associated in an Advisory Capacity with BEDROC, Nagapattinam.

References

  1. ↑ http://apnnews.com/2011/02/26/satish-babu-to-head-icfoss/
  2. ↑ http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/info-tech/article3293810.ece?homepage=true&ref=wl_home
  3. ↑ http://www.searcc.org/about-searcc/management/president
  4. ↑ http://www.ieeekerala.org/about/executive-committee.html
  5. ↑ http://www.computer.org/portal/web/volunteercenter/nominations;jsessionid=1296e05733c9aa2619f07861e8c9
  6. ↑ http://www.computer.org/portal/web/chapters/board
  7. ↑ http://www.computer.org/portal/web/awards/goldencore
  8. ↑ http://www.ieee.org/societies_communities/geo_activities/awards/recipients/recipients_achievement.html
  9. ↑ http://icannwiki.com/index.php/Satish_babu
  10. ↑ https://twitter.com/ICANN_AtLarge/status/474709822844055552
  11. ↑ http://www.ndri.res.in/
  12. ↑ http://www.irma.ac.in
  13. ↑ http://siffs.org
  14. ↑ http://www.icsf.net/images/samudra/pdf/english/issue_19/114_art15.pdf
  15. ↑ http://inapp.com
  16. ↑ https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/soc.culture.indian.kerala/sumk93OYE5E
  17. ↑ http://lists.fsf.org/archive/html/info-press/2001-07/msg00003.html
  18. ↑ http://space-kerala.org

External links