End Term Review: STAB Overall Coordinator 2016-17

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The year has been one of the more active ones for the thriving Tech@IITB community with structural reforms for the introduction of GS Tech along with sustainable introduction of BioTech Club, expansion of Tinkerers’ Lab and inclusion of more machinery and resources with help from batch of ‘66. BioTech club is now established as a hobby club on equal footing with other clubs after a successful trial year.

Interactions among community have been significantly surged by frequent Group Discussions and Reading Group Talks by all hobby clubs. Another improvement is the complete online sharing of events, minutes and articles on respective club websites and ensurance of their punctual updation. A revamped STAB website has centralised all the web platforms and club microsites together.

With dedicated Project managers, industrial and academia projects were offered to tinkerers this year, throughout the semesters. Sourced projects and dedicated mentorship from TATA was granted, with tangible results in the form of three completed projects and prototypes. ITSP has seen grants from FOSSEE for Open Source projects along with WnCC.

Broken Points –

Hostel Technical councils could not be satisfactorily integrated with the hobby clubs by rooting for dual responsibilities of Tech Secys as de-facto Conveners, save for specific cases in Aeromodelling Club, Krittika, and WnCC.

PG participation has been limited to select sessions and events – any high turnouts received were without special inducements. The main reason was no PG representation in Technical Council to guide reforms and suggestions forward.

Two GCs (Aeromodelling and SciComp) out of ten, had to be scraped to accommodate ‘Tech n RnD’ exposition, which was delayed significantly by three months from the planned dates in Jan.
Inter IIT Tech meet, which is currently being held in IIT Kanpur, saw no participation from IITB for the dates are highly unconducive, being in close propinquity of end-semesters.

Blah@TL, which was an initiative to support informal talks among Tech peers got overshadowed by frequently planned Group Discussions and Talks by hobby clubs, hence deeming the point redundant.

Carry forwards for next (first) GSTech

OKSP, (Online Knowledge Sharing Portal) could not be launched in this tenure but much of the site has been girded. The Portal should be up and about in summers, hence, it is actively being taken up by the GS Tech for his tenure.

Club-Hostel Tech Council collaboration will now be tackled with a different approach by decentralising large scale events.

Lightsaber, (proposed revival of tech newsletter) which was originally planned in association with Insight, could not be met with a concrete structure for publication frequency and layout matters, and now is in the pipeline for more deliberation by the next council.

Work outside the Manifesto

Hostel Tech rooms of H-2, 5 & 7 were completely revamped and revived this year.
Industrial collaboration in TL has been conceived and driven well under process with ongoing negotiations with Bosch and TI to draft up MoUs.

IITB’s team for Techfest’s Robowars competition has been funded by Technical council (The event being quite high budget.)

Maths n Physics Club have a well sustained student reading group, Summer of Science (http://mnp-club.github.io/projects/).

Web n Coding Club have seasons of code initiative which has seen enthusiastic response (http://www.wncc-iitb.org/soc/).