KGP and MetaKGP

TSA-Admin
TSA-Admin
Aug 27, 2017 · 5 min read

MetaKGP, since its inception in 2014 has become a main source of information about everything KGP. Despite being a source of vast information catering to almost each and every need of KGPians and a great platform to connect and collaborate with like-minded people, most of MetaKGP’s remarkable ideas and work is unknown to us. What most of us see and know is just the wiki page which in itself deserves accolades but what we should know is that is not all that MetaKGP is about.

The vision of Metakgp is to be a single avenue where anyone, from any department, who has any idea, can come and collaborate with others having the same idea without restricting it to just coding, other projects like craft or literature or music are equally encouraged. The people interested in music can share their music experiences and skills and the same goes for other inclinations. All in all, any student on the campus who is interested in learning some skill or collaborating on something they feel KGP lacks, MetaKGP is the place to go and communicate with people who’ll help.

Some of the projects that have been started by MetaKGP include the following:

IIT KGP Professor Search: given a research project, it will find the professor who works on it.

Naarad: sources news from the important pages related to IIT Kharagpur in one place

Gyft: your academic timetable can be synced with your Google Calendar.

BlackJack: A bot that adds previous year grade distribution to course pages.

MetaKGP Talks: Talks from current students or alumni of IIT Kharagpur.

How it all began?

It was set up by Vikrant Varma and Vivek Aithal in 2014, along with their friends Harsh Gupta and Vivek Rai. It was started as an attempt to create an avenue to meet interesting people doing their own interesting thing and formed a place where people could meet with their own pet projects and help each other. Since then, it has grown to over 3000 articles with contributions by hundreds of KGPians, and more than 500 unique users visiting every day. The idea was to have a collection of all relevant information that everyone on campus can benefit by. MetaKGP started with a wiki which is based on Wikipedia’s model. Anyone can edit the pages and the information is easily accessible for all to view. The community driven nature of the setup makes it easier to identify and correct mistakes or discrepancies in the content which is full of useful information like General Championship data, Course grades and history of almost all the places in KGP. To get more traffic on the wiki they started writing and compiling articles and featuring some of them. In addition to that, they started two other projects — MFQP and MFTP to boost the traffic on the wiki. And finally, they converted it into a GitHub organization and wrote a lot of scripts to automate the wiki page. So, it gradually developed to become the organization it is today where anyone can bring up their own projects and work with other people. Projects like MFQP (a tool for searching previous years’ question papers), MFTP (Google group based notification service for notices from the Training and Placement noticeboard), and TKDP (The Kharagpur Documentary Project — history of KGP in the voice of people behind various canteens and shops) are the ones that got the group significant traction in the beginning. You can also read about the essence of MetaKgp on Vikrant’s blog.

What you need to know to begin?

The group basically enables any individual to help others by either sharing information or working on an idea. They have Slack (messaging platform for teams) channels for communication. Anyone who wants to be a part of the group can get a self invite link from “slack.metakgp.org” which can be found on their facebook page — https://www.facebook.com/metakgp/. You’ll have to enter your email addresses and register for the Slack channel. It’s just a matter of reaching here, sharing the idea and you’d be guided further with a team to work on it, and resources like server space or technical instructions. The conversations on the channel varies widely from discussing project ideas, thoughts about literature, music or research and random chit-chats. They also have a github organization where their projects are kept updated and open sourced.

They have a list of projects maintained on https://wiki.metakgp.org/w/Metakgp:MetaX.

There is no barrier to entry, you always see some new faces in MetaKGP meetups. The collaboration is such that even a beginner can make significant contributions. Despite generally having been seen as a hardcore “coding” society, the word ‘collaboration’ is the cornerstone of the foundation of Metakgp. They have ‘Hackdays’ when they sit down to hack on awesome project ideas, wiki problems and bugs. They also have ‘Addathons’ when the group comes together and add information to the wiki. In addition to this, they hold a ‘Book Club’ meeting where they discuss about literature and books in particular. All details about these and their meetups are posted on the slack channel which already has about 300 people on it. To further boost their interactions, they are hoping to conduct more such offline events and their dashboard will be launched soon which aims to put most projects in a single web page.

The Present

The MetaKGP team currently has three maintainers — Ayush Goyal, Naresh Ramesh and Nishant Nikhil. It is important to note that they are merely a face of the organization rather than the usual hierarchical heads. Instead, it functions as a flat organization where everyone has equal vote rights. The maintainers mostly exist to oversee the different projects and removing roadblocks. These maintainers are elected through online elections which is carried under the supervision of an election commissioner, currently Arun Patro, while the voters are the people who have made any kind of contribution to the wiki or any MetaKGP project.

Metakgp is not a society and will never be. There will be no drudgery, no hierarchy, no admonition. Metakgp is for curious people to come together and fix their own interesting shit. Creating beautiful, useful products is a happy coincidence.” — Vivek Aithal, co-founder

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