@Directi we are committed to improve the technical community in India. We started off with TechCamp. Next we launched CodeChef. And now we proudly present DesignChef.

Unlike CodeChef, which was targted at Developers, DesignChef is targeted at Design Professionals like Usability Experts, UX Specialists, Interaction Designers, Front-end developers, etc.

We welcome you to join this non-profit, community initiative and help us grow it.

I had a conference call with Vikrama Dhiman to discus how we can collaborate with WiZiQ and create virtual (online) conferences. Going forward its going to be more and more difficult for all of us to be in one place and do these conferences. Getting the venue and other logistics is very complicated. While we should try and do as many in-person conferences, we should start building a culture of online conferences.

So here is the plan (Brickbats welcomed)

In 2 weeks from now, we should do our first Virtual Conference (it’s not really first. Vikram and Mayank have already done one). We can have 2-3 speakers for this conference.
Depending on how this conference goes, we can plan for a grand conference begining May. For this conference I can invite some luminaries from US and Europe.

Along these lines, I’m also thinking of starting an online 24/7 chat-room, open to all to join, we can have interesting discussion and folks can shoot questions for real-time help.

Any suggestions on what we sould use for this? Skype chat, Twitter and IRC are 3 things that comes to my mind.

Directi has launched its first Treasure Hunt http://th.directi.com/. The target audience for this treasure hunt are the participants of the Great Indian Developer Summit. Hopefully we will come up with many more such contests to help us build a stronger community of software professionals in India.

On similar lines we are planning a series of contests focused on Software Design, UX, Testing, etc.  Watch out the Directi wiki for updates.