Python In The Wild: Enabling children to voice their opinions

The talk focusses on a mobile-based application built for enabling children to voice their opinions to the policy makers. The Application is built upon the GeoDjango-OpenLayers-RapidSMS stack. The talk would also introduce the open source RapidSMS framework which is built by Python programmers from all over the world who are contributing to the mobile healthcare sector in the developing countries like Uganda, Senegal, Ghana, India etc.

1. Objectives of the application covering the humanitarian aspects of the project.
2. The technology stack and the reason why we chose it.
3. Tools used for automation, continuos integration, testing etc., and Lessons learned during deployment.
4. The state of mobile and sms application frameworks in Python and an introduction to RapidSMS.

Diptanu Choudhury is a consultant who works with ThoughtWorks. He is a FOSS enthusiast and is very passionate about dynamic languages. His other interests includes Evolutionary Computing and HPC Clusters, while studying at NIT Jalandhar he worked on Beowulf Clusters and Particle Swarm Optimization and presented his research at various conferences including GECCO.

Jeff Wishnie is the Director of Social Impact at ThoughtWorks. Prior to this, he spent nearly 20 years as a silicon valley entrepreneur working in both large organizations and small - as engineer, user-interface designer, product designer, architect, president and founder. Responsible for software projects including the Ubuntu-based Inveneo Desktop Linux, he also planned and participated in field implementation of computing and communications technology for education, health care, relief, and economic development projects in Uganda, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone.