November 3nd, 2007

With only 15 hours and 11 minutes to go till our little experiment, we’ve been trying all we can to get the message across to people all over the city. Like they say, More the Merrier! A lot of enthusiastic people have come forward to help us by way of blog posts, newspaper articles, e-mail spam (!) and spreading the word through networking sites like Orkut, FaceBook etc. Thank you all!

On the 30^th of October, Deccan Chronicle, a national daily, carried an article on the 03:11 PM campaign. Here’s a snapshot of it:

Also, there’s a FaceBook Event for 03:11 PM, created by Vaishnavi – invites to which reached over three hundred people. And there’s been a lot of eager response on those forums as well! Yay! So if you’re on FaceBook, do check it out and key in your RSVPs!

November 2nd, 2007

Schools for India is a non profitable charitable Organization, involved in creating the best in class schools across India, with the aim of providing education for the people of rural India.

6000 schools across the country have been planned. Each of the schools will have the capacity to teach 945 students, including up to 15 special children from Primary to secondary school.

Schools for India is embarking on a magnificent infrastructure building plan with the aim of providing the best schools for rural India, with facilities on par or superior to that of city schools for students from rural India.

The school buildings will be constructed within 12 weeks from the date of commencement using latest international building technologies.

The state-of-the-art infrastructure will act as a catalyst for parents to send their children to school, and Schools for India will sponsor education, meals and uniforms to those who require it.

Schools for India believes firmly that such provided infrastructure will ensure quicker admission, higher school attendance and reduce the migration of students to cities.

Schools for India will employ 600,000 teaching and non teaching staff by the year 2020.

Schools for India will also provide with best of its abilities all the facilities and amenities to underprivileged students free of cost.

Schools for India was started in Jan 2004 and registered as the Non profit Charitable trust under the Indian Charitable trust act in December 2005.

Schools for India is run by a team of professionals who has wide experience in planning and executing large turnkey projects across the globe. The trust has scores of volunteers, members and mentors who help in ensuring that the project is executed on time.

Venkatesh Chandru

Founder-Trustee

For More information Visit: www.schoolsforindia.org

Schools for India- A Little Step to Literate India

November 2nd, 2007

1) Address your email to 311pm@email.smugmug.com

2) Type ‘chennai’ (without quotes and all small letters) into the subject line (important do not change it or add anything to it. Type only chennai)

3) Change the email format to ‘text’ from ‘rich format’ (very important) and type the description (include your name and email/phone number and a 50 word (approx) write up about your photo) into the body of the email and send it. The photo will be placed in the email gallery.

4) Go to http://311pm.smugmug.com/gallery/3746961 after 5/10 minutes and check whether your photo has successfully been uploaded. If it has then good. Else try again or mail it to us at 0311pm@gmail.com

Note: This works both for email and direct mobile uploads.

Note 2: If this is complicated, email the photo with your name, contact details, and description of the photo to 0311pm@gmail.com

Note 3: Upload the photos by November 13th, 2007 (10 days from now) latest.

Note 4: All your photos are creative commons licensed and will not be used for any profitable purposes. In case your photo generates any revenue, you will definitely be informed about it (please join the Google groups) and the proceeds will be donated to charity

November 1st, 2007

Not in Chennai on Nov 3, 03:11pm?

Not to worry, SecondLife and Avatar Voodo to the rescue. Labsji has setup this amazing facility to help you participate in 03:11 PM campaign virtually via SecondLife. Visit SecondLife Sim Treepu. While there, launch a virtual balloon with your request for a photo shoot at a particular location, as if you are taking it! Some kind natured 03:11 PM enthusiast might take your request seriously and shoot a snap exactly as you requested. Your requests are actually queued as Human Intelligence Task request in Amazon Mturk.

Want to help someone wanting to participate from afar?

Log on to http://mturk.com and search of HITs titled AVooDo. Fulfill the HIT as requested and make someone’s day! As a token of appreciation your good natured gesture, there will be small inconsequential (yet fun!) rewards that you will be able to claim against your successful HIT completion.

Help spill the fun from Virtual to Real and vice versa.

More details can be found here: http://treepu.in/wp/chennai-311pm-photo-freeze-event-now-from-anywhere-via-secondlife/79

October 31th, 2007

Findnearyou.com, a location based information service is sponsoring our SmugMug account. Woah!

So that means, apart from making everyday decisions simpler, they are also making our photo uploading process simpler. Details on photo uploading procedure will be put up soon. Watch this space.

A big thanks to findnearyou.com for supporting us and helping us out of this tight spot.

October 30th, 2007

A few folks have been complaining about the complex process involved with uploading the photos.

1) One has to obtain a Yahoo ID.

2) Get a flickr account.

3) Join the 311pm flickr group

4) The upload the photo to their account.

5) Go to organizer and send the photo to the flickr pool.

Phew!

It is a very known fact that flickr isn’t very usable, so if flickr is the only option for uploading photos, we are going to be stifling a lot of n00bs in here. So what can be done?

Have an email id? An email id to which folks can mail their photo. This sounds like a nice, but it is a very torturous process. The organizers i.e. us, have to manually read every message, wait for the virus scan. Download the photo and try to make sure we don’t mess the write ups which accompany the photo.

So we have zeroed in on Smugmug, for the want of a better choice. Smugmug has everything we wanted and more, but all this for a price of $150 (approx. Rs. 6,500). If we manage to find sponsors in these four days, we will make lives easier for a lot of you.

*Fingers crossed*

October 27th, 2007

Hello I am Ganesh APP, a blogger/filmmaker/engineering student in Chennai. I along with Bhargav Ramakrishnan and Mahendran Balan are organizing this campaign with a lot of help from friends, bloggers, strangers et la.

Let me introduce you to Bhargav and Mahen. Bhargav is my classmate, a very creative chap who is game for anything innovative. Engineering has been his bane in life. He is more of an arts student. He is a theater personality in his own right. You might catch him at some random Evam plays these days.

Mahendran, who works for Citigroup Global Services ltd banking, is the most enthusiastic guy I have known during my stay in Chennai. He has been driving this campaign … blood and flesh… 

How did it all start?

I spend a lot of time watching play.blogger.com photos. Isn’t it amazing, to watch all the photos uploaded at the same time? What if I could see all the photos taken at the same time? Brilliant!

I called up Baggy and told him about this. He later fine tuned the idea.

Why only Chennai and not the whole world?

It is a a question of quantity and fullness. By fixing the event to only Chennai, we can have better publicity drives and cover the whole city. Get enough photos to show the city in full.

Why 03:11 PM?

It is just an insignificant time on an insignificant date. At least we thought so, till we bumped into this Wikipedia entry.

Here is my top pick from that list: The storage space counter on Gmails homepage increases by 311^10-6 MB every second.

………share our initiative with Chennaiites, both participants and non-participants, all over. We are closing deals with sponsors and on the lookout for more to place banners of that moment we defined. We also intend to release a coffe table book ‘3:11 PM – Define a Moment in Chennai’, to be distributed and sold, proceeds of which will be forwarded to the ‘Schools for India’ project.

0311 will not stop with that, with the encouraging response and support we have received we are pitching to take this event to other cities in India starting with Bengaluru and hopefully one day define a moment in India itself. We are open to ideas and contributions from all our friends at 311, if you have any ideas about what more we can do, please mail us at 0311pm@gmail.com

Thank you.

Bhargav

-WHAT

On the 3rd of November 2007, we invite every Chennaiite to for one second, at exactly 03:11 PM, stop whatever it is that they are doing, and click, shoot, snap, capture or photograph that moment, just hold that one instant frozen in a picture and send it to us. This is not for any great worthy cause, this is not a competition, it may or may not help charity, it will not prevent global warming, you will gain no medals, no certificates but it is most definitely not a waste.

-WHY

It is to share with so many of your neighbors what was going on in your part Chennai at the same time as something else was going on in theirs. There are no requisites to do this, other than that you be in Chennai, whether it be a fancy SLR or a VGA mobile camera, get the clearest, cleanest shot you can that will suggest what you were doing or what was going on near you, in our lovely city, at that one instant.

-HOW

If you wish to contribute, synchronize your watch, set reminders and alarms and just remember to shoot that moment. Please attach a note, in under 50 words, with your name and where you were when you clicked that snap. Uploading procedure is here.

You can also lend a hand by informing your friends and by putting up a link on your website. We wish to make not just a collection but a memory, on the internet and if we can, have it published to share with as many Chennaiites as we can,’03:11 PM’.