Carrot Cakes,

Our primary goal at CodeChef has always been to help students and professionals become better programmers.  While algorithmic problem solving certainly helps, we feel like we can do a lot more.  We’ve tried to expand our reach by holding Tech Talks and Meet-ups as well as instituting campus chapters, the wiki and chat.  Now we’re excited to announce our next idea.  In our most recent poll we asked if any of you participate in an Open Source project, the large majority of people indicated that they currently do not but are interested in doing so.  We’d like to leverage your enthusiasm, start our own open source project and ask all of you to contribute.

We’d like to do a project that helps the wider community.  We came across this article and really liked the concept:

NIIT Limited on the occasion of the World Computer Literacy Day (WCLD) 2005 is planning to set up computer literacy kiosks in 20 locations spread over the rural areas of the country and to train 20,000 village children free of cost…

… computers are installed for unsupervised use of children in slums and impoverished locations to show that irrespective of the socio-economic background children learn to use computers by themselves if provided with the right kind of infrastructure.

While we have a few ideas of our own, we’d love to hear what cool concepts you can come up with.  Let’s all work together to create a project that can really help people.  Please share your thoughts with us in the comment section below… let the brainstorming begin…

Cheers,
Amit