Chibangalore - Update 2007

Chibangalore was formed to address the growing needs of the HCI professionals in Bangalore. Bangalore is the hub of IT in India and now the IT companies are giving a lot of emphasis to usability and user centered design activities. In fact, according to the latest statistics from Google, the word ‘usability’ was most searched in the world from Bangalore!

It was not that there weren’t any existing groups in South India which provided a platform to interact. There is the Easy conference on usability which takes place in Bangalore annually and has a sizable brand presence. But an annual event ,with limited participation, does not cater to the growing needs of the HCI community in bangalore.

It was seen that the HCI professionals were grappling with lots of issues specific to the needs of the Indian IT industry. For example – Users not being in the same country, how to integrate user centered process with the software design life cycle, how to institutionalize usability in software outsourcing companies etc. Understanding this need, Chibangalore was formed which represents the software products, services and the consulting companies in Bangalore. The aim was to have more number of events and touch points within the community so that the sharing of best practices processes and developments can be done more frequently. Also, one of things this forum wants to achieve is to make this platform more inclusive- Include most of the companies representing many streams within IT so that the learning’s can be disseminated across the domains.

• Jonathan Arnowitz - Rapid Prototyping and Demo of Prototyping Tools
• Michael Arent - Moving from a engineering centered to a user centered organization
• Jeremy Ashley - Head user experience Oracle
• Joseph Konstan – President of ACM Sigchi
• Geetha Naryanan – Founder and director of Srishti school of design

The events have been attended by wide array of companies like Infosys, SAP, Honeywell, HP, HFI, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and many others. Companies have taken turns in organizing the events. Taking the lead in organizing are SAP, HFI, Honeywell, Oracle and Microsoft.

To kick start the 2007 activities, there is an event planned in March. For more details, watch this space.

To make Chibangalore as a more inclusive forum this new website has been initiated. You can contribute as an author; add comments to the articles, rate authors, add biographies etc. So please go ahead register yourself using the register link on the top right corner and start contributing!.