The Idea

A number of ideas came together in the SkillsCamp concept. For sometime I have been supporting the digital studyhall project which is an effort to use video to scale the efforts of very good private primary school teachers out into rural and poor areas where quality teachers with deep knowledge of the required subjects are hard to find.

At the higher end, I feel the need for quality technical training may be one of the most important impediments to India's continued economic growth. I constantly hear from friends and read on misc. blogs how difficult it is for managers at technical companies to hire competent people. At the same time there are half a billion people in India under 25 many of whom would love to fill these jobs. The gap between these populations is training.

Traditional approaches to training clearly wont be adequate to fill this gap. The population is simply too large, and most people competent to teach are too busy earning good money in industry to spend time lecturing a small group of students in a classroom week in and week out.

The intelligence and the social concience of people working in the tech sector has been striking at the different barcamps I've been to. In the past couple years I have met many people with intense passion and knowledge of this technology who are both interested in how to use these skills to start-up and make money, as well as make the world a better place.

The DSH model (simlar to MIT open courseware) has some hope of scaling the focused efforts of a small group of people to affect change across a landscape as large as India. The barcamp community has the people with the skills to seed this content network with the right information to help would be geeks around the world get upto speed.

SkillsCamp is an attempt to bring these communities together to affect this change for the benefit of everyone everywhere. Really, its win win for everyone involved.