Hello! Welcome to MindTree Foundation.
We launched the current MindTreeFoundation site on December 3rd 2009, in commemoration of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. The site has given us good visibility in the community and connected with us many interested visitors. However, this is not an very accessible site for its chief audience – Persons with Disabilities. Also, it did not fully utilize Web 2.0 capabilities.
To address these issues, the Microsoft Sharepoint COE team has built an exciting new site for the Foundation. I am privileged to launch this site for review and feedback by MindTree Minds across the globe today, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities 2010.
The site has several interesting facts.
- This will be one of the earliest external facing sites on Sharepoint 2010 in India.
- Microsoft has made the entire Sharepoint environment licenses available to MindTree at a huge discount.
- The site makes use of many Out-of-Box accessibility features from SharePoint 2010 to make this a more productive experience for persons with disabilities
- The site will be hosted by our IS team. Another first for the MindTree!
- In the next phase of development, we will add more interactive features like personalized pages, richer content on experience sharing, more accessibility features, more interactive experience with NGO's, Volunteers and Persons with Disabilities and possibly a payment gateway.
Please share your comments and inputs. This site will also be a showcase for MindTree’s Sharepoint 2010 capabilities and our ability to develop accessible web sites. We would like to go live very soon !
We wanted to do something special for this launch. So we requested some of our fellow MindTree Minds to share their thoughts on the upcoming Census 2011, with respect to its impact on the enumeration of Persons with Disabilities.
The Census numbers are very important role when policy makers decide on developmental programs and resource allocations. This is also a very important input for marketing plans and product strategies, when companies start creating products and services specifically addressing their needs.
In the last Census, the Percentage of People with Disabilities was reported as just 2.1% of the total population. This is too low a number when compared to global averages.
This time, the questions on disabilities have been included well in advance. There are more options to choose. The enumerators are being trained well to ask the right questions. Moreover, the question on Disability itself has been moved up to the 9th position to make sure it does not get missed.
What came out of this is very a short movie about counting of Persons with Disability in the 15th National Census of India in 2011. Please take a look. Tell your friends and families about this.
As Vaishanavi Kasturi, a MindTree Mind working in SVB as Business Analyst says, “Cheer up! We are blessed with a wonderful gift from God, our hidden talent! So bring out that talent and participate in the Census. It would help in benefiting yourself”.
Thank you.