About This Website

History

This site has been created for the RVS alumni, originally at the behest of Dr. Kumaraswamy. He was in Chicago, USA in summer of 1997 and "volunteered" a few individuals for the task.

The domain name rvs.org was picked after considering many others -- www.astachal.org, www.caverock.org etc. It was registered on Aug 14, 1997 and was open to "public access" in early September, 1997.

The initial version of the website used technologies such as: html, cgi-bin (backed by programs written in C++ and the UNIX k-shell) and was deployed on a Sun Sparc machine running the Solaris OS (Sun's version of UNIX).

The cost of hosting the site has been met through donations from individuals (please consider contributing some money towards this if you can).

Goals

The original goals of creating this website were pretty simple:

To maintain a world-wide database of RVS alumni, enabling them to reconnect with their friends.
To provide a forum for discussion of common-interest issues.
To provide a means for career networking and mentoring to both RVS alumni and to current students/recent graduates who need guidance.
To be a source of information about the current goings-on in RV.
To provide an occassional "walk down memory lane", back to our days in RV.

While we have been very successful at some of these over the years, others goals have not been realized. We hope that with the formation of a formal alumni association (whenever that happens), it will be easier to address these tasks.

The Current Avatar

The current version of the website went live in July 2005. The development of the site is now overseen by two groups -- one responsible for the content (the WebContent group) and the other for the design/layout (the WebDesign group). In addition, other volunteers are also involved, contributing material or ensuring integrity of the data on the site.

A host of new features have been addded; the design and navigability have been considerably improved. The site now also uses some newer web technologies (compared to the original 1997 site), such as: Java, Servlets/JSP, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

The site is still hosted in Chicago, USA.

If anyone is interested in getting involved in the development and management of this website, please contact us (details provided in the "Help/Join Us" section).