A city like Peshawar ends up in world news daily, mostly because of the terror threats and challenges it faces. But its irrepressible citizens find hope in other areas of progress. They rise to most challenges and resiliently look forward to doing more. The same passion is the fuel behind the Peshawar Fellowship Program. The program is 4 weeks old, but much has transpired in those 4 weeks moving at a very dynamic pace. Allow us to introduce you to the Peshawar Fellowship Program and what's been happening in the past few weeks.
THE 2014-2015 FELLOWS
In our first cohort, there are 12 Fellows in the program. The Fellows work in 4 project teams, with 3 members per team.
Muhammad Ahmed Ibraheem
Team No Kunda
Muhammad Ahmad Ibraheem hails from the beautiful valley of Peshawar. At 23, Ibraheem helped launch Vivid, a product of Appography (a UK-based startup) at Microsoft Ventures UK. With an Electrical Engineering background, he takes a keen interest in entrepreneurial ventures, startups, and emerging technologies. Ibraheem is passionate about using technology to help solve society's major problems.
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Ehtisham Siddiqui
Team No Kunda
Ehtisham Siddiqui is a Computer Systems Engineering undergrad student from Peshawar. Computers & security fascinate him and he has always wanted to use his tech skills to contribute to society. Already a Cisco Certified Network Associate, he likes to code in C and Python, play with Arduino and Raspberry Pi, and blog at LabAndroid.com. He's also an avid military aviation follower and a cricket nut.
Muhammad Ali Khan
Team No Kunda
Muhammad Ali Khan descends from the beautiful valley of Swat. With a Computer Systems Engineering background, Ali is fascinated by computer security and network forensics. Apart from his experience in security, he also specializes in .NET technologies and data analysis. He's currently segued from ethical hacking to civic hacking. Envisioning a Pakistan where electricity theft can cleverly be reported with the power of mobile, Ali is working with his Fellowship team to develop No Kunda, a crowdsourcing app to solve the problem of electricity theft in the country.
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Hira Shakeel
Team DocSeek
Hira Shakeel, a native of the city of Peshawar, is a final year student of Computer Systems Engineering. She believes that it’s an empowering field that will allow her to make a difference to society and change it in a positive way. Her main areas of interest are web development (back end, front end), video codecs, C/C++, and Python. Inspired by civic hacking, she and her Fellowship team is creating DocSeek, an application to help people find their nearest medical care providers.
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Hina Mehmud
Team DocSeek
Hina is a final year student of Computer Systems Engineering at UET Peshawar. During her engineering education, she has earned vast knowledge in software development and hardware designing. She is an expert web developer, with an amazing esthetic for design.
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Umer Farooq
Team DocSeek
Umer is an Android, C/C++, Java, and Games Developer. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Systems Engineering. He has built web and mobile applications for healthcare in his career. As founder of WinGoku & an Android enthusiast, he has worked on several Android apps, as well as a few OS apps. He loves to help developers on StackOverflow and blog about technology. He is interested in Computer Vision & Machine Learning.
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Muhammad Usman
Team Rehnuma
Muhammad Usman started his career as Business Development Officer at Technowings while simultaneously working as a front/back-end designer and developer. His specialties are ASP.Net, C#, ROR, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Usman earned a degree in Computer Science from University of Peshawar in 2013.
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Muhammad Nasir
Team Rehnuma
Muhammad Nasir believes in simplicity and providing ease to the users. He graduated from University of Peshawar in 2012 and started his career as a software engineer. He has worked in several private companies as an ASP.Net and front/back-end developer. As a Fellow at Code for Pakistan, he is working on Rehnuma, and information portal for the city of Peshawar.
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Ebad Ullah
Team Rehnuma
Ebad Ullah is a software engineer with a passion for perfection. He believes that software can be used to build a better world, and he loves developing applications to make cities more livable, easy, and beautiful. He received his Bachelor's degree from Comsats Institute of Information Technology. He has been working as a software engineer. As a Fellow, Ebad Ullah is inspired by Honolulu Answers and is redeploying it as Rehnuma for Peshawar.
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Zahid Ali
Team Messiah
Zahid Ali is a skilled Android apps and games developer. When asked what first drew him to the field, he said he's spent much of his time with computers. In the past, he served as Computer Cell President at his university for 2 years. Inspired by the Fellowship Program Manager, Ali Raza, he wants to be a successful tech entrepreneur. He is aiming to initiate his own startup. Zahid loves to mess around with his hair and is a passionate photographer.
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Ebtihaj
Team Messiah
Ebtihaj is a Chief of Army Staff gold medalist graphic designer from Peshawar who designs, develops, consults, and speaks about building high quality games. He started designing and drawing from a young age and most of his design skills and knowledge is self taught. His experience goes into different areas of graphic design, but his true passion lies with game development. Most of his day is spent around his two loves, graphics and football.
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Mubassir Hayat
Team Messiah
Mubassir Hayat is a web developer and designer with a special interest in building custom APIs. Mubassir has worked at the nonprofit organization Computer Cell and contributes to several open source projects. Mubassir just wrapped up his summer 2013 project on oil and gas maintenance management.
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THE MANAGERS
Mr. Siddiqullah Chamkani
Managing Director KPITB
The Government of KP has been an incredibly supportive partner. In addition to offering the Fellows a stipend, the KP IT Board has also provided the Fellows work space at the IT Park. The MD of the KP IT Board, Mr. Siddiqullah Chamkani, directly facilitates the communication between the Fellows and focal people from Government departments, making sure the Fellows face no roadblocks in their work.
Ali Raza
Fellowship Program Manager
We jumped for joy when Ali Raza came on board as the Fellowship Program Manager, thanks to the awesome partnership of the World Bank. He is the guardian angel of the Fellows, leading the Fellowship Program hands-on, working closely with Code for Pakistan on designing the Fellowship Program, keeping the Fellows intellectually stimulated, teaching them workshops on coding, product development, and the lean startup methodology, enabling skillshares and hack days, and often feeding them donuts. Ali is a tech entrepreneur from Peshawar, the founder of SweetPixel Studios, a mobile apps and games startup.
THE PROJECTS
The 5 open source projects that the Fellows are working on are:
Rehnuma
This is a redeployment of the popular Honolulu Answers. This project will re-define how citizens of Peshawar find information on the web and via SMS regarding their city's services.
No Kunda
No Kunda aspires to launch a cult movement by gamifying electricity theft reporting.
Messiah
Messiah is a real-time emergency alerts messenger and a disaster data management tool.
Messiah Disaster Survey Tool
The Messiah Survey tool is customized to create reports automatically from a collected survey. The solution also provides an SMS based mechanism for surveyors to check the registration status of an IDP family.
DocSeek
This project will be the Yelp for government health facilities in KP, enabling residents to easily find nearby government health facilities.
