After iSpirt cofounder admits to trolling, members start leaving the organization

Last week, iSpirt cofounder Sharad Sharma confessed to being the one trolling anyone with negatives views on Aadhar.
After iSpirt cofounder admits to trolling, members start leaving the organization
After iSpirt cofounder admits to trolling, members start leaving the organization
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In a Twitter post recently, Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSpirt admitted to being behind trolling those criticizing Aadhar. After his public apology, there is seems to be turmoil in the organization with several being unhappy with Sharad’s actions.

According to a report by the Times of India, some of iSpirt’s key members including InMobi co-founder Naveen Tewari and FusionCharts founder Pallav Nadhani have reportedly quit the body

iSpirt was established four years ago to promote software products and has recently been the technology backbone of the government's Digital India project.

In the recent past, many have been calling for better privacy and security standards in Aadhaar, which is at the root of IndiaStack, a set of technology platforms that iSpirt is building and which can be used to digitise everyday processes including money transfers and signatures.

Sharad’s apology came after Kiran Jonnalagadda, cofounder of a developer community platform HasGeek revealed in a medium post that Sharad and other iSpirt members were behind the anonymous trolling, further mentioning Sudham, calling it an internal iSpirt trolling program where trolls coordinated on WhatsApp and attacked on Twitter.

Post his declaration, an internal committee was set up to investigate the issue. On Sunday, it came out with its final report, as per which it asked for the reconstitution of iSpirt's governing council, disbanding the team that was used to troll, and telling Sharma to stay off all public pronouncements on iSpirt for four months.

Ispirt’s program Sudham was set up to troll anti-Aadhaar activists has been dissolved. Sharad announced this through an official statement.

“…And on that count, I as one of the builders have stumbled. I condoned uncivil behavior by some anonymous handles over a period of ten days. I have owned up to this transgression. It was investigated internally by the iSPIRT Governing Council: Sudham as a team stands dissolved, and I will no longer be communicating on behalf of iSPIRT externally for 4 months.,” he said in the statement.

However, the committee’s report was met with several angry responses from those who were not happy with the decisions taken. TOI reports that some used the opportunity to express their anger, till now latent, with iSpirt's move to focus on IndiaStack. They felt it undermined its original objective of promoting software products.

Nadhani said in a mail that he strongly felt like he didn’t resonate with the direction iSpirt is moving in, the style of leadership, and the approach being adopted for maintaining and strengthening belief systems, leading to questions, doubts and factions, adding in the end that he is tendering his resignation as a volunteer of iSpirt.

As per the TOI report, Paras Chopra, co-founder of Wingify, another software product startup, is also exiting from the association.

"Several people were not happy with the way Sharad behaved at the meeting on Sunday . He seemed to be dictating what the committee should do," a person close to the developments told TOI.

Jay Pullur, a governing council member of iSpirt, told TOI that his feeling was that there was a need to change the governing structure of iSpirt to make IndiaStack and ProductNation (the software product promotion movement) as two of its initiatives.

Incidentally, iSpirt is the product of a split in IT association Nasscom, when many of the software product companies felt that Nasscom was too focused on IT services companies.

And so around 30 companies, led by Sharad, Naveen and others, create iSpirt in 2013 as a separate think tank. It currently has over 200 members.

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