| Submit Your UC Application! | | Print | |
| Written by Amine Hambaba | ||||||
| Tuesday, 29 November 2005 | ||||||
Page 3 of 4
Question 2
Focus: Potential to Contribute Rationale: UC welcomes the contributions each student brings to the campus learning community. This question seeks to determine an applicant's academic or creative interests and potential to contribute to the vitality of the University. Question: Tell us about a talent, experience, contribution or personal quality you will bring to the University of California. While growing up I developed an appreciation with the depth and beauty of the Qur’an, the center of Islamic discourse. I sought source material which would reconcile the textual commentaries and develop my understanding of the modern world I lived in. The lack of resources within my area and the high cost of obtaining materials from institutions lead me to search the Internet for content, but I hardly found enough material. This need transpired for a project allowing digital content concerning Islamic related material intertwined with the modern discourse. Through the last four years I initiated a non profit organization called, Alilm Network, otherwise known as alilm.net. 'Ilm' the Arabic term for knowledge and 'al' being the definite article, standing for 'the knowledge'. Despite being an international effort, the main intent of this organization has not changed, even though people from all over the world with their different backgrounds contribute to it. Alilm has converted over a thousand files in: audio, video and text to the digital format placed in a database system that is continuously updated for effective distribution. A majority of the functions offered by Alilm are online, the primary component being an extensive search engine through index files of the database. Ease and automatic customization applied within the search application allows more accurate results for a user’s inquiry especially with repeated usage. This application has received acknowledgment from the international community promoting the visibility of Alilm’s efforts. Recent trends within the information technology sector allowed me to further Alilm’s services to focus on access to the database for the community. At first, the concept was discarded due to tremendous maintenance expense. It was one thing to place so many files on our website, but in order to develop wide contribution as well as distribution it would require vast amounts of bandwidth. However, using meshing, a generic term for content development using other resources on the net, as well as reduction in maintenance cost the distribution of Alilm’s work was soon actualized. Since then, Alilm has received wide community support and eventually inspired another online project of similar intent by Islamic Multimedia Education Group (IMEG). A key aspect to the concept is allowing the distribution of alilm.net database to other organizations free of charge. A reason why Alilm’s has grown to such an extent is due to the use of an extensive public notice system. Originally, I intended to place an advertisement system within the site to offer means of financial support. I soon realized that such a system degraded the value of content, by not offering any relevance. Instead of regular ads we used public service ads which were related to our site. An example set of these notices would consist of notices on the Asia Tsunami crisis of the more recent hurricane Katrina. We also promoted notices related to the study of other fields and religions such as a link to the Zaytuna Institute Minara Program. The experience and success of the Alilm project is a window to a fast-growing, substantial Muslim community in America. Its significance is a step towards understanding the modern world, as well as the interconnectedness to the world’s diverse concept of life. Such a contribution to the University of California should allow for not only a broader understanding of ideas of Islam, but a deep-seated reverence and engagement with them. |
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