Category Archives: Community

GNUnify 2009: Community Feedback

GNUnify 2009

GNUnify 2009

GNUnify always creates buzz in India’s FOSS beehive ;) and this year was no different.

Here are some blog posts from participants at this year’s conference which I feel provide valuable feedback to tune the conference further to serve its community.

GNUnify 2009 photos can be viewed here.

Excellent sessions at FOSDEM

FOSDEM 2009, held this weekend at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) campus in Brussels pulled together some excellent talks and sessions. The keynotes by Mark Surman of Mozilla and BDale Garbee of Debian on the first day had a packed auditorium of more than 3000 people. I really liked the lightning talks – the quality of the topics as well as the presenters was top-notch and everyone held to their 15 minute time limits. The hallways were teeming with attendees and the project tables from Mozilla, OpenOffice, BSD, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, KDE, Gnome, OpenSUSE and others were very popular.

FOSDEM 2009

FOSDEM 2009

For being a community organized conference, FOSDEM did a fantastic job in pulling together world class developers and technology leaders from across many open source projects. The audience in general was well informed and interested in the sessions they were attending. I was pleased by the questions as well as suggestions we received during OSI’s public meetings. I also liked FOSDEM’s idea of providing rooms for major projects where each project could dive into topics of interest to their communities. Only a couple of things that could’ve been improved – larger rooms for some of the talks (there was no space to even get in!) and availability of drinking water in the hallways for attendees.

At FOSDEM 2009

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

I’ll be at FOSDEM in Brussels this week and am looking forward to attending the sessions on Fedora, CentOS, Drupal and Mozilla. The first day keynotes at FOSDEM seem pretty interesting too. Mark Surman of Mozilla will talk about how freedom, openness and participation have become a pervasive part of digital life. BDale Garbee will be speaking on Debian and his observations about the role that Debian plays in the world of free software, and some lessons learned that may help other free software projects.

Also, of interest to me are the OSI sessions at FOSDEM where the OSI plans to meet with the European FOSS community. In its ‘Public Meeting of the Open Source Initiative‘, the OSI plans to discuss its recent activities, future direction and other topics of importance to the open source community.

At another session, ‘OSI: Recent Activities and Future Directions‘, the OSI’s Board of Directors will cover recent activities of the organization as well as present a current snapshot of the adoption of open source throughout the world.

Will post more later during the conference.

Building open source communities at OSSPAC

OSSPAC Singapore

OSSPAC Singapore

Singapore will be hosting its new open source conference OSSPAC from February 16-18 next month. OSSPAC is being supported by global open source players such as Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, MySQL (Sun) and Novell as well as influential local organizations such as Singapore International Chamber of Commerce and the Singapore Computer Society.

It is great to see an organized effort to hold a open source business conference in Singapore. The timing is right to emphasize how open source can support cost efficiencies and bring a greater value proposition for decision makers especially during the current global economic downturn. The conference is expecting about 500 attendees from quite a spread of nations all the way from India to Indonesia and Malaysia.

OSSPAC has some great keynotes lined up. A couple of keynotes I’m interested in attending include Harish Pillay’s talk on “The Magic of Infinity: How abundance drives innovation and economies” and Dr. Leng’s talk on “iN2015 and the Innovation Bazaar“. The conference program covers a lot of ground with session topics ranging from the virtues of virtualization and Android 101 to building and governing open source communities.

I’ll be speaking on a couple of topics I’m passionate about – on building successful open source communities and on “Open Source Open World” where I’ll talk about the impact of open source outside the US especially in India where open source has developed a large and healthy grassroots community around it but still sees slow industry adoption.

I’m looking forward to being in Singapore and interacting again with the vibrant local open source community.

FOSS seminar by IOTA Kolkata on Dec 26-28

IOTA Kolkata

IOTA Kolkata

The Institute for Open Technology and Applications (IOTA) will be holding its “Freedom in Computer Technology” seminar later this month at Science City in Kolkata on December 26-28. This seminar aims to promote FOSS in West Bengal and is targeted at state policy makers, industry professionals and academics from Kolkata and neighboring areas. Panel discussions and sessions on open source technologies, business models, licensing, standards and open hardware are on the program. FSF has announced a 3 hour talk ;-) on ‘Copyright vs. Community’ by RMS at the event on Dec 26. If you’re able to attend, please send me feedback about the event.

IOTA’s charter includes promotion of FOSS in government and academia and was founded in 2007. Supported by Sun Microsystems India and Red Hat India, IOTA seeks to provide information on FOSS and open standards to organizations looking to understand how open source can fit into their IT infrastructure. IOTA’s resource center at Jadavpur University also offers training on Linux and Open Office. It would be great to see more quality training on other components of the LAMP stack from IOTA as well as more community participation from ILUG-Cal and other local groups.

GNUnify 2009 announced, CFP now open

GNUnify 2009

GNUnify 2009

Pune’s popular FOSS conference GNUnify has just announced its dates for 2009 – February 13-14. The conference has been organized annually by the Pune FOSS community, Linux User Group (PLUG) and Symbiosis’ Institute for Computer Studies and Research (SICSR) since 2003 and is a favorite meeting place for India’s FOSS community.

The seventh GNUnify plans to bring together another round of excellent technology talks, workshops, BOFs and install-fests. The call for participation is now open – so send in your proposal for an in-depth talk, a serious workshop or a BOF on the latest open source technologies to Harshad Gune or Sudhanwa Jogalekar at GNUnify.

Twincling’s Open Source Summit Programming Contest: Show-off Your Code

Twincling Open Source Summit 2008

Twincling Open Source Summit 2008

The Open Source Summit coming up in Hyderabad this weekend has lined up some exceptional talks, workshops and a fun programming contest. Sessions I’d like to be at (and I know you’d be too) include Using Git in your project, Hadoop: a data intensive distributed application framework, Map-Reduce: a distributed model of computation, open source routers, layered security using open source tools and hands-on workshops on Threading Building Blocks (TBB) and OpenMP multi-core programming.

The programming contest challenge “Find the Words” is already underway. All entries must include an English-language explanation of your solution’s design. Contest entries must include source code for the implementation. Also don’t forget to add contributor names, e-mail addresses, and brief resumes (including postal addresses and telephone numbers) of everyone who contributed to the project. The project must be submitted as a gzipped tar file via email to leela at twincling dot org. The submission deadline is midnight (IST) December 12 2008.

Take on this challenge, show off your code and impress your peers.

Twincling’s Open Source Summit ’08: Contributing to Open Source

Twincling Open Source Summit 2008

Twincling Open Source Summit 2008

Cool technology, hacking code, phenomenal energy — that’s the upcoming Twincling Open Source Summit in Hyderabad.

Over the last few years it’s been fantastic to see the growing energy around open source software in Hyderabad resulting from the dedicated efforts of the Twincling Technology Foundation. This year, Twincling is organizing its 2-day Open Source Summit on December 13-14 at the beautiful IIIT Campus in Gachibowli. The agenda includes in-depth sessions on open source technologies like KDE, Git, Hadoop, OpenSUSE and Gentoo. Plus, the second day will have hands-on workshops by Intel engineers on Threading Building Blocks (TBB) and openMP. There also will be sessions on open source Web 2.0 frameworks, virtualization, networking, operating systems and multi-core software development technologies.

At Twincling events, I’ve come to expect a high level of participation from attendees, high quality discussions, and good technology sessions. Earlier this year, I conducted the Open Source Entrepreneurship Forum organized by Twincling. I was impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of the local developer community. They are eager to build software and start-ups based on open source tools and techniques.

At this year’s Open Source Summit, developers can expect to learn about the latest in open source software, share their knowledge and, as always, network with peers. So mark your calendars for December 13-14 (Saturday-Sunday) and participate at the summit. Don’t miss this opportunity to join in the excitement.

Celebrate Software Freedom Day on 20 September

Transparency is key in enabling people to participate in the creation of wealth and well-being in society. In the past decade, free and open source software (FOSS) has become one of the major catalysts in increasing transparency by lowering the barrier to access the best software technologies. Software Freedom Day (SFD) celebrates this important role of FOSS in making this change happen globally.

Educate, distribute, install and promote the use of free and open source software on Software Freedom Day this year in your community – in your neighborhood, in your school and at work.

Share your knowledge and participate in the nearest SFD celebration. Visit the Software Freedom Day website to find out where you can participate in your local area.

Show your support for FOSS and for software freedom.

Software Freedom Day 2008

44 apps over a weekend at SF iPhoneDevCamp2

iPhoneDevCamp2Every year, the hack-a-thon at iPhoneDevCamp is a superb example of collaboration, team effort and hacking code. Chris Allen has been a fantastic mentor for many participants hacking code at the DevCamp and this camp was no exception. This time around, a couple of days of huddling and coding produced some amazing results – 44 iPhone applications based on big ideas and small ideas from open source dev tools to games and social apps. The hack-a-thon brought together teams of people who had never met each other before the conference started. Two days of intense collaboration, communication and coding (sounds like open source doesn’t it!) culminated in demos of these applications that were judged by a panel of experts for categories of best 90 minute app, best open source app, coolest app, most useful app, best developer tool, most educational app, best social app, best game, best web app. Our team of five worked on developing a multiplayer version of “Rock, Scissors, Paper” and appropriately named it RSPRoyale. Our team gave a good demo. We plan to work further on the app and hopefully make it available through the iTunes AppStore. The unconference happening simultaneously had a lot of interesting talks as well. By the evening, once the demos were conducted, the best apps in each contest category were announced and awarded some cool prizes – an iPhone 3G, a 17-inch MacBook Pro, JBL speakers, VMWare Fusion, Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, Apple Store gift certificates. A group photo of the DevCamp community with the satellite groups visible online on the background screens was one of the highlights of the whole event. I congratulate the organizers (Raven, Dom, Chris, Blake) who put this camp together and the community. It was a great experience of team building, some serious coding and lots of fun.