Tag Archives: Community

GNUnify 2009 announced, CFP now open

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

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

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

Every 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.

SF iPhoneDevCamp2 in full swing

iPhoneDevCamp2 August 1 Evening: The camp started with more than 300 people attending the opening session on Friday evening to get started. People discussed app ideas, development plans and formed teams. iPhone users ranging from developers to user interface specialists and even photographers joined in to brainstorm. The organizing team (thanks Raven & Dom), volunteers and Adobe staff were exceptionally helpful to participants coming in. A lot of energy and high spirits. I was impressed with the number of sponsors (60+ sponsors) and supporters for the DevCamp, all interested in encouraging this open community around the iPhone phenomenon.

August 2 Morning: It is Saturday morning now and the DevCamp is already buzzing with activity. After breakfast, sponsors were introduced briefly by Raven and Dominic. Right now, the keynote forum with Merlin Mann is in progress. Mann, introduced as a “maker of fun” and iPhone evangelist, talked about the excitement the iPhone has generated and a major itch to scratch according to him has been “email”. Mike Lee of Tapulous and Brian Fling of Leaflets are the other two keynoters. Fling talked about the new version of Safari and leveraging the latest features to build interfaces for the iPhone. When the panel was asked about the some of the killer apps that make the iPhone really worthwhile, they listed Surfline.com, iChat, Twitterific, Games, Safari and Remote. The keynoters also discussed about were killer interactions that make iPhone apps highly usable, user habits (i.e. how do users use the iPhone vs. iPod / iTouch), interactivity of web apps and making UIs friendly and usable on iPhones. Usability suggestions included not having to scroll up and down unnecessarily, having short sequences to perform actions, remove splash screens from apps, not using video on splash screens especially on games. The last part of the forum is Q&A between the participants and keynoters. Interestingly, user interfaces that got flagged by users as needing improvement for iPhone like interfaces included Amazon.com, and some Google services.

iPhoneDevCamp 2 this weekend in SF

iPhoneDevCamp2 The iPhone 3G was launched on July 11 (only 20 days ago) and Apple sold a million units in the first 3 days. I got my 3G on launch day. And this time the lines were even longer (cheaper phone, more demand) while unlucky customers faced a network infrastructure jammed with simultaneous requests to set up AT&T contracts for each phone. Despite initial difficulties, iPhone fans persevered and got their shiny new objects.

And those fans who hack are ready for this weekend’s iPhoneDevCamp 2 in San Francisco. This year’s organizers — Raven, Dom, Chris, Blake — have done a phenomenal job pulling in sponsors and handling logistics, volunteers, speakers and developers.

Developers, testers and hackers will gather at Adobe’s offices tomorrow to start designing and building code for the iPhone and iTouch through the weekend. They’ll use the iPhone’s SDK as well as web technologies to build cool iPhone friendly apps. A hackathon contest will be held on Saturday and Sunday (August 2-3) to promote open source community values of sharing, contributing and openness while churning out some serious code. At the end of the contest on Sunday, each app will be demonstrated and qualified participants will win cool prizes. I can tell you from experience, the prizes are really neat (developers even won iPhones last year).

To top it off, the excitement doesn’t stop in San Francisco. With satellite events happening concurrently in Austin, Chicago, Colorado, Portland and Seattle and internationally in London, Paris and India (Yeh!) , this weekend will buzz with activity.

Can’t wait to see the fun begin tomorrow evening! See you there.

Open Source Open World at OSCON’08

OSCON Next week is OSCON. As this conference celebrates its 10th anniversary, there are a lot of cool happenings at and around the conference. I’ve been partipating at OSCON now for over 5 years and it has always been the hub of foss geeks from all parts of the US and beyond. It has changed its character a bit but not much. The hallway conversations, great talks, BOFs, awards, parties and the sheer number of geeks, geek-herders and wanna-be geeks (from companies who can’t avoid open source anymore) make the OSCON experience pretty exciting. This year promises to be fun again with co-located events such as OSCamp, an unconference from the 23rd to 25th occuring simultaneously at OSCON.

I’ll be part of a panel discussion termed “Open Source, Open World” and will be presenting a perspective on open source in India and its impact on India’s IT ecosystem. My fellow speakers will be Nnenna Nwakanme of FOSSFA Africa, Li Gong of Mozilla China, Bruno Souza of JUG, Brazil, Harshad Gune of GNUnify, India, Martin Michlmayr of HP, Europe and Rishab Ghosh of UNU-MERIT, Europe. The world will speak through these panelists and it should be very interesting to learn what open source has done to transform the world in the past 10 years. Danese Cooper will be moderator.

It has also been 10 years since the term “open source” was coined and the OSI was formed. The open source community will be gathering at OSCON to celebrate these anniversaries. I look forward to the next 10 years of open source going strong and changing the landscape of software development in many more ways.

See you there!

Why Bloggers (Even Non-Programmers) Benefit from Participating in Open Source Projects

BlogHer 2008, is an annual conference that brings together bloggers from all over the world to confab under one roof. This year it will be held July 18-20 in San Francisco. Over 1000 women bloggers will gather together at this forum to talk and blog live about a lot of topics – from political opinion commentary to parenting, green eco-consciousness to travel, good blogging techniques to open source technology and blogging tools. Pretty cool, huh!

I’ll be one of the speakers at an exciting panel this Friday on “Why Bloggers (Even Non-Programmers) Benefit from Participating in Open Source Projects“. My fellow panelists include Mozilla’s Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker and Freebase community director Kirrily Robert. This panel will discuss why and how bloggers, programmers and even non-programmers can participate in open source projects and the benefits of participating in the open source community which shares a lot with the blogging world. Participation begins with an itch to scratch or a problem to solve and can be challenging as well as fun in open source projects . This interactive discussion promises to be interesting and I’ll blog more on my experience later.

Mozilla turns 10!

Mozilla’s 10th birthday party in SF on March 31st felt like a Netscape reunion. Hundreds of geeks and cat-herders, many with Netscape jackets, shirts, and nostalgia, gathered together to celebrate Mozilla’s phenomenal success. Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich and the Mozilla community were all there to party, to enjoy the cake and to be merry. As the galactic chocolate birthday cake was being cut, Mitchell predicted that many opportunities and challenges lay ahead in the next 10 years and that the greatest achievements for Mozilla are yet to come.

Mozilla has millions of reasons to celebrate. After 500 million downloads, Firefox stands tall as the world’s best free and open source web browser. After 500 million downloads, Firefox has single-handedly turned the tables on IE and has prevented Microsoft from closing the Web. Mozilla is Netscape done right.

Life would be almost unimaginable without Firefox.

Way to go! Mozilla. Live long and prosper.

Alolita Sharma

Software Engineering, Open Source, Open Standards, Observability, Search, Language Technologies, Culture