kinshuk sunilit aint no, dessert if therez no caek

I am leaving for Chandigarh today. To attend OSScamp Chandigarh October 2009 – a culmination of a month’s work. A platform to promote open source in the state of Punjab. The first of its kind in the state. Exhiliration, Relief, Worries, Issues. I feel all of this. And a lot more.

In recent times, in the aftermath of the September camp at Delhi – a couple of individuals stood up, who did not agree with the way OSScamps was being done. They were worried about it all being a psuedo-marketing effort by my company. They were worried about lack of ownership and transparency in the organisation of events. Most of all, they were worried about the lack of open source software in the camp. And that having a camp was, apparently,  important than open source. Or the fact that ‘dont focus on open source, talk about free software‘. And a lot of smearing, as well.

I respect people who have an opinion, and who stand up for it. Most of the criticism was welcome. What was unnerving was the way it was put. The ‘my way or highway‘ way of speaking never went well with me. Constructive criticism takes us all forward, but negative criticism doesnt do much good. I see it around me. Always.

I do not understand this sub-culture amongst the FOSS pseudo-elites in India (as far as I have encountered) – the ego tussle of being worshipped and treated like god. Their words and wishes be held fast as if some writing on the stone. Never quite understood: why people expect that, why other appease them. In my simple existence, I only understand man’s effort and his proving his worth with that.

For the last 3 years, I have been working with FOSS – contributing, being a part of it, pushing it with all my personal might, making attempts and efforts of organising camps. It has involved a lot of pushing around. Running around. It was not easy, it was not simple. And I did all I could. In retrospect, now, I see a shift as more people take up the mantle as well. I see friends and acquaintances, who stand up and begin new efforts. OSScamps, in my opinion, has done well as a platform. The effort that was put by me, my colleagues and friends, so many people in the community – everyone’s efforts, gave OSScamp a direction and a focus; and it always stayed true to that.

There has been another shift – from developers to students. Students will drive FOSS forward. Developers have a vested interest in technology; Students, apart from wanting good placements, have a lot of spare time, passion and enthusiasm. I see their enthusiasm in all FOSS events I have participated at. They are the main drivers of FOSS today and an even bigger catalyst tomorrow. They form a major chunk of all efforts required by a community initiative. They lead. They work. They play.

When the said negative cirticism took place, I got the opportunity to gauge the community – the concerns and issues. I used the opportunity to evaluate, where we stand today and where we are headed. No one had agreed with the individuals who were disgruntled with OSScamps. Everyone came forward to protect the way of the community – we are different, we don’t deny it. The plain fact is that we dont do, nor do we want to do that, which everyone does. We have a faith and a belief and we work on it. Aspirations and Dreams. We try to achieve. I feel a lot of people in the community will agree with what I speak. I hope.

I am leaving for Chandigarh today. To attend OSScamp Chandigarh October 2009 – a culmination of a month’s work. A platform to promote open source in the state of Punjab. The first of its kind in the state. Exhiliration, Relief, Worries, Issues. I feel all of this. I know that the community in India encourages OSScamps as a platform to promote FOSS. I understand that the community wants to make the best of the event, take a step forward. The aftermath of OSScamp Delhi September 2009 was a good opportunity to disprove some myths and clear away a lot of confusion about the events and the community. Now we walk with a clearer focus. Knowing that, where I am going today, I will be accepted and encouraged as one of the brothers in arms. Amen.

I hope you are having loads of fun on Raksha Bandhan. While, by no means I mean to intrude, I would, definitely, like to remind you of the way we are celebrating this Independence Day.

There is a blogging contest running at the OSScamp Community Blog from August 1st to august 15th. Bloggers can only post content till 15th. However the performance of the posts will be calculated as on noon, August 25th and the winners will be announced by August 27th.

Prizes on offer are 3 annual Subscriptions of the Linux For You Magazine (sponsored by LFY themselves) and 3 .IN Domain Names (sponsored by Digimantra.com). But to win these prizes – you will have to follow the community’s blogging guidelines and retweet this message.

Sounds simple and easy? Join the pool of bloggers already blogging on India’s wannabe-premier blog on opensource.

Details: http://osscamp.in/event/we-are-free-contest

Hello All

Just wanted to update you all about the next OSScamp Delhi September 2009. OSScamp Delhi has been scheduled for September 5-6, 2009. The venue is NSIT, Dwarka.

What are OSScamps?
OSScamps are community-driven events where technology enthusiasts come together to celebrate technology. Its a two-day action packed event with loads of open source karma. Being an unconference means that it i snot as formal and boring as a conference, yet higher in knowledge richness. We already have anout 50 registerations. We are expecting over 300 people to turn up at the camp. The registered talks as of now are:

1. Programming OpenOffice.org
2. Game Development with Open Source
3. Go Green – Save Power
4. Customization of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) using open source technology
5. Porting Softwares to OpenSolaris
6. Working with MVC framework PHP & Ruby
7. A generic approach to Blender 3D
8. Social Network (Open Source)
9. Getting Started with Scala
10. many more to come, keep watching

Details about the event: http://osscamp.in/event/osscamp-delhi-september-2009
Register for the Event: http://osscamp.in/node/162/signups
Add a Talk on the event: http://osscamp.in/node/add/talk

Help us spread the word by blogging about us, tweeting about us, making loads of noise, and stuff.

Hope to see you there!
Kinshuk

OSScamp Delhi March 2009 is finally over. All doubts and concerns about the various experiments have now been resolved. How have my experiments fared? Not good. Not bad, either. So what happened at this OSScamp ?

Participation has fallen to almost 50% of OSScamp Delhi September 2008. I do not understand this completely. The registrations were decent enough – 287, but the turnout was only 76. There must be a reason to it. One reason I can think of is that the number of registered sessions on the website was only 8. That could have been one deterrent to people coming to the camp – their doubts on lack of quality at the camp. This is why I do not appreciate a sessions-oriented unconference. People need to understand that unconferences are successful and have good quality only when people join. So what if only 8 talks have been registered on the site, 1 out of every 20 guys (being very pessimistic) volunteers to give a talk at the camp. so if a 160 people participate, we get a total of 16 talks now. Plus, the informal discussions improve manifold. But then people have the habit of putting themselves before everyone else. Especially in Delhi. Countless people who had been promising pure-awesomeness at the camp but didn’t even participate have been making this excuse to me – we were busy! Yes, that’s an excuse. But never mind you, you coming to the camp would have been a waste in any case.

Next, since the participation was low and camps were thinly spread, I got a plenty of opportunity to test out my social sandbox concept. I have come up with a lot of inputs and challenges for the concept of Social Sandboxes, will be discussing them in detail here soon. Next OSScamp Delhi will see a more focused effort at creating a Social Sandbox though. Long gone are the days of a talk-oriented unconference.

The demographics for the camp was also pretty interesting. Look at the images below:

I am not going to talk about the sessions that took place at the camp, as a lot of other blogs have already covered them. I will simply share the pictures of the camp and my talk.

Pictures from the camp:

My Ignite talk on Social Sandbox at the Camp:

A brief update about Day 1 of OSScamp Delhi that I sent to all participants published here for general public, with some notes (included within parentheses) here and there :P

***

Day 1 of OSScamp was fun, despite the low turnout. Instead of focussing on sessions, a lot of informal interactions took place taking forward the social sandbox OSScamps are. (Though the numbers were, in many ways, disappointing, the social sandbox concept really holds promise and is a concept I am going to pursue further. For more on social sandbox, keep watching this blog)

Sessions that took place were:

• Rohit11’s Introduction to BackTrack (An awesome and eye opener talk on Network Security and BackTrack. Follow rohit11 on twitter)
• Jegnesh’s Kerberos
• Suyog’s 3D visualization with MayaVi2 and Mlab (another interesting talk, the projection infrastructure at IIT Delhi was disappointing. Spoiled a lot of fun at the event.)
• Informal Discussion on CSS, Linux, Firefox, Cloud and upcoming technologies (The icing on the cake. Social Sandbox is great!)

On Day 2, we are hoping for a far better turnout (yes, a lot of people have confirmed, don’t be disheartened by todays low turnout) and the following sessions:

• An Ignite session by Rohit Lodha (@rohitlodha)
• Gaurav Mishra’s (@gmishra) 10 simple ways of making money through open source.
• Prateek Saxena’s (@prtksxna) The Semantic Web: OWL, DLs etc
• Swanand Deodhar’s R: Open Source Statistical Package
• Chaitanya’s  SLIME: Why it is the IDE of choice for Lispers worldwide
• Srinivasan’s The Recession and Open Source
• A talk on Advanced PHP
• Hopefully a talk on Ruby as well (it is not confirmed yet)

Follow todays aggregated #osscamp tweets and a blog post by Realin.

Hope to see you there tomorrow
Kinshuk