kinshuk sunilit aint no, dessert if therez no caek

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:

With a day left for the next premier open source unconference of India, it is a very difficult task to contain the excitement i am experiencing. This OSScamp will be a a very unique experience than what it has been in the past. OSScamp Delhi March 2009 is an experimental social sandbox that should bring together the community even further and really extend a foot forward towards being a true unconference. A lot of the participants, especially the regular participants, will find something very different than what they are expecting; the new faces will have a time to roll – it is now left to be seen if that takes the community forward or not.

The experiment has been multi-fold. Firstly, there was no active promotion of the event, unlike the earlier times. Then, the platform is more flexible than the past and spontaneity at the event is encouraged. Also, the event is going to be plainer than the past – absolutely no blings this time – not even an attempt to blind anyone by the bling.

A simple highlight of this experiment is that the camp has not been actively promoted. Other than a few announcements in certain mailing lists and submission to a few event directories (the same way as it was being done in the past) no promotional activity was undertaken. Instead, the onus was taken by the community and what followed was a good viral campaign where many community members became ambassadors of the event spreading the word far and wide.

We were also joined by a very active set of Media Partners – YourStory.in, IndiBlogger.in, and DelhiLive.com, who then provided impetus to this viral campaign by taking it a step further. Linux For You will be covering the event in print and so would be Mid-Day and CXO Today.

Linked In, Facebook and OSScamp.in were the only places where event registrations were taking place. And the registrations have been trickling in steadily. The current figures are around 204 who have registered (with a slight overlap of about 20) and another 63 that will be registering. And then we have the final day of registrations still left. Not to forget people who will straight away apparate at the venue. 300+ is a safe number of registrations. What is now left to be seen is how well that translates into actual numbers. Last OSScamp Delhi (September 2008) saw a participation of 150 people. This event will certainly be a step further.

Another surprising aspect of this experiment has been the drastic change in its composition of participants. Earlier camps used to see a lot of start ups and open source companies walking to the camp. This time around, in addition to these, a lot of bigger heads have turned this way. Some of these biggies include: SAP Labs, Genpact, PortWise, Sapient, Alcatel Lucent, CNN, Evalueserve, HCL, IBM, TCS, and Sun. What I am really interested in seeing now is how these biggies will contribute to the event and the community.

The composition of the individuals has also changed. Past camps have seen a lot of students and developers as their campers. They used to be the major chunk of participants. This time round a lot of new sections have entered into the race and the percentage of composition has grown to be more or less similar. Students and Developers have now grown into: Students, Developers, Project Managers, System Analysts, Journalists, Technical Writers, Technology Consultants, System Architects, CXOs, Designers and Web/User-Experience Engineers. It will be interesting to see how these distinct groups interact together in the social sandbox OSScamp Delhi will be.

I used the word social sandbox, because that’s what this camp is going to be. We have really worked at removing the structures (even the minuscule ones) that were present in the past camps. The event might still take place the old way – sessions based, or the participants may come up with something completely unique. It is now, completely, their prerogative. The emphasis is on spontaneity – At the Venue, In Real-Time. I was having a discussion with Daksh Sharma about this social sandbox and though he found the idea interesting, he was also sceptical about how much it would work. I just hope it works, or else some interventions might be required.

Another aspect of this experiment is that the event is going to be very plain. Pure and sweet Technology. Just that. Take a platform of purely open source technology and throw in a bunch of passionate individuals – it makes a pretty sight. Or it will, so I hope. This time there will be no goodies (you are free to bring and distribute some, if its in the spirit of open source and not business-oriented) and there will be no pomp – a minimalistic affair, where everything that is essential is present. We did not even approach potential sponsors, for there was almost nothing that needed sponsorship – other than lunch, of course.

The venue for the event is IIT Delhi (Lecture Theater 1, Block 3) and has been provided for by LUG@IITD. The LT also has a wifi (again something that was virtually absent in the past camps), so don’t forget to bring your wifi-enabled devices and don’t forget to live tweet/blog the event. You can also live blog the event at OSScamp Live!. Create an account there, if you’d be using it. When You do live tweet the event, use the hashtag #osscamp to aggregate your tweets.

All in all, OSScamp Delhi March 2009 will be a bold step forward towards a truer unconference. What is now left to be seen is how true is the translation of the design into being.

The event is free for all, so don’t forget to bring as many people with you as possible. If by some chance you still haven’t registered for the camp, do so here: http://osscamp.in/node/130/signup (you will need to have an user account on OSScamp.in first). You might want to view and rate the listed talks at: http://osscamp.in/category/talk-camp/osscamp-delhi-march-2009 or perhaps add a talk at: http://osscamp.in/node/add/talk. Do spread the word and talk about us. When you do, tag us osscamp.

And be there!

This Post was originally published in the Linux For You Magazine’s March 2009 Edition. Also available online.

Delhi’s first unconference on Mozilla technologies was a grand event with about a 100 campers who came together to share some Mozilla love on February 10. It was an event that attracted technologists and students, with Mozilla’s Seth Bindernagel and Arun Ranganathan around to discuss the future of the Web…

This Post was originally published in the Linux For You Magazine’s March 2009 Edition. Also available online.

I am so tired. Its been a tough month for me. A tougher month awaits. First was OSScamp Pantnagar, then was the MozillaCamp (I will be talking about it in this post). Now, upcoming are OSScamp Delhi and OSScamp Chennai. But then, they are immense events in prospects and i do hope to get a lot of community support (unlike the previous times). It would be unfair to add that kudos to the Pantnagar student for the awesome camp they organised in their university. The only thing lacking in OSScamp Pantnagar was the absence of professionals. It was predominantly a student’s camp.

Now about the recent MozillaCamp – How and what of it. (And, I am sorry for writing this post so late)

It all began with a phone call I received from Mohak, when he introduced himself and his idea for MozillaCamp Delhi. The basic idea was that Arun and Seth were coming to India for Techkriti and GNUnify. Mohak talked with Mary Colvig at Mozilla and ensured that Arun and Seth spend a day at Delhi too. Problem was they’d be in Delhi on Tuesday the Tenth. And so started our endeavour to organise a technology unconference for working professionals on a weekday. If anything was supposed not to work, this was it.

Mohak’s first and foremost instruction to me was ‘meet me before you leave for Pantnagar’ and we worked on a number of issues related to sponsorships and venues on phone. Finally, we met for the first time at JIMS (Rithala), to scout it for a venue. In the meanwhile, I had got us our only sponsorship – from OSSCube (my company, but that doesn’t mean it was easy).

In the meanwhile, I also asked Yadu to design the visual assets for the camp and he did a splendid job. Mohak and his team of volunteers did a lot of running job to all sponsors, printers, and supporters. Mohak’s efforts on pre-event promotion paid of really well. But the event was on Tuesday and we had our doubts about the possible attendance. Registrations on the wiki were only about 150.

The biggest challenge for us was to find a venue at such a short notice. We shifted from JIMS (Rithala) to IIT Delhi to finally at Indian Social Institute.

Came Tuesday. Untill 11 only about 10 participants were on the venue. But soon, the hall was full with over 80 participants. It made a grand sight. Arun and Seth were to join us by around 2. So for the morning session, the participants were left at the mercies of me and Mohak. And we ran rampant! The morning session was a drag without any quality session and while breaking for lunch my main concern was – how many will return ?

Return they did from a not-sponsored lunch. (There was hardly any point in sponsoring it either – the venue didnt allow a caterer and their canteen sux). Then, we were joined by Seth and Arun and the rest as they say is history.

The first session was by Pascal Finette on the Concept Series by Mozilla Labs. He talked in length about what is the aim of Concept Series and how is it creatign a better Firefox and a better web. Seth, then, introduced us all to Mozilla and their efforts on Localisation. He discussed emerging issues and challenges in localisation over the web. Then the floor belonged to Arun who talked at length about the new and exciting things coming up in Mozilla Firefox 3.1, HTML 5, Video Tags, and Canvas. His sesion included a number of live demos and was very entertaining event for the non-geeks (a small section of the audeince).Soon it was 5:30pm and we had to wind up.

Mohak and I joined Arun and Seth, then, at the India Habitat Center for a short interview that I recorded for OSSCube, which basically discussed the emerging issues and challenges on the web.

You will find a lot of pictures from the event at: http://tr.im/gd3b and http://tr.im/gd3e
Videos will be uploaded soon at http://youtube.com/osscube . Keep watching that space.