Hola Amigos!
Some of our mates missed the FOSSMeet @ NIT-C this year and wanted to know about the same. So here it goes from a Speaker’s POV (that’s me 🙂 talking on ‘Contributing to GNOME-Music‘):
As usual everything happened at the last-minute.
I was in Data Structure’s lecture when they call me and tell that you have to present your talk tomorrow :P.
Same happened with one of our senior, Avani. She got the call one day before me so she had virtually more time, but due to last-minute system crash she had to rebuild everything.
I got my seat in the bus luckily due to some people dropping out at last-minute. Anyways we (2nd years) were there in the CIR getting all the permissions from Biju ji and waiting for first years. We went in the bus and then all the girls entered the bus, we thought that there are 2 buses then we realized that we all have to fit in that one small bus which by the way was not a problem in the end 😛
14/2/2014: We left from our campus at around 2130 hours roughly, everyone was exited about FOSSMeet and I was thinking about what should I say during my presentation. After preparing few slides I rewarded myself with ‘Metallica-Through the Never’ concert and headbanging all night \m/. Thanks to Anup’s laptop the bus journey was not all that boring. No one couldn’t sleep either as a result of the bus being from back 90’s maybe. We reached Kochi at midnight and there was this much hyped Lulu Mall 🙂
Also on the way we had seen some festival or tradition going on, they had round sticks which were set on fire with a weird logo on them that reminded me of ‘Dexter’. Small girls were holding the diya’s and walking in a disciplined way and all dressed up in a traditional way.
15/2/2014: We reached NIT campus early in the morning at around 0430 hours in half sleep and very tired. We got to know that organizers are all asleep and registration will only start at 0800 hours. Yazir, an ex-organizer came by our bus and was talking to Harish, in the meanwhile he recognized me from last year and I asked him to get some room arrangements done as I was speaker and needed rest as my talk was scheduled in few hours. He told me that he will arrange something and by 0630 hours speaker coordinator, Sudev came by and asked for me while I was finally asleep 😛
I reached the guest house and OMG here I was in a big A/C room :D, with balcony and bathroom as big as our hostel rooms :P. The room was installed with LAN internet and what lightning speed it had. I updated and built gnome-music in just couple of minutes. I tried to sleep but was too excited about the talk. I got freshened up and then took some rest and left for the registration hall. A lot of crowd was there, and 75% were Amrita students 🙂 \m/
I went and asked for speaker ID and they were searching for it and Avani (our senior) too was waiting there, finally they come and say we are out of speaker ID’s as it was printed long back and will make arrangements ASAP. BTW I got my ID after my talk finished 😛
Everyone went for ‘Let’s Contribute’ workshop and few went for Python w/s. Around 1030 hours I went into the Bhaskara hall where my talk was scheduled, and as usual Praveen’s talk scheduled at 0900 hours had just started :P. Few guys came around at 1115 hours while the other talk was still going on and others at Let’s Contribute were still there in lab. I asked the coordinators to call someone and ask them to come. And then they realized that more than half of the people from the workshop are leaving and they were like the workshop would have to be cancelled then 😛
Poor Arrangements
They didn’t have the proper projector connectors for my MAC. Me Tony and Anup tried some weird hacks like sharing screen through G+ hangouts and what not, I wanted to show the demo of jhbuild and GNOME-Music.
Contributing to GNOME-Music
I started the talk around 1200 hours and it went on till 1245 hours and using the PowerPoint presentation alone I tried to explain the procedures, I showed them the git repository of GNOME-Music online and few snapshots of the user interface that I had taken while I was bug fixing. I also tried for a live demo through hangout but it didn’t quite work as it was meant to. After my presentation I wanted the juniors to ask questions or doubts so I was like pointing out people and asking them if they had any doubts or questions. All in all the talk was good and audience strength was also good. Thanks to Anup for taking snaps and collecting all the images from everyone and uploading.
Attaching the album at the end.
Everyone liked my presentation and applauded and I was happy to know that my presentation got them interested to know more about GNOME and its projects. We had a brief discussion too at the end, some of them were shy to ask questions but me repeatedly asking them made few of them talk 🙂 I was happy that first year guy shared his idea too about what he understood and what are the benefits of Open Source contribution.
Unfortunate event
After lunch most of us went for RUBY workshop, and in middle we hear the news of unfortunate accident that happened. It was really sad to hear about the accident and that too someone of our age, may his soul rest in peace.
They had cancelled the talks for the day and decided to keep the workshop going on in an informal way. We all went around the campus and saw Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics departments and clicked a lot of pics.
Evening discussion
It was around 1700 hours and the organizers were gonna put up the updated schedule. As usual nothing was put up so I decided to sit in the Bhaskara hall and voilà there was Open DATA talk going on :P. There were only a few present there. The talk went above my head about data and data sets, etc. But by the end of the talk I got a good idea about it. The government of India have all there data’s uploaded online. You can find all the data about population, lok sabha members, etc from the beginning.
Few links are:
http://theballot.in/ (Do check this out)
The Ballot is maintained by Nirbheek Chauhan whom I met in the talk and another woman. They download the huge data sets that are hosted online and they do an analytic study of these huge data and have put them up in a beautiful graphical manner with all the stats.
After the talk some more people came in and we started discussing about our idea about Free Software.What is Free Software?
The organizers came in and told that they need to close the hall as there was some protest that was gonna happen. We all went back to guest house and the discussion continued. I also learnt about the tradition where the child takes the family name of their mother rather than their father’s family name.
We had to go to the canteen for food as we won’t get food after 2000 hours, and for speakers everything was taken care by them as dinner was not provided on account of event being held cancelled. We returned to guest house and I met new people too and they were like working in companies run by the other speakers after graduating and different projects that they work on using Open Source. Some of them didn’t know about Open Source contribution so I explained to them in detail about it. Some of them recommended that I should have taken up a workshop so that I could have gone deep into the details about the topic. But as it was my first Official talk I rather take up a talk and then think about workshops in coming future:)
Around mid night some organizer came and told that the second day and FOSSMeet is officially cancelled.
16/2/2014: Planned to go Beach, planetarium and Lulu all, but Lulu mall was dropped. In the morning, I went to the registration desk to see what’s going on, they were refunding half the money and preparing the certificates. They had a separate desk for Amrita Students specially as they didn’t want the place to be crowded. Harish got two certificates 😛 as Hareesh (now void) as well as Harish. Everyone collected their refunds and bought t-shirts with them and collected their certificates. Avani and I got t-shirts for free (advantages of being a speaker).
Return Journey back to home sweet home (rather hostel :P)We left at around 1130 hours for planetarium. Before that we had a pit stop at Paragon \m/ Yummmmm…..Chicken Biryani (CB Arjun, ABC :P). After eating we got a Party music CD (just for namesake party music, rather only a few songs were party type). Maybe you should ask Anup and Arjun as they were our DJ’s, thanks to them we got our legs moving :D. We took some wrong turns too but finally reached planetarium. There we saw Dinosaurs and pre-historic animals and cool scientific stuff too. We had fun there and the movie was awesome except for the guy was speaking in high level Malayalam. We were more interested in taking pics, hence the security guys were behind us all the time :P. After that we left for the beach, at first it was just small empty land and backwater but then on the other side was the real thing waiting for us. Juniors ran away in the water which made everyone join in. Me harish and avani went along the path way deep into the sea or ocean whatever it was 😛 as we were not that interested in salt water full of sewer water and chemicals. We returned back and everyone was there at the coffee shop, so I decided I should also have something hot as my throat was gone due to screaming and the intense headbanging \m/. Woooo awesome experience.
We stopped at a small restaurant and had dinner, after that again back to dancing and fun. Then we had cheers for FOSS @ Amrita and a last dance where everyone joined in for the great trip we had.
We reached back early in the morning at around 0230 hours and earlier than I had expected 😛 Wish I could have slept the whole night. The juniors were accompanied by the security faculty and Harish (body builder :D). And there were we Me, Tony and Anup the lone rangers all alone and the warden sleeping hard. Luckily someone was awake and knocked on wardens door and finally we entered the hostel. Slept hard and didn’t want to wake up in the morning. But no worries slept nicely in the lectures as usual 🙂
Link to my presentation Slides: ‘Contributing to GNOME-Music‘
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