Seriously, I have no clue why everyone feels like February and March are the *perfect* months for holding a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) event. Not only does it make it extremely difficult to choose which ones to attend, it leaves the rest of the year (all the way to the end, when FOSS.IN happens) uncovered, and perfect hunting grounds for companies who are not exactly known to be sending the FOSS world greeting cards at Christmas…
So anyway, I thought I’d give everyone a heads-up about the more prominent FOSS community events (there are some other prominent events, but they have nothing to do with the FOSS community). My apologies to community events that I don’t mention here – maybe you forgot to let me know about your event?
Since this piece is likely to get a bit long, I am going to force you to read it on my website, so that it doesn’t clutter up everyone’s RSS readers and planets.
Tomorrow (i.e. Saturday, the 26th, at 2pm in the Lecture Theatre) I will be in a panel discussion with Jon “Maddog” Hall and Venkatesh Hariharan. No idea whether this is open to the public, but apparently, the session will be broadcast on CNBC-TV18, though I don’t yet know when, so check the program listings.
The next day (i.e. Sunday, the 27th, from 10am to 4:30pm at KReSIT), Maddog and I will be participating in the Barcamp Techfest, which promises to be a lot of fun. Both of us are giving talks. I will be speaking about Open Mobility – which is a fancy name for my going on a geeky show-and-tell of various mobile devices running free and open source software – though (this being a Barcamp) nothing is carved in stone. This is open to everyone, though I don’t know how many people are going to fit in. Assume that 60% of the signups will come – it’s still going to be quite a crowd.
At at 6pm on Sunday, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, will be speaking at the Convocation Hall. again, I have no idea who will be allowed in, but I am certainly going to try my best to attend the talk.
So basically I will be in the IIT Bombay all of Saturday and Sunday. If you are going to be around, do drop in and say hello!
This evening, I fly off to Chennai, to attend PROTO.IN – an event I always look forward to.
This time, I find myself in the unexpected situation of giving the opening talk – “India a Technology Leader – Possible?”. While it seemed like a dry topic to me when I first looked at it, I found some interesting stuff while thinking about it – and I hope the audience thinks the same.
Like I said a couple of days ago – this is an event where you not only get to hear and see a lot of new and amazing stuff, you get to interact with interesting people, actually become part of the process that will create some of the startup hits of the future, etc.
If you have registered online, make sure you don’t miss this chance (if you didn’t – sorry, the event is all sold out) – you never know, next time it could be you, presenting *your* startup. Best to learn NOW how it’s done.
And so another year has passed us by, and it is now 2008.
A few friends wrote in, asking why I am not doing what everyone else does – make predictions, resolutions, etc.
I’d rather take my time on that, so for now, my one prediction for 2008 is that all predictions will turn out wrong.
And my one resolution is 1024×768.
My eyes are much better – thank you for asking. I am still very weak, but now that the medicines are being tapered off, things are improving.
Last Saturday, the Team FOSS.IN members physically in India met up in Bangalore to finish off various things related to FOSS.IN/2007. This meeting should have taken place just after the event, but because of my illness, had to be postponed to January. During the 5 hour meeting, we did a fairly detailed post-mortem of the event, identified things we could have done better, discussed ideas for FOSS.IN/2008, time-lines, policies, etc.
Couple of things I am participating in this month:
PROTO.IN – January 18-19 in Chennai. *The* event for Indian startups, and an event I *never* miss. You get to see and hear some amazing new stuff there. The place crawls with VCs, but the real fun is meeting (and mentoring) some of the startup companies who present at the event, brainstorming with them about ideas they have, etc. And revel in the fact that so many of them rely heavily on Free and Open Source Software for their projects. Like I always say – FOSS is the real Startup Enabler.
IIT Bombay’s Techfest – January 25-27 in Mumbai. I have been invited to be part of a panel discussion on the 26th. This is going to be fun, especially given who my fellow panelists are. And bonus – I get to participate in the Barcamp on the 27th.
This evening, I am off to Mumbai for the week, for work related stuff. First trip in months – I hope I survive this.
Ah well, it’s Christmas. Joy to the world, peace and harmony to all!
It’s been an unusual one for me this year.
After the unbelievable success of FOSS.IN/2007, I went from high-frantic-activity-mode to almost completely comatose in a matter of days. Instead of the planned short and much needed holiday to Goa that I had been secretly hatching, I find myself sitting at home 24×7, dealing with things I’d rather not be dealing with.
Today is my daughter Geetanjali’s last day of attending classes at the school she has been in for the past 14 years.
We saw her off at the bus stop, just as we did on the first day all those years ago, when she joined that quaint little school in the middle of nowhere, which over the years became the Mallya Aditi International School.
After this, she will be spending time (I hope) preparing for her 12th standard exams (which are in March), but the days of spending time in her school classrooms are over.
Funny how time flies.
When I finished school, I barely felt anything. It didn’t even strike me that I was leaving behind a lifetime of protected existence, where teachers took an active interest in you, and that I would be entering college, where lectures lecture and leave, and you are left mostly to your own devices. It was only years later that I awoke to the fact just what I had left behind then.
Just how much is too much when you spend all your time trying to provide for your family? Does struggling to give your child the best of education, the safest of lives, the nicest of clothes, etc. compare to playing with your daughter and her puppy in the garden for an afternoon? Where’s the balance?
The sheer mortality of relationships (at least at different levels) is a frightening thought. While she will always be my daughter, she will steadily progress through life (if she puts her mind to it), establishing different relationships, sometimes/often at the cost of a level of relationship with me.
Decades from now, how will she, or I, remember these days that end today? Will there be a deep sense of regret and loss, as I am feeling now, or will time cover the bad spots and let us remember only the good times?
I realise, as I sit here writing this, just how much I have not done, and will probably never be able to do again in this lifetime. That includes the things you’d expect a normal father to do with his family – going to the zoo, the circus, a movie, or just for a walk. I don’t think of myself as a bad father because of this, but the sense of loss is inevitable – these times will never come again.
Whatever was I thinking these past one and half decades?
Slipping Through My Fingers (ABBA)
Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile
I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness
And I have to sit down for a while
The feeling that I’m losing her forever
And without really entering her world
I’m glad whenever I can share her laughter
That funny little girl
Slipping through my fingers all the time
I try to capture every minute
The feeling in it
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Do I really see whats in her mind
Each time I think I’m close to knowing
She keeps on growing
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Sleep in our eyes, her and me at the breakfast table
Barely awake, I let precious time go by
Then when she’s gone theres that odd melancholy feeling
And a sense of guilt I can’t deny
What happened to the wonderful adventures
The places I had planned for us to go
(slipping through my fingers all the time)
Well, some of that we did but most we didn’t
And why I just don’t know
Slipping through my fingers all the time
I try to capture every minute
The feeling in it
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Do I really see whats in her mind
Each time I think I’m close to knowing
She keeps on growing
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture
And save it from the funny tricks of time
Slipping through my fingers…
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Schoolbag in hand she leaves home in the early morning
Someone pointed out that everyone is writing about the FOSS.IN posters in their blogs and journals – except me.
Well, every year, Team FOSS.IN brings out some promotional posters for the event. This year, we decided to focus on people and a message – the message being that one should contribute to FOSS. And as subjects we chose several Indian FOSS contributors.
Have a look (you can click on the small images to see them full size and download them)
All these posters were created by our Graphic Superman – Harikrishnan C.
If you are in Bangalore and would like some of these in printed form to hang on your company or college noticeboard, get on the FOSS.IN mailing list and let us know. And quickly – we have limited stocks, and they are going FAST!
Things didn’t end there. The “People Poster” idea caught on, and here are some created by the KDE project! Fantastic stuff! The right spirit
And as Sankarshan said – if you want to be on next year’s posters, make sure you start contributing to FOSS!
And the fun is beginning to escalate – tons of people are actively planning activities for the event. Lightning Talks, BoFs, Corridor Meets, Stickers, T-shirts, FOSS project stalls, hackathons, putting faces to IRC handles, keysigning parties and lots more. This is the real meat of FOSS.IN (and you thought it was only about talks???) – where the community gets together and does what it does best.
Each year, we are amazed at how many people come to the event just to meet with others and to have a good time, and how much they look forward to it every year. We hope that we will live up to your expectations!
BTW – if you want to help make the event even bigger and better, all you have to do is SPREAD THE WORD. Pull graphics from here, add them to your blog entries and websites, grab some posters and hang them on your college/company notice boards, mail internal lists, letting them know the event is happening, grab a FOSS.IN sticker and stick it on your forehead…
To find out how to get posters and stickers, get on the mailing list and *ASK*!
We just posted this on the FOSS.IN/2007 site, but I thought I’d post this in my journal as well, since not everyone is subscribed to the FOSS.IN RSS Feed:
We simply *have* to put out this post before we go completely nuts!
Throughout the year, we run into people who talk about the event, but refer to it simply as “FOSS”, as in “see you at FOSS”, “when is FOSS this year?”, “who is coming to FOSS?”, etc.
People – the event name is FOSS.IN, pronounced FOSS (as in “boss”) DOT (as in “hot”) IN (as in “win” or “I N” as in “eye enn”).
“FOSS” alone stands for “Free and Open Source Software”, and we have absolutely no intention of being representative of that entire movement in India! We just run an event about FOSS in India, and we focus on FOSS contributors.
Again – “FOSS” is a movement, while “FOSS.IN” is an event – our event.
So next time you want to talk about the event, please do us the honour of using the correct name, ok?
If you have been following the FOSS.IN/2007 saga, you know that we chose to do a CfP Restart rather than compromise on the objectives of the event.
The CfP finally closed on October 20th, and we have been spending the past week weeding through 300 talk submissions, choosing talks that were closest to what we wanted for FOSS.IN.
I could say that it was a breeze, all the talks just fell into place, and all we needed to do was eeny, meeny, miny, moe to select a bunch of talks.
Sadly, this was not the case.
I can safely say that this was by far the hardest thing Team FOSS.IN have ever done in 7 years that we have been running this event.
One problem was the absolutely incredible push-back we faced.
FOSS.IN is about contribution to Free and Open Source Software. It is not about evangelism, it is not about using technologies, it is not about being cool. We have a goal that we set ourselves years ago – to encourage, cajole and even bully Indian developers into contributing to FOSS, instead of just being consumers.
Why is this so important to us? Here is our “internal mission statement”:
We believe (and the industry agrees) that people who are involved with FOSS tend to have a much better understanding of technology, simply because they can – instead of having to work with often obscure and closed APIs, FOSS developers can drill down to the very core of things, and understand every aspect of the technology they are working with, often improving on it.
FOSS contributors also quickly learn how to be part of a large, distributed, global development team, using communication tools to maximum benefit.
But most of all, FOSS contributors experience something few closed source developers can: they experience a feeling of ownership and belonging. No matter how small their contribution may be, they know that it made a difference.
The biggest beneficiaries of this will be not just existing professional developers, but also students, who will get a head-start on previous generations of developers and technologists, by standing on the shoulders of giants. And not just admiring them from a distance, but actually interacting with them.
FOSS.IN is about making this happen.
Of course, this is not what the vast majority of talk submitters wanted. What *they* wanted was to stand on stage, expound the benefits of FOSS, maybe even give a shallow little introduction to some FOSS application or technology, then pride themselves for “having done their bit to promote FOSS”.
A vast majority of the talks submitted to FOSS.IN this year were talks like these. And we rejected them all – more than 200 of them. This year, we were taking a hard stand – either a talk matched the objectives of the event, or we simply wouldn’t select it – no matter who submitted it.
Naturally, this led to HUGE ego clashes. More than one well known FOSS personality decided to go “holier than thou” on us. Though we can never reveal names, I can tell you that if you ever found out the names of some of the speakers whose talks we rejected, you would faint.
By the 8th of October, when the CfP was to close, we realised that we had not gotten even *close* to what we wanted. So we had two choices – call the event off, or take an unbelievable risk: we restarted the CfP, clearly telling people why.
And *this* time we not only started getting the kind of talks we were hoping to see – we started getting talk submissions from people whom we had expected to see at FOSS.IN. Imagine waking up in the morning after a long night of rejecting talks, blearily staring at the latest crop of submissions, and seeing talks submitted by Rusty Russell!
Or realising a few minutes later (coffee helped) that along with Harald Welte and James Morris, we had almost the entire original Netfilter/iptables team at FOSS.IN!
And then beginning to see names like Ulrich Drepper (glibc), Mitchell Baker (Mozilla), Sam Hocevar (Debian Project Leader) and Thomas Gleixner (Linux Realtime-Preempt Patches) appear on the submission list. Not just that, but suddenly, we were beginning to see many prominent *Indian* contributors submit talks!
After we closed the CfP, we still had to work with almost every submitter to finetune their talk to completely address the needs of FOSS.IN. Each talk in the Main Conference had to necessarily address our 25-25-50 formula – 25% “About”, 25% “Using” and 50% “Contributing”. The idea was to present talks that will allow our audiences to understand the project, and learn how they can participate in it.
Last night, we finally looked at the list and said “this is it – it can’t get better than this”.
There are still plenty of things that will change over the next week. Some talks/speakers will be added, some removed, and none of the keynotes or panel discussions or BoFs are in this list yet. But it should give you a fairly good idea what talks we are going to have, and who is speaking.
In 7 years, we have not had a speaker lineup like this, and we aren’t done yet.
This is open to everyone, though I don’t know how many people are going to fit in. Assume that 60% of the signups will come – it’s still going to be quite a crowd.
