You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you
We have about 48 hours left before talk submission for FOSS.IN/2007 finally closes.
At this point, I *still* have people asking me what kind of talk they should submit, or whether they should.
Rather than say it myself, I will point you a post I made last year, which referred to Rusty Russel’s fabulous post.
Then read the CfP and register as a speaker and submit a talk.
Show the world that India is no longer just a consumer of FOSS, but a contributor too.
If you plan to submit a talk to FOSS.IN/2007, please note that talk submissions close THIS SATURDAY, 20TH OF OCTOBER, at 23:59 GMT+0530.
So go here, make sure that you have read the Call for Participation, and submit your talks!
At 00:00am on Sunday morning, it will be too late.
For those who came in late (or were just living under a rock for a while):
FOSS.IN in India’s largest and probably best known Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conferences, and is now spoken about as one of the the four primary, grassroot-level FOSS conferences in the world, the other three being being linux.conf.au, OLS and linuxconf.eu.
The conference sees thousands of participants coming together from across India and from many parts of the world, to listen to talks on cutting edge FOSS technologies, given by leading FOSS developers and contributors from across the world. They also participate in discussions, BoFs, workshops and just a lot of honest-to-goodness fun, meeting people, exchanging ideas, hatching plans for world domination.
FOSS.IN differs from other conferences by being completely developer and contributor focused. There are no “preaching to the choir” evangelism talks, no bandwidth-robbing introductory talks, no boring “I could have read this on the web” talks – this conference is hard-core developer/contributor oriented.
FOSS.IN will help professional and student developers, who have development experience but no prior FOSS experience, to become successful FOSS contributors, by exposing them to the minds of some of the most brilliant developers in the world. They will learn about cutting edge technologies that come out of the FOSS community to literally change the world, and they will learn what it is like to work in a team of geographically dispersed people.
And existing FOSS developers and contributors will get together and fine-tune ideas and projects, learn new and interesting ways to change the world they live in, and help new developers to come up to speed.
The newly introduced Project Days give you a chance to get involved with eight of the most talked about FOSS projects on the planet, and will learn to contribute to them.
But most of all, participants at FOSS.IN have an unbelievable amount of fun.
At FOSS.IN, you are not artificially kept at the fringe by unreal, self-serving commercial interests – you are mainstream. This is one of the most anticipated technical events every year, and there is a good reason for this.
So how do you participate?
Simple.
If you are a FOSS developer/contributor, you should submit proposals for sessions for the Project Days and/or the Main conference. But you better hurry up – the last date for submission is October 8th, 2007.
If you are not (yet) a FOSS developer/contributor and want to learn how to be one, you attend the event as a delegate – i.e. part of of the audience of thousands of people who are there to learn, interact and have fun.
If you are an organization that would like to see India producing more and more FOSS contributors, whose razor sharp skills will also show up in their work in your organization, then you should consider sponsoring the event. While many of the sponsor slots are already filled, there is room for a few more.
And finally, if you are a member of the FOSS community, and want to be at one of the most happening (technically and socially) FOSS events in the world, then make sure you have your calendar marked for December 4th through 8th, 2007.
We guarantee that you will have the time of your life.
You can find lots of information about the event on the FOSS.IN website.
See you at FOSS.IN/2007!
OK, so I had it up to here with some of the mails I have been getting, with people asking whether they have to submit talks to FOSS.IN/2007 or whether (implied) they are big and famous enough to get selected directly, or whether they will be given keynotes, etc.
FOSS.IN focuses on quality of talks, and value to audiences. We don’t need/want/encourage corporate positional talks (“my company is so great because it does all these things for FOSS”) or demands for “positioning” (i.e. first day, first show) just because the proposed speaker works for a big company.
Here is a sure-shot recipe to get into what *you* think is a “prime slot”:
1. Fire up vi, and start writing code, or cause your organization to start contributing
2. Help build a community (hint – you can’t buy community)
3. Practice your public speaking – just because you are a great coder, you aren’t necessarily a great speaker or know how to communicate.
4. Stop depending on corporate clout to assure yourself a talk slot at FOSS.IN – try getting there on merit.
This year, instead of 200+ talks in the main conference, we have just 60. We can afford to be selective, and BY GOLLY, WE WILL BE!
We have but one $deity we recognise – our audiences. And we want to give them the best value they can get. We want to be better than those freaking $5000-per-head conferences that no one can afford attending, where you end up only hearing marketing talk from people who bought themselves a talk slot.
We are FOSS.IN.
We are better than that.
If you ever wanted to figure out what is holding back Linux (and FOSS) from people’s desktops, then you should probably read this.
*Now*.
Aaron Seigo (a past speaker at FOSS.IN), has really hammered it home, but without using the offensive approach the media usually uses when talking about Linux on the desktop (“as in “What’s wrong with Linux”, “Why Linux won’t succeed”, etc.).
He points out that the real problem isn’t that Linux can’t do something, or that Linux *won’t* do something – it is that that no one is really putting together and asking The Question (read his post to understand what that means).
I want to see FOSS.IN/2007 become the place where The Question gets formulated and asked. It’s the perfect place, given that so many of the world’s FOSS movers and shakers will be there and can provide inputs.
Will you be there? Will you help ask The Question?
Back in the last century, Kishore Bhargava and I used to travel all over India, giving talks on data communication, the internet, BBSs, etc.
While some people today comment that both of us are decent ad-hoc speakers and appear to be able to speak on any topic without any preparation, that is not really true – before every talk, we used to practice, tune our slides, argue, refine, change points, add new ones, etc. to give our audiences the kind of great experience any speaker should give his audiences.
But I digress…
Often, these preparations would take place in our hotel rooms late into the night (since during daytime we were either presenting, or traveling).
And to make this preparatory time easier and more enjoyable for us, we used to have music playing in the background.
And this music was, almost always, Vanessa-Mae‘s most famous album – The Violin Player.
Sometimes, when I am really down (which usually happens when things aren’t working the way they are supposed to – at work, at home or elsewhere), I turn on the music – loud.
And one song that invariably picks me up and gets the adrenaline pumping again is good old “Linux Can!” – currently Tony Das’ 2006 version.
This song, originally composed by Mrinal Kalakrishnan (with some inputs from me), has seen many incarnations over the past 8 years.
Phenom has an article on their site about the song and its history, and it finally brings together all the versions in one place.
Dear world,
This is a rather painful post to make, but I see no way out but ask for help from the three people who read my diary on a sporadic basis. This is personal, and I’d rather not splatter it across the few planets that reproduce my posts, so please click below to see the rest of this post.
Mine.
The FOSS.IN/2007 Event Announcement is now out there – go read!
Highlights:
Event dates: 4-8 December (Tuesday through Saturday)
Event venue: National Science Symposium Centre (NSSC), IISc, Bangalore.
Format: Main Conference (6/7/8 Dec) and Project Days (4/5 Dec)
New Stuff: HackCenter, Party@FOSS.IN
Website will open in the next 24 hours or so, with more details.
For now – GO SPREAD THE WORD!