Software Freedom Day Celebrations at College of Technology, Pantnagar

It was August the 15^th all over again for the Open Source User Group (OSUG) / Sun Club / OSScamp Community, Pantnagar as Software Freedom Day was celebrated by the community in the college. The community organised an unconference for the interested students of the college. The event was planned on a short notice and hence adequate publicity could not be done but still a lot of more than 50 students attended and discussed Open Source inside out and upside down at the event. We managed to get permission from 2-5 in the evening which was certainly not enough considering the number of talks proposed by the students. Computer Engineering students from the II and III yrs of the college delivered numerous talks on a wide variety of topics.

The attendees after the SFD celebrations.

Some initial hitches were caused by some electricity issues but the time was utilised in some social sandboxing by the students. Students were peeked by the author (forgive me for that ) discussing technologies like Scala, Grails, Ogg, Svg, Netbeans, PHP……………………… and more (I’m sorry, I can recall only a few ). Once the systems were setup, it was time for us to go-go-go! The students enthusiastically demanded Vikash Pandey to begin his talk on Setting up a website, DNS and related issue. Vikash explained the minor details of setting up a website on a local Apahe server which were well grasped by the students. Once he finished, Nishant Singhal and Varun Agarwal were up front explaining the technical know-hows of System and Network Security. Sumit Sati initiated an interesting discussion during the talk: Ethical Hacking – does it really exist?! The bad weather outside was causing power cuts quite frequently so live demos related to System and Network Security were postponed for later. Meanwhile, Vigya Sharma came up with his lucid discussion on PHP, appropriately titled Introduction to PHP. It was basically a doubt clearing session regarding installation issues in LAMP and XAMPP and some bit of coding in PHP. The numerous questions raised by the students were handled well by Vigya. Following this server side scripting, was some Shell Scripting by Ankush Chander and Akshat Pokhriyal. The young lads started with “Why Unix?” and moved on with their talk explaining the powers of the shell.

Nishant and Varun facing volleys of questions during demonstration of System and Network Security.

We were running short of time and still had 6-7 more talks on queue! Going by the community vote, Aduait Pokhriyal was tossed up on the stage for an Introduction to Routing Protocols. After his talk, Nishant and Varun were ready with the demonstration of System and Network Security. They introduced the students to utilities like Netcat.

The clock had already ticked past 5 but we still had many openSolaris and Netbeans DVDs from Sun Microsystems to give away. Then Tanay Mathpal and Sumit Sati came up with an interesting way to do so; through an Open Source quiz! Simple Open Source trivia questions were answered by the students to take away everything we had in store for them!

The community then discussed the prospects of organising yet another OSScamp Pantnagar either in the campus of the university or in Nainital. The name OSScamp Nainital was exiting enough and the level of enthusiasm shown by the students showed that very soon the OSScamp Pantnagar community will take its first steps in this direction.

More pics from the event at Flickr.

OSScamp Pantnagar

It was just another day when Sumit (http://twitter.com/sumitsati/), who had just returned from Delhi from an event on Open Source in the month of September, 2008, told me about the two days he spent there. The event was an Open Source Software Camp in the premises of IIT Delhi. Both of us were on a rickshaw on our way to the Badi market when he first introduced me to the concept of Unconferences (wikipedia). For me, it was an instant hit! I instantly loved the idea. We had just reached about half way when he told me about his meeting with Kinshuk (http://www.kinshuksunil.com/) and the proposal of having such a camp in our college – College of Technology, Pantnagar (http://www.gbpuat-tech.ac.in/)! Working for the Engineering & Technology Society of the college for the past 2½ years had given me enough experiences to understand that whatever he was saying was not going to ba a cakewalk considering the administrative hurdles and formalities in the government university. Initially i was very skeptical about the feasibility of the camp at Pantnagar but the idea constantly fascinated me.

For me, this fascination towards Open Source softwares and technologies began last year when the Campus Ambassador of Sun Microsystems in our college, Narendra Pant sir held workshops and introduced us to Linux and other Open Source technologies. Open Source philosophy particularly inspired me and especially after watching the documentary movie Revolution OS (http://www.revolution-os.com/), i knew that Open Source softwares are definitely a big thumbs up from my side!

The process of clearing the administrative hurdles began in the Department of Computer Engineering. We had a meeting with our Head of Department and told him about the camp and our plans. Having an orthodox professor’s mindset, making him understand the concept of unconferences was a tedious task but once we took him in our confidence, he extended every bit of support to us. Working for the camp in Pantnagar included writing numerous applications, designing proposals (I say proposal’s’ as to satisfy every administrative ego, the same proposal had to be edited and redesigned three times!) for the Dean and the Vice Chancellor, listening to ‘un’necessary advices and what not!. During the course of this work, the Open Source Camp at Pantnagar became OSScamp Pantnagar (unpunctuated and with the lowercase ‘c’!!!). Visits to the HOD became an everyday routine. There were occasional meetings with the Dean too where we were aptly supported by our HOD.

There was yet another problem. The first and second year students of the college were not very much aware about the Open Source philosophy and technologies. With the special permission from the Dean, we, under the banner of OSUG, Pantnagar (Open Source User Group, Pantnagar, http://groups.google.com/group/sunclub-pantnagar/), held classes for the students every day in the evening. Taking and attending these classes was a surely a big learning experience. The attendance of students was overwhelming and many days we had to face the problem of lack of chairs and space in the class rooms (was surely a matter of envy for the department professors!). The members in the newly formed Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/osscamp-pantnagar/ increased and so did their posts. The entire working team and all the students were now eagerly waiting for the official permission to come our way.

One fine day i got to know about Ruby FunDay at Delhi and i, along with Sumit, Manish (http://twitter.com/graphicmist/) and Diwanshu (http://twitter.com/diwanshu/), went to attend it. Kinshuk accompnied us on our return trip and stayed with us for two days at Pantnagar discussing plans for the OSScamp. It was the end of November and the administrative hurdles were not yet cleared. Once Kinshuk left, we left no stone unturned in fulfilling our promise to him of getting the administrative nod by the end of the month. December dawned and so did out semester final examinations. We had our first exam in a couple of days when a phone call to Sumit jubiliated us all! We had got the written and signed permission from the Vice Chancellor! It was a moment to rejoice and we surely did enjoy it! Very soon we got http://pantnagar.osscamp.in/ and today it is busy with new sign-ups everyday.

The dream called OSScamp Pantnagar is now a reality. This reality will unveil itself on 31^st January – 1^st February, 2009 in the Department of Computer Engineering, College of Technology, Pantnagar.

OSScamp Pantnagar has been a long and interesting journey for me and all my fellow contributors in and out of Pantnagar. Now it’s time for all of us to bask in the glory.

Welcome to OSScamp Pantnagar!

Sign up for the camp at – http://pantnagar.osscamp.in/

Join the group – http://groups.google.com/group/osscamp-pantnagar/

The college – http://www.gbpuat-tech.ac.in/