Free yourself to do the right thing

After conducting the first ever Localization sprint for Sahana sometime back, we had a Hackfest planned at FOSSKriti where I saw awesome collaboration work happening real time for the first time !!

The plan: Coding for Sahana in Python

Date/Time: February 14th 2009, 1530 UTC.

Venue: Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
and #sahana on irc.freenode.net the official project IRC channel for online collaboration/communication with the team.

Why on a Valentines Day?: Because we love Sahana!

Team Sahana at Hackfest:

• Fran Boon [irc/skype]
• Chamindra de Silva [irc/skype]
• Dominic König [irc/skype]
• Ajay Kumar [onsite]

Special Thanks to Satyakaam Goswaami, who led the “Sahana Testing” track and Massimo Di Pierro, author of Web2Py who led the students on queries related to Web2Py.

What happened there?:

• We saw around 80+ students initially filled in the labs at the venue.
• Students were briefed about what Sahana is in the talk delivered by me earlier.
• Fran Boon, gave a brief outline and introduction on what to expect and what we will be doing over a Video Call on Skype.
• Introduction of the track leads and tasks we all were to address.
• Addressing newbie questions right from starting to code in Linux development environment using a text editor to what Open Source or what Sahana is.
• Since the main channel #sahana got too noisy and bombarded with all sorts of questions from all the students present at the venue, we decided to split the focus.
• We had #sahana-classroom to deal with total newbie related questions, which Chamindra gracefully handled .
• #sahana-testing room was created to handle Testing related discussion which Satyakaam handled.
• #sahana – For core development on SahanaPy handled by Fran Boon.
• Whenever a question used to pop-up on IRC, I used to explain it to the student at the venue itself so as to divert attention of the traffic from #sahana and let the leads focus on other issues.
• Massimo, patiently handled local setup issues with the organisers and help setup the development environment for the students, since the IIT K network was not accessible from outside and checking out code etc was a pain.
• Since it was an overnight event, we had limitations and not all people stayed till the end. We had to shut down the labs at 1 am local India time and we had people working on Sahana till the end
• The organisers, being students themselves, were assisting in the local issues and helping the newbies get started as well.

Overall experience:

This was something happening for the first time on such a large scale, for which we were not really prepared since it was not anticipated! We had a great time learning things, showing code, writing code, testing Sahana, getting students started to contribute to Sahana. The whole excitement for me was to see various project leads handling the issues and collaborating with the students on IRC for the first time. I never saw them all at once on IRC so far and we all discussing development .

So it was a great experience for me to be a part of such an initiative. This event has had a lasting effect with students asking about Sahana and how to get started with its development who might as well apply for Sahana in Google Summer of Code 2009.

I loved being at FOSSkriti and get an experience of a lifetime, this is a place I would want to visit next year as well

Pictures from the venue here: http://picasaweb.google.com/ajuonline/SahanaPyHackfestFOSSKriti

Complete event log and report including IRC logs located here: https://trac.sahanapy.org/wiki/FOSSkriti