We always know a place where we find strange peace…
Events
Talking Sahana & HFOSS at GNUnify & FOSSKriti
Feb 24th
Recently I had planned to attend and present Sahana to the students audience at two events in India where the main agenda of my talk was to make them aware of the HFOSS ideology and Sahana, as a part of the community building efforts I have been doing in India.
Being a student myself, I am highly excited to attend such events and make sure I attend them and spread Sahana 
First event to attend was GNUnify 09, which was at “Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research“, Pune. It is an annual gathering of the techies & community organised by the SICR & Pune GNU/Linux Users Group. It was a two day event held from 13th – 14th Feb 2009, I was present for the first day. The best take home, apart from excited students interested in taking up work on Sahana as a part of their academics, was a student volunteer coming up and sharing his thoughts on using Sahana to maintain the database of all people related information for the country starting with his city Pune, which can be used to access information in case such an emergency situation arises. As he pointed out, we don’t have a central identity mechanism in India as a national ID, but have various different IDs like the Voter ID, Ration Card, Passport. The student also mentioned they have a group at their college which works on Social issues who might be willing to take up work on Sahana . Audience here comprised of FOSS Contributors & Professionals, Students, Teachers.
Second event was FOSSKriti, at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur from February 12-15th 2009, where I was for the last 2 days of the event. FOSSKriti is the FOSS component of their annual technical festival called Techkriti which attracts a huge student crowd from across India each year. This place attracted a larger student audience since it was a student only event and the organizers were an awesome bunch since they were students as well!
The slides of the talk:
When /me was at foss.in/2008
Dec 31st
Probably I am the last one to write the report on the event by now But heck, I had exams before and after the event and then life took over But I decided to write it up before the year ends! It will be a long post, you have been warned
This was my first time at foss.in and I had only seen about it over the web, pictures, and heard about it from the *people*. After mukt.in/2008, this was the second FOSS community event that I attended representing Sahana. As someone new to all this stuff, I was really confused all the time, asking people questions on how to go about it on the mailing list and the IRC, especially about the Workouts AKA Hackathons.
So basically, I had the workout planned and prepared well enough. I got few people interested who mailed me off list showing interest to join in, and some praise mails as well. Thank You! But in the end, it worked out the people I got who were prepared for the workout could not be present at the event, hence remotely over IRC!
I reached Bangalore on Sunday, 2 days before the event just because I was paranoid the flight might get cancelled again, as what happened at mukt.in 
And as I left to Delhi, on the way I figured I had forgot my laptop’s charger Awesome no? And did I mention, I had my HDD crashed just while I was packing my stuff and fixing GRUB entries of the dual boot. Finally wiped off completely and installed *just* Ubuntu and left.
So after the chilly Delhi climate, Bangalore’s weather was pleasant and I loved it! Reached the hotel and started what? Charger hunting! Asking people if they had a Thinkpad charger. No Luck! So first day, I spent watching TV and talking to people on phone. Luckily, I went to meet my old friends at some opposite corner in Bangalore to help me with the hunting late at 7 and I while hopping shops, I figured I had a school friend staying in this area. Called her to check, if she knew any shops who sold laptop stuff. She asked me what model I had, and said if the Lenovo models will work. I said, yeah it will. And she had one & brought it, and guess what!, it worked!! So she was happy to lend it to me for a week and sacrifice her movie watching for the time being in return of a treat which I duly gave her before leaving Bangalore. In fact, she helped me get back to the airport as well by booking a cab! As I couldn’t get my internet working and as always, was at the last minute.
So finally I get back to the hotel and setup stuff for the workout and prepare my freshly installed Ubuntu with the dev environment.
Report
Prior to Day 1 (dinner) it was good to meet the speakers who had already arrived and talk to them. Got addressed by Atul & the Team@Foss.in members and got an idea of what to expect and what NOT and what is expected of us!
Day 1: I did manage to wake up early and leave ON time, to reach the venue, attended Harald’s keynote. And after that, I was always hanging around preparing for my workout on Day 2 at the FOSS Expo booths with the KDE guys! I also met fellow community guys, who agreed to help out during the workout with their participation. After the event, I came back to the hotel and post dinner, we sat and discussed things late night.
Day 2: Last night after discussions at the room with Piyush Verma, who works on Mobile/SMS stuff and have good experience in the field, we had the plan setup to go and hack on! Along with Nirmaya Lahiri, a new contributor who joined the Sahana list from Kolkata a few days back and was ready to work along over the IRC. At the hall, I was sruprised to see few guys already present before time and were setting up stuff after reading the wiki page. That was great! and unexpected 
That sure felt good. So we had:
- Nandeep Maali, GSoC 2008, Sarai, New Delhi. [irc]
- Shantanu Choudhary, from Sarai, New Delhi.
- Piyush Verma, KDE & Ex-GSoC 2007 student, New Delhi.
- Nirmalaya Lahiri, Kolkatta. [irc]
- Salil Kothadia, Bangalore.
- P.C. Kabeer, Kerala.
- Vivek Khurana, New Delhi.
who participated in the workout along with me and brainstormed on ideas to figure out the best way to solve the problems determined. We had some audience and friends present to support as well and watch the action as we discussed on the screen and the whiteboard (we used this a lot) 
. It was a nice session where the end result was no code, but solutions to solve the problem in a better way. Which needed further action and discussion to act upon, which is now being worked upon already! One thing we all felt, that we all were exhausted completely after the 2-5 pm, which went to 6 iirc, discussion and we had our much needed coffee break, before meeting again the next day to discuss and hack again.
Days 3-5: I had been hanging around whatever place I could get figuring out stuff to get to work, was joined by Kabir always and we would sit and do things on Sahana. Apart from that I would hang around with the KDE guys, meet other people chit-chat around. Practised the KDE song back at the hotel at night and danced on it, keeping everyone awake thinking that we were drunk, while we weren’t.
KDE Song late night practise
Met some *really* nice people, who were not only good hackers, but good & *friendly* people whom I had great fun with. I attended the KDE POTD and helped out in Piyush’s workout and attended Aanjhan’s workout as well. The day ended with an awesome ending keynote by Kalyan Verma, which left people thinking on issues related to the nature and wildlife, and the change we can be a part of.
Overall, this event was a great place for me to meet people whom you have talked to, but not met in person, meet new people, have fun, talk about Sahana and let people understand and know what FOSS can also do, in the form of Sahana.
Apart from seeing people getting kissed in public,
kushal at foss.in/2008 with some mysterious person
some using desperate measures & threatening to start contributing to their projects
Pradeepto, Join KDE or... !!
and some taking a time out of hacking
Aanjhan aka tuxmaniac taking a time out
… we had some great action and minds at work at the venue everywhere like this:
Minds at work at foss.in/2008
You can see the set of pictures from foss.in/2008 uploaded by everyone on Flickr and reports by others here.
The take home for me at foss.in/2008 was, meeting good people, getting to tell them about Sahana where it needs help, how its important for India to have an active community to work on, coming up with great new ideas to work/implement into Sahana and of course get more contributors, which I see is happening now As a developer the idea of having Workouts is indeed a useful one which I intend to replicate at other places as well. And this was the first time I was doing a development focussed activity for Sahana in India.
And of course this
foss.in/2008 t-shirt
We all love geeky shirts, more so special if it has your name on it!
Thanks to the people whom I met and the foss.in team who made this whole experience a wonderful and awesome one!
See you at foss.in/2009!
Why should you participate in the Sahana workout?
Nov 5th
- Because you know PHP and can code in PHP!
- Because you get a chance to let your code make a difference to a large cause. Globally!
- Because you understand availability of information at the right time is important!
- Because you *want* to do some life changing work! One that can change lives.
Imagine, a missing person has been displaced and lost touch with his family after floods. The relatives fires up an SMS to the system to search him in the database. And finds the person!!! So you can say, that was MY CODE which helped the family unite back after a disaster.***
- Sahana is a PHP/mySQL based web application that can run over a standalone PC or a client/server & networked environment. So you need to have the knowledge of PHP to contribute to the code of Sahana.
- Disaster strikes without notice. Sahana has been deployed at various such incidents and used by the government for relief operations. Right from pre-disaster management planning in the New York City USA, to post-disaster management operations in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, China, Philippines, India, Myanmar. So you know where your code goes! Globally and goes for a social/noble cause.
- In such an emergency situation you need information, which is important, right when it is available. Or at least easily accessible when you want it. Getting information using your cellphone and SMS could be really easy and effective.
- Sahana system has helped track families and unite missing victims. Certainly these are life changing experiences including saving lives. Getting the right supply of relief materials on the right time are among the few aspects the Sahana system is used in.
The example I have used is based on the scenario where Sahana is deployed with the SMS being setup which interacts with the Sahana server. People send SMS to the Sahana number and it retrieves information from the database. Missing persons information is collected at relief camps and entered into the Sahana central system. So, a person could be misplaced and land up at a relief camp in a distant area and get assistance. But his family could be searching for him/her someplace else.
More information can be found here:
http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php?id=dev:foss_in_2008_ideas
I am coming to FOSS.in/2008. Are you?
Sahana at FOSS Workshop by NRCFOSS in JMIT, Radaur.
Nov 4th
On 7th & 8th November 2008 A FOSS introductory workshop is being organized at JMIT, Raudaur, for Lecturers/Professors of computer / electronic streams at JMIT and neighboring colleges. Proposed strength is 40 participants, which will also include some student members.
Link: http://nrcfosshelpline.in/code/wiki/JmitHaryanaWorkshop
Am planning to conduct a hands-on session to install & use Sahana for the participants. Will be talking to their CSE department to have some kind of contributions done to the project.
I code for SAHANA. Do you?
