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Posts tagged fosskriti
Sahana hackfest at FOSSKriti
Feb 24th
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
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:
