Along with Arnav and Jigyasa we organised an event to promote contributions to open source projects. We especially wanted to get people interested in the projects we are working on this summer with FOSSASIA. So yeah, we had an awesome event planned in collaboration with the Organising committee of Esya’15 (My college’s Technical festival) and Women who code Delhi. Also, Another fellow working with the Python software Foundation Yash volunteered as speaker to share his experiences.
We had an awesome turnout of about 150 odd people. So Arnav started off with his presentation where he talked about his experience with Open source technologies and How he got into development. He talked about some important things like Why he likes FOSS, his contributions etc. which got the participants really excited. He also talked about some of his projects and GSoC. Then he moved on to our project and how’s it been like till now. You can find his slides here.
During Arnav’s presentation, Mario came online and just after Arnav was done, We put Mario on Live hangout’s video call with the participants. Mario talked about his experience with OSS and why he likes it. He also talked about some projects as well as answered questions that the attendees had. It was a very informative and inspiring talk. Thank you mario for that.
Then Jigyasa made her presentation. Right when she was in the middle of her presentation, his mentor Martin came online on hangouts and her presentation was cut short. It was pretty cool to have Martin as well. Though his children were playing in the background and making some noises but the talk was pretty informative.
Next I put on the pre recorded video Mohit had sent me talking about his experience and some tips to start a beautiful journey into the open source world. His video very precise and to the point. I liked that about the video. The content was really good. Thank you Mohit to take out time to make the recording.
Lastly I gave my presentation where I talked about some myths regarding open source. Then I talked about my experience as a programmer and an Open source enthusiast. For the maximum part of my presentation, I talked about our GSoC project. Arnav also joined me during the time where I was showing some of our work. The participants also asked questions about our project during the allocated time. We also gave them the links to the repos and mailing list etc. to get them a starting point to contribute to FOSSASIA. It was a cool event all in all.