Freed.in 2011/2012

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Contents

Communication Channels

IRC

Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #freed.in

Be around if you need any information and want to discuss something.

Initial planning for Freed.in 2011/2012

Please edit as desired.

Managers

Theme

Planning

Proposed Roll-out

The idea is to build an platform where the leet folks of open source can assemble. All conferences, unconferences, etc end up getting swamped by newbies (which, is not a bad thing, but dissuades serious people from participating). To be able to do so, the following needs to be achieved in principle:

Freed.in 2012 will be the first of such conferences. It will not be a conference trying to please everyone. It will have a single focus: get some work done - facilitate projects in solving real problems by fixing issues and adding missing resources.

Roadmap

The plans remain pretty much the same but due to lack of time, the time allocated to each phase has been shortened in such a way that we can cover most of what was earlier decided in the beginning of the year. Practicality has to be looked into. Therefore the scope can be re-considered.

Phase 1: Imparting Fundamentals

Mid August to September

Every weekend, a 2 (one and a half) day workshop on contribution fundamentals across regional centres in India.

To be coordinated with various LUGs across the country.

Day 1: learning fundamentals

Day 2: hands on / hacks

Phase 2: Building Leaders

October to Mid November

Every fortnight 2 day contribution camps

Focus on specific themes - CMS, Frameworks, Productivity Tools, System Tools, Mobile Platforms, etc.

Day 1: Build contribution skills across models

Day 2: Contribution sprints 

 Another idea could be...
 * Clubbing phase 1 and 2 
 * Meeting every weekend (for 2 or 1 and a half days) for the two months.
 * Dedicating the first complete day to building fundamentals and the 2nd day for introduction to specific focus areas/themes like frameworks, CMS, tools, platforms, etc.
 * Meeting every fortnight after the first two months, completely focussing on phase 2.

Phase 3: Dress Rehearsal

November End (last week): 2 day miniconf in Delhi

2 days spread across contribution sprints by regional project teams

Phase 4: Freed.in February 2012

CFPs Timeline - 1 August - 15 September 2011
Participating projects announced - 1 October 2011
October - January: Activity Incubation by Projects

February 2012 - Freed.in

Focus Areas

Content Management Systems

Development & Enterprise Tools

Productivity Tools

Open Ecosystem

eGovernance

Systems Administration

Mobile computing

Techno-entrepreneurship (Would be interested in discussing this and taking this forward. Any colleges interested in getting the EDP workshops ? ) (Main.GauravMishra)

Buzz

Meetings for event planning

Meeting 1 - Kick Start Meeting

Agenda:

<Add as you wish>

When & Where:

Minutes of the Meeting

Organization: Delhi NCR FOSS Community
Venue: SC&SS, JNU, New Delhi
Time: 11:00 am
Purpose of the meeting: Kick-starting Freed.in preparations

Attendees:
Ashim Kapoor
Satyakam
Jake Dorab
Gaurang Aggarwal
Piyush
Kapil
Raghav Dwivedi
Devendra Singh
Konark K. Modi
Gaurav Mishra
Shailesh Kumar
Hemika Narang
Vaidik Kapoor
M. Tanveer
Ankur Saxena
Narendra Sisodiya
Akarsh Sanghi

The meeting was scheduled to start at 11:00 am but it started at around 11:40 am due to a new location in JNU than the usual one which was difficult to find. Initially, we had only 7 people to start with and other folks joined in as the time passed by.

  1. Why do we need Freed.in?
    1. Satyakam put forward the first question of the meeting by asking why do we want/need to have Freed.in.
    2. Inputs from initial attendees: FOSS advocacy, to get Delhi NCR folks involved in FOSS activities, to have a good event for the FOSS community in the north, to get together, write some code and contribute, for increasing contribution to FOSS projects from India.
    3. Satyakam suggested that the reasons to have an event like Freed.in are different than the reasons that we are going to tell the prospective sponsors as sponsors are looking for benefits. Reasons like FOSS advocacy, etc. are not what they'll be interested in.
  2. Participation & contribution
    1. Satyakaam asked for how many volunteers are willing to work for the event.
    2. Names that came up are:
      1. JNU
        1. Prof. Andrew
        2. Sachin Chugh
      2. JIIT OSDC
        1. Ankur Anand
        2. Udit Gupta
        3. Neeraj Khandelwal
      3. Amity
        1. Anuvrat Parashar
      4. Other
        1. Karan Pratap Singh
      Above are the names of those people who were not able to attend and committed to volunteer for the event.
      All others who attended are in for contribution.
    3. Satyakam asked Kapil about the kind of contribution that can be expected for Freed.in from JNU, to which Kapil said that its difficult to expect much contribution from JNU as students are not aware.
    4. Satyakam suggested Kapil to have some quick FOSS intro sessions with students so that they can get involved.
  3. Freed.in Theme
    1. Based on the answers of the previous question, we started working on the theme of the event and what we want the event to have.
    2. Discussed every point mentioned under the Theme section on the event wiki. All the points were discussed to be fine except maintaining Freed.in brand – Satyakam suggested about getting to know the Freed.in history first.
    3. Vaidik proposed that their shouldn't be just one field of focus and there should be sessions/talks/hacks for different fields like web dev, system level programming, networking, etc.
    4. Piyush and Konark suggested that Freed.in should be a 2-day event.
    5. Piyush suggested the focus should be on DevOps.
    6. Satyakam seconded both the above suggestions.
  4. Sponsorships
    1. Possible sponsors were proposed by members -
      • Google
      • Wikipedia
      • Yahoo
      • NIXI
      • LFY
      • Open Labs
    2. Vaidik was asked to list down possible sponsors.
    3. Satyakam said that sponsorship slots have to be worked upon. Estimates like total fund requirements, footfalls, etc. have to be worked out.
    4. Satyakam also mentioned that companies have personal interests behind giving sponsorships, personal interests like publicity, human resource, etc. Such interests have to be listed down before going out for sponsorships.
  5. Arrangements
    1. Satyakam mentioned a couple of things to be arranged at JNU and requested Kapil to look into them:
    2. Internet and wi-fi
    3. Open space for coding sprints.
    4. Personal (isolated) space for some small group discussions.
    5. Power connections.
  6. Freed.in Planning & Discussions
    1. Satyakam suggested to have regular discussions on IRC channel #freed.in
    2. Piyush took the responsibiliy of setting up the IRC channel bot for logging discussions.
    3. Rest of the work and planning is to happen at the event wiki at http://www.lug-iitd.org/Freed.in_2011/2012.
  7. Freed.in History
    1. Gaurav Mishra gave a brief history about previous Freed.in.
    2. He explained that Freed.in was majorly an event where the philosophical angle to FOSS was given much weightage and that used to be the highlight.
    3. Besides that, people used to come and meet old friends and just talk or hangout and meet new people, something that every attendee really used to enjoy.
    4. Freed.in 2007 was the best event by far. Footfalls > 1000.
    5. Freed.in 2008 was a failure as a lot of people who were previously involved with Freed.in didn't work as compared to previous years.
  8. Freed.in Theme Revisited
    1. Gaurav put forward the question if Freed.in should drift from the previous years' themes and if yes, why?
    2. Gaurav spoke about how people who have been coding for a long time have might not be interested in hackathons/coding/dev sessions. They will be more interested in the sessions dealing with the philosophical angle to FOSS and in meeting old friends and hanging out.
    3. Many attendees agreed to this.
    4. Some attendees suggested that DevOps tracks are also important as that would attract the young generation, engineering students particularly.
    5. Most of the members suggested that there should be both the tracks – FOSS philosophy and DevOps. This would attract the old folks and the new generation as well.
  9. The Date
    1. Satyakam proposed to have Freed.in sometime around APRICOT 2012 which is happening in February 2012 (exact dates 21 Feb to 2 Mar) as that would save us the work of getting speakers.
    2. Members agreed to fix the date to the weekend falling between APRICOT's dates.
    3. 25-26 February were selected to be the final dates for having Freed.in 2012.

Addition to minutes by Satyakaam on the LUG@IITD mailing list:
Also to add to this Devendra Singh from RKGIT spoke about his college initiatives and will be inviting us all for the talks in there college. There plan so far looks like to go FOSS for the academic education , to which Narendra and myself pointed out that Mohit Singh from Meerut has already worked on getting the Syllabus according to FOSS now if you are expecting any other support you can always come back to this group for help. Also adding to the point we talked about Bhasker Selvaraj from chennai's effort in getting the FOSS labs up and running so we will be connecting Devendra to Bhasker and Mohit to see how this pans out.

Narendra proposed a small events of half a Day in and around NCR to build the momentum for Freed.in , he will be preparing the following things and letting us know for further action on this point.

  1. List of colleges in NCR.
  2. List of Speakers
  3. Preparation of FOSS kit.

These half a day talks are Advocacy and introductory in nature , i ask one and all to participate in this activity , this is one of the easiest way to get rid of your stage fear without paying :-) .

We had the following people who would be volunteering for this activity:

Narendra : Will be preparing the list and FOSS kit in next one month. Satyaakam : Will be coordinating with colleges for talks. Ankur : Can volunteer for a Day in a month in Gurgoan area. Devendra : Volunteer.

Meeting 2

Agenda:
Mini Freed.in - Should we have it or not? If yes, then where?
<Add as you please>

When & Where:

Minutes of the Meeting

Organization: Delhi NCR FOSS Community
Venue: CIS, JNU, New Delhi
Time: 2:30 pm

The meeting kicked off late at 2:50 pm. A lot of new attendees from different communities/LUGs in Delhi NCR had come to attend the meeting for the first time. Therefore, Vaidik Kapoor began with briefing about discussions that happpened in the previous meeting and discussions on the mailing list and #freed.in channel regarding the event.

In brief, the following discussions took place in the last meeting and on IRC and the mailing list after the last meeting:

Discussions happened during this meeting:
Vaidik began with asking the question again, what does everyone want from the event and how would they want it to be as in the previous meeting many members emphasized on having hackathons and giving people the space to start their own hackathons for which personal spaces would be required. Kishore suggested to not strictly follow this format as it ideally is very good but things get messed up at times. A little more organised approach would be better is what he said. He also said that the hackathons should be decided by the participants but they should be decided in advance.

Also, in support of what Gora suggested, Kishore opposed to using the name Freed.in as Freed.in was completely different as compared to what the event is planned to be. Hence the name should be changed to which nobody had any objection to.

Attendees were asked to volunteer for organising the event. Following names came from different communities/LUG members present:
JNU - Prof. Andrew, Anmol, Gautam
Amity - Anuvrat
IIT - Narendra Sisodiya (confirmation required)
JIIT - Akarsh, Udit, Apoorv, Hemika, Vaidik
ILUGD members

Kishore asked what could be a possible and practical date for having the mini event. Vaidik proposed August could be a possible month. Kishore suggested that August will not be practical as the event will be a crowd puller for the major event, and it will require a lot of effort in organising it, getting funds and getting the cream of developers and speakers from the FOSS community in India. Kishore took the responsibility of getting speakers and funds on behalf of ILUGD. He also said that all the organisational work, publicity, getting people has to be taken care of by the team and therefore, a practical and doable date should be suggested. To add to this, he suggested that september or december's first week can be considered, as October and November would be busy because of Dushehra and Diwali. Further, he also suggested that December would be too late for an event in February. Therefore, september should be considered as it is doable as well. Other members agreed to having a mini-event in September.

Another suggestion came from Kishore - ILUD used to do small one-day long events in different colleges in Delhi NCR which used to be a great success and lots of students used to attend. He suggested that probably we could consider doing such theme-based events for getting people to attend the mini-event in september. These events could be used for publicising the event. Volunteers from different colleges agreed to it. After a discussion, it was finalised that the theme of the one-day long events in different colleges should be related to the tracks for the mini-event and further the tracks of the mini-event should be related (a subset) of the tracks decided for the main event.

Vaidik called for suggestion for tracks for the mini-event. Suggestions that came were: Python, Drupal, Django, RoR, etc. With a couple of suggestions on the board, Manav, Prof. Andrew and other members suggested to move a little out of the scope of web development as all the suggestions that came were essentially related to web dev and having such tracks only would make it more of a web-developer centric event.

Prof. Andrew gave the list of tracks prepared for the main event in focus on the event wiki:

Andrew proposed these events to be included in the mini-event as well. Vaidik, Kishore, Manav and some other members suggested not to have all of these in the mini-event because the expected crowd might not be ready for all these tracks. The idea is to get students from college to the mini-event and then to the main event and get them ready for the main event so that they make the most of it. Another member proposed that CMS, Sys Admin and Mobile Computing can be the focus in the mini-event and other tracks including those included for the mini-event can be included for the main event. Kishore suggested that we should leave this to an open poll where people interested in attending can select the tracks they'd want to be included in the mini-event. Vaidik took the responsibility of setting up the poll. The poll is to be left open until August last week so that the tracks can be finalised for the mini-event. All the members agreed to this method of track selection.

Since the mini-event's focus was to be decided according to the poll results, the events to be organised in colleges were restricted to hands-on sessions for beginners which would majorly focus on programming languages/CMSs and use of some common development tools.

The following colleges have confirmed to hold at least a one-day long session:

Amity

Jaypee Institute of Information Technology

JNU SC&SS

IIT or JNU

The meeting ended with finalising the name to be used for the event. As suggested by Gora on the mailing list, everyone agreed to use Freedel as the name for the event. Kishore took the responsibility of getting the freedel.org domain renewed and for setting up the mailing list for the event.

The event wiki is to be moved to ILUGD's wiki where all the work would be done from now on.

Retrieved from "http://www.lug-iitd.org/Freed.in_2011/2012"
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