Free and Open Source Software hits Techkriti

Techkriti is IIT Kanpur's technical festival. My participation in Techkriti over the years has been varied, to say the least. I participated heavily in random events the first year, sat it out the second thanks to Robocon, and now was part of the organizing team. We organized what was planned to be a small part of Techkriti, something that the folks over at Navya [internal IITK link] always knew was missing but never really did anything about it. FOSSKriti, in all rights, is Arun's baby. He came up with the concept and brought it from the initial "Lets have a FOSS component in Techkriti" to the amazing success the event finally was almost single handedly, with a little help from the rest of us. :)

While the success of the event is quite subjective, I claim FOSSKriti to a success on all fronts because of the following facts :

• Over 200 people participated. We didnt have a formal registration structure in place (other than people signing up in a stall in the SAC which was just used to selectively let people in in cases where we were at capacity - people who signed up didnt always show up, and many who didnt sign up did) so we dont have exact numbers, but the Linux Kernel workshop, with the most participation, ran at full capacity both times, with over a 100 people in the lab. There are probably many people who didnt attend that workshop but did the others, but there is no way know for sure.
• The participation was, for the most part, active and lively. People asked questions - a reasonably good sign that they seemed to be following the talks. It also seemed at times that the speakers got tired quicker than the audience did (no offence meant to any of you folks, though :) )
  
• People interacted with us outside the framework of the event, met us in the SAC (and not always near our stalls) and spoke to us about FOSS. There were some who said they came to Techkriti only for FOSSKriti. Perhaps they were just being polite, but it did make us feel good. :)
  
• On the 4th day of Techkriti, we gave out almost 200 CDs of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Kubuntu-KDE4, Knoppix, SuSE, and FOSS for Windows (which Nirbheek compiled for this very purpose)
• We had a lot of events, all of which went very well. For the most part they started on time (or atleast reasonably close to it).
  

FOSSKriti started with the Beagle Hackfest on the first day of Techkriti. When Arun suggested a beagle hackfest, I remember telling him not to expect more than 10 people, and that too only because the event has the word 'hack' in it. It was the first day of the festival, with not all teams on campus and not enough time to publicize it. 60 people showed up. We had to improvise, running around the lab getting more machines set up with the necessary tools. The hackfest went very well, with some good contributions that have been sent upstream for review or will be sent in the days to come. More about this on Arun's blog.

The second day we had a talk on Clutter by Shreyas Srinivasan (who happens to be a really cool guy) which I happened to miss thanks to this unfortunate human requirement called sleep. I'm told we had about 150 people attending the talk, who sat through the whole thing and seemed to be awake through it. After the talk, a bunch of guys started working on a clutter frontend for Beagle.

By the time Day 3 came along, we had all our stalls in the CSE grounds up and running. The day was packed with FOSSKriti events, starting with the Linux Kernel Workshop conducted by Ankita Garg. We expected this one to be a crowd puller, but never realized how much. We had to turn away a lot of people, including all the IITK participants, and still had the Lab packed to the brim. We had planned to conduct the workshop ourself for the on-campus people at a later time, but Ankita agreed to do it all over again, so that evening we had a second workshop where we gave a priority to IITK participants, and _again_ we had to turn away a few people! In between, we had two talks - one about KDE4 for the user, delivered by Piyush Verma (another really cool guy) and a talk about LinuxChix which Ankita delivered. While we filled CS101 for the KDE4 talk, the LinuxChix talk could have had more turnout (in my opinion atleast). Perhaps we'll have to do some looking into the way we publicized the talk and make modifications for next time. We did realize that the talk was a little too close for comfort with a talk by a Nobel Laureate (Grunberg, Nobel Prize in Physics, 2007), and perhaps that kept people away. That night, at 10 PM, we had the RoR workshop, conducted by Saurabh Nanda of Cleartrip, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and a former member of Navya. We started off with people sitting on the floor of CS101, and by the time the near 2-hour talk part of the workshop was done, CS101 was about 80% full. By this time, Nanda was able to build the backend for an OARS like website. We think most of the people who stayed on understood what was going on, which is a much larger number than we had expected. At this point we moved to the lab, where the effects of the long day packed with events was visible in the faces of the participants. Only 25 or 30 of them joined us for the workshop, which went on till about 3 AM.

This brings up to Day 4, which started with the KDE Developer talk which Piyush delivered. This was one talk which I _really_ wanted to attend but missed out on, but I'm told that Piyush built a simple KDE application with pyQt which was well received by the participants, and we hope more people will start contributing to KDE from here :) . The BoF sessions in the afternoon were a great success, with a _lot_ of active participation. The day ended with the Common Lisp workshop conducted by Chaitanya Gupta, also from Cleartrip which also went great, considering that people stayed on even after the Strings show had started.

FOSSKriti could not have been possible without help and support from many sides, including the financial support and (lots of) T-shirts from Cleartrip. Gnome, KDE, Firefox, and the folks over at Opera gave us some too :) The people over at the main computer center and CSE also pitched in, helping us get the labs and all the access we needed on the machines. The Festival Coordinators of Techkriti also deserve a thanks, and perhaps a generic apology - we resorted to a lot of arm-twisting to get the things we needed. Mayur was amazing when things got a bit iffy regarding our speakers' accomodation, and the Transportation Cell did a terrific, terrific job.