Fedora Engagement Day

Since this is my first blog post, pardon me if i bore you.I love constructive criticism,So please do drop in your feedback. Everyone has to start someday, right? 🙂

This post is to share my experiences at the Fedora Contribution Camp from a volunteer’s point of view . It was a three day long event conducted in Amrita School of Engineering,Coimbatore. Since the campus policy of letting outsiders in was a bit sophisticated, we had to organize the event keeping in mind the fact that almost all of the participants were new to the concepts of free and open source.

Day 0 :

The event was planned and organized by Sarup Banskota,the coolest and yet, one of the most geekiest guy one can ever imagine in the college. Manjush and I had planned to screen “The Internet’s Own Boy”,a documentary on Aaron Swartz. This was primarily to lure in people for the days to come. The problem now was that the event had to be publicised otherwise it would go unnoticed.So, a nice poster was designed by Anirudh Menon.

Here it is :

Publicising the event was tougher than i expected it to be. Manjush and I had to walk into each and every classroom telling them who Aaron Swartz was and why the documentary is worth watching (nevertheless, it was fun though). Campaigning came to an end in the evening, posters were stuck almost everywhere and our little preparation for the event was done with! I was very excited and waited patiently for the next day. I could see nervousness in everyone’s face, it was “good nervous” 🙂

Day 1 :

The movie screening was scheduled to start at 5pm. Sarup, Manjush and I were present in the hall by 4pm to make sure everything was working fine. We had to fiddle around a bit with the projector display until everyone were satisfied with the tweak. We just waited there for people to join in. Sarup was restless though, he went around the campus and urged people to come and watch the documentary, although he had his own reasons to do so. At around 5:15pm, the hall was filled with people. The turn up was much higher than we expected and I silently whispered to Manjush “Mission Accomplished”. I didn’t realize time passing by as I got totally engrossed in the film. The documentary had captured the life of Aaron in a very subtle and inspiring way. As soon as the movie ended, Abhishek Ahuja invited everyone present there to be a part of the Day-2 events. Sarup took over the mic and invited them again, just in case. Did he want to imply something there? I really don’t know. I was thinking of growing hair like Aaron Swartz then, So i did not think. 😛

Day 2 :

Keeping the college timings in mind, the event was scheduled to happen at 5:30 in the Seminar Hall. Around 40 people turned up for the event and everyone were given Fedora swag as a token of appreciation for participating. The day was kick-started by Abhishek Ahuja. He gave an introduction to Free and Open Source and explained the general FOSS terms. It was really clever of him to take Wikipedia as an example and tell the gathering that contributing to open source is not as complex as it seems to be. He also explained what bugs and Bugzilla were and also demonstrated how easy was it to use Linux.

There was a short break after his session where the participants were given snacks and drinks that Sarup had arranged for. Everyone were delighted to see free food as it was not a common thing in the campus. After everyone managed to gobble down the food, I started my session on Linux, the various distributions and desktop environments. 95% of the participants were Windows users and my sole aim was to convince them that Linux was actually better than Windows. I started off with the advantages of Linux. I must say, that they looked impressed by the points I had in my slide. I explained what distributions were and took them on a quick tour of the popular distributions available and also helped a few people choose their distribution according to their needs.

Manjush’s talk immediately followed mine. The topic looked very catchy, “My experiments with Operating Systems”, it reminded me of “My Experiments With Truth”, although i didn’t see any relation there. I chucked the thought and looked at his slides. He had beautifully arranged them with hints of humour in almost every slide. He said how his quest for “the” perfect operating system ended up with Fedora GNOME. you can find his blog here.

Sarup was to talk next. He made a lively discussion which i must admit was rejuvenating, with the audience who appeared a bit tired as the night was settling in. He presented the Fedora A-Z guide slides with a lot of passion. He took his own time and made sure everyone understood what he was talking. He emphasized on Fedora Easyfix as he thought that it was a great place for everyone to start contributing to Fedora. He looked very active. Was there any reason for it? I really don’t know.

Day 3 :

Same place, same venue as Day 2. The only difference is that Sarup was the sole speaker for the day as it was purely dedicated to Fedora. No Ubuntu, No Mint. Just Fedora. After all, it is a Fedora Contribution Camp! Sarup distributed Fedora stickers to people who had shown up for the event which instantly made them happy. Sarup shared his personal experiences with the Fedora community and showed a lot of his early age photos. He also shared his GSOC experience which inspired one and all present there and also showed how to contact the Fedora community if any help was required in the future which was followed by a short and lively chat in #glittergallery channel on Freenode.

A break followed where food was waiting for everyone. After the break, Sarup talked about how non-programmers could contribute to Fedora. Simultaneously, I was helping people install Fedora onto their laptops which was until then, under the captivity of Windows. Windows was being replaced with Linux, I felt so great inside and if you’re a Linux fan reading this, you probably will know how i would have left. Sarup ended his session in a very elegant manner. He was smiling, but there was something troubling him. Did he miss anything? I really don’t know.

The three days were just amazing. I am really thankful to Sarup for planning and organizing the event. This is an event worth remembering for a lifetime and I think everyone would agree to it, too 🙂

Fedora Engagement Day by Sachin Kamath is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.