My last evening in Bangalore has been spent at Atul's place with
all the other speakers around and the organization team for the
"Speaker Party". Once again great food, and great people to discuss
with.
I left a bit early with Till, Volker, Christian, Kartik and Sheela.
I got back to the hotel with Kartik while Till, Volker and
Christian left to the airport to take their plane.
This way I had some sleep, and early in the morning I got a car
sent by the organizers to get to the airport. Had my flight for
Mumbai with no problem, and arrived in time. I have to admit that
Mumbai airport is much bigger and cleaner than the Bangalore one.
There, Pradeepto was waiting for me and picked me up to go to a
hotel in Panvel (a small town near Mumbai). I'm staying there for
the next few days because I'm attending Pradeepto's wedding.
This post is officially the last one about FOSS.in 2007. But likely
not my last one from India this year, I'll probably blog about
Mumbai and the wedding. As for FOSS.in, I have a short list of
things which I'll definitely remember (in no particular order):
- Most of the talks are all done by high profile speakers... I
even wonder how I got talks there. You definitely have the best
people in their field coming here. The "who's who" of the Indian
Free Software contributors is there, but you also have quite a lot
of famous international Free Software contributors. If you don't
believe me, look at this year speakers list but also past years...
I hardly know any other conference with such speaker lists (except
maybe FOSDEM).
- The organization team is just awesome and I'll really miss them
all. Lovely and interesting people... I admit I was a bit heart
broken when I had to leave the speaker party. I'm looking forward
to meet them all again.
- The party at Opus, nice karaoke club, terrific atmosphere...
and Shlipa learning how to count people when drunk (I'll never let
you forget this moment). @Shreyas: No need to smile while reading
this, you were half drunk too, remember? ;-)
- The high quality of the organization (the organizers again, but
also the volunteers and the logistics around the conference), it
was just perfect. I've been speaker in quite a few conferences, and
I've never seen something like this. As a speaker, you're never let
on your own, you always get help for anything, and you can feel
it's all done with a great pleasure. In short: it's the best
organized conference I've ever been to. And I don't see another one
beating this team anytime soon.
Last day of FOSS.in I had some network problems, and I've been left
with almost no access since then. Hence why I'm blogging this only
now and the entry will be slightly short.
The last two days were marked by a few talks I attended.
Particularly, Danese Cooper talk was brilliant, she's one of the
best speakers I know. This talk was very interesting, and relevant
to most people employed to work on Free Software. How to keep your
ethics. How to make your employer move forward in the right
direction. Are important part of the equation now that we see more
and more companies involved in Free Software development.
Of course other outstanding talks were the ones by Till and Volker
about Akonadi. Very well done guys! It gave me a very good overview
of what Akonadi is, and how to develop with it. I already claimed
in the past that I would never ever work on the kdepim codebase...
Honestly they gave me the will to work on Akonadi based PIM stuff
which is a small miracle. Akonadi really looks like the way to go
for PIM: shareable accross desktops, lightweight yet powerful, a
nice and clean API taking care of years of experience from our
PIMsters. Congrats to everybody involved.
Last but not least, the talk from Andrew Cowie about how to become
a contributor was quite nice too. The idea to do it along with
Shreyas was terrific, it gave a very entertaining talk. Too bad
there was too much content for the allocated slot and they had
technical issue at the beginning of the talk. They had to rush in
the end, which is unfortunate for such an important topic.
Finally, we had the official closing of the conference, it started
with a talk by Rusty Russell. Basically he was asked to give a talk
which would give everybody the will to become a contributor. Then,
he came up with the very nice idea to explain is own story, and to
invite other kernel hackers to do the same. After that he invited
Sheela on stage and she made her first patch to the kernel in live.
That patch was sent on the relevant lists, we learnt later that it
got applied and will be shipped in the next kernel... Yes, that was
that easy! In the end of his talk he invited almost all the
attendance on the stage: contributors, users, people knowing
developers, etc.
Atul then got on stage to the closing talk, he invited a few people
to talk about other indian conferences and events around Free
Software. There's so much potential here that it's really nice to
see some dynamics around this topic in India.
It was the opening day for the conference part of the event. Very
nice introduction by Atul in my opinion. The keynote was nice too,
getting some insights about Anjuta development, where it came from
etc.
Then, I attended Holger's talk about Open Embedded, interesting
stuff too. It really shows the difficulties of having to deal with
small devices and how it impacts the community.
After lunch (ah! great food again!), I hanged into the Hacking Room
for most of the afternoon showing bits of KDE, discussing the
design, trying to give information on how to get started with some
of our frameworks. Nice and interesting people were here to
discuss. Because of that I missed the QtWebKit talk by Simon, but
it was worth it.
And finally, I had my last presentation, about the student projects
we did last year in my University (and we have a sequel running
this year), it had some exclusive data in it on how it's going this
year. I got really nice feedback to this talk, truely nice to see
so many students and a few professors in the room. There's
definitely some will to replicate this and I'd love to help such
efforts. We'll see where it goes...
Since the first day of the conference was over, we moved to a
restaurant... Followed by some of the organizers, we ended up being
20 people in there. Was a traditional "on the banana leaf"
restaurant. Great people (again), awesome food (again)... I ended
the day full and happy!
Daily report from FOSS.in (at least I try). It was the day were we
had the KDE project day, so I was of course hanging in the KDE room
all day. Unfortunately it was a quite remote room, which didn't
make it easy to find us, but we had our share of people, and at
least we were sure they were motivated to find us. ;-)
Overall we had nice talks, and of course nice questions. I'm not
that happy with my talks too, I think I somehow missed the target
audience, but I learnt from this and will do better next time.
In the evening we had a nice party in a karaoke bar. The food was
great, the people too. At the end of the party one of the organizer
was drunk, she had to count us ten times to know how many taxis to
get. In the end we had our taxi and went back to the hotel.
For those wondering: no, I won't give the name of the drunk
organizer for her own sake... I've been told it'd be disclosed by
other bloggers anyway. :-)
I got my flight to Bangalore yesterday after a night in a cheap
hotel near CDG airport. In case you'd wonder: yes CDG airport is
still as bad as usual... For instance I met Till and Volker there
and we didn't manage to buy wifi time there. Their portal was sooo
confusing...
Anyway, we just sit in the plane and after a few hours (with a
headache for me) we arrived safely in Bangalore airport. No bagage
got lost so after a bit of waiting we got out of the airport.
There, Atul and a couple of other people from
[FOSS.in](http://foss.in) organization.
We crashed out at the hotel and woke up ready for the first day of
the conference. After breakfast we got to the venue which is a nice
building in my opinion. I used my day to keep up with mail, prepare
myself for tomorrow talks, add the final touch to my main
conference talk and discuss with people. It's really nice to meet
them, lot of nice folks!
The lunch break was great too (I could I come here without talking
about food?). I really enjoyed it, veggie and spicy! We also got
joined by
[Danese Cooper](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danese_Cooper) and a
few other people, the discussions were very interesting. Last but
not least that's the time when the
[famous Pradeepto](http://foss.in/2007/info/Image:Pradeepto.jpg)
joined us. Always a pleasure to see him!
Now leaving for dinner... Later people!
