We at our college organized a four day “Free and Open Source”  FOSS GN 09 Festival from 28th- 31st October 2009.  The event was planned in a very short while but the final outcome was really awesome. Initially the event was planned by me and Anirudh and later other FOSS enthusiastic people joined us. We had a vision about the event that how the talks would be like, how the hackfests would be and how the venue would look like and I am happy that we achieved that, thanks to our wonderful team which includes some of the bright juniors, some of the great artists and some of the great planners.  And the best part was we managed to convince Niyam Bhushan to come to the fest for talk, his talks just lighten everyone here and the outcome is that we are setting up a GNU Linux Users Group (GLUG) here in our own campus.

I gave a talk on HFOSS and Sahana Disaster Management System. on first day of the fest and at the night( yes! we had hackfests in midnight going from 10:30 pm to 2:30pm ) we had hackfest on Sahana. Huge crowd turned up in nights, was unexpected but pleasant surprise. Since the junta was quite new to linux and others, we however managed to teach them installing Sahana and playing around with code, though the plan was to have bug fixing session too which couldn’t be done. The good thing was students were asking about Sahana and were showing interest in it.

Other sessions included Drupal, Fedora, Multitouch, Joomla, Firefox and SUN Spot talks and hackfests.  Photographs from the event are on flickr and slides are on slideshare.  Overall the aim of this FOSS event was to light the fire of FOSS in our college and I believe we have succeeded in that. Kudos to our team. Hail FOSS!