Been weeks now since BarCmp Delhi 6 was held – on 28th February and 1st March 2009. Not many people seem to have put up photographs, although I did put up whatever few I had from BarCamp Delhi 6. In retrospect, the event took a huge beating in participation due to the fact that it was being held at Gurgaon. Admittedly, reaching the venue was a difficult proposition for many people. But then, we didn’t get any other venue and are glad that MDI Gurgaon helped us out during that time. Read up tweets from BarCamp Delhi 6.
Day 1
I reached early in the morning to help set up stuff. Pleasantly surprised to find WiFi working at every room sessions were to be conducted in. Others who had volunteered were Piyush, Jasdeep, Anand, Rashmi, Vaibhav, Deepak, Praval, Honey, and Gaurav (hope Im not missing out anyone here!). Soon enough participants started trickling in for registration. (About halfway through you realize that you might need to miss a few sessions for this, but that’s OK.) Post-registration I decided to attend a session on social media.
Most of the action happened after the lunch break (lunch had to be paid this time since we didn’t have enough sponsorship to cover food). Pankaj Jain and Deepak Shenoy gave an update on the financial crisis; as always, the statistics were startling. Shwetank Dixit, Opera evangelist, conducted a session on ‘The Open Web’ concept which Opera has been championing. Rohit Srivastava of Clubhack gave an incredibly obvious (and thus boring) session on Internet security. ‘How to interact with the open source community’ was worth attending after that. I met my friend Animesh of iTasveer and demonstrated a bug in in their shopping cart which makes the browser unstable when a large number of photos are added in Firefox or similar browsers. (It seems to be a Gecko layout engine or JavaScript issue.)
The highlight of the day was Pavan Duggal‘s open house interaction session on cyberlaw in India; specifically about privacy issues. He took an ongoing case where an explicit video was shot by some company’s employee using a company-provided phone and one of the parties is now threatening to sue the company because the video has been leaked. Just as in WordCamp the interpretation of law spurred some heated discussions – and talk of hard work and creativity. Pavan Duggal also spoke on the liablity of website / forums owners on content which maybe posted by third parties, ‘legal acceptance’ of terms and conditions, etc. This was the closing session of the day.
Day 2
Turnout on the second was visibly much lesser. While day 1 had around 180 participants, day 2 had around 50. Among the volunteers me and Deepak were the first to reach. Eventually people started turning up, so we decided that until there was a reasonable crowd we’d conduct an informal discussion. The bright side is that in these smaller groups a lot more interaction and active discussion can take place. Sessions got off to a late start, with some product demos in the morning. I requested Praval to talk about his journey from being a freelance writer to co-founding MediaRedefined. I was up next with my BarCamp Delhi 6 Quiz. This was primarily a re-hash of some of the best questions from a few of my earlier quizzes. Credit also goes to Espera; I took some questions from her Physics Quiz. (I don’t regret make an un-original set this time, because eventually the audience turned out to be small.) Guru Dutt, an ex-quizzer and alumnus of MDI Gurgaon, walked away answering the highest number of questions (thus getting the highest number of chocolate bars in the process).
Lunch was individually bought from the canteen. Again, lots of interesting discussions and networking during the lunch break. Post-lunch, we had an presentation by Abhay on usability testing in India. He gave some interesting anecdotes from usability tests, and those are quite extensive because he does that for the Naukri.com group of companies which own quite a few major Indian web portals.
At the end of the day, I really enjoyed being an active part of BarCamp Delhi 6, meeting up so many friends and making news ones. Oh, and there was Twilight Fairy + Sanjay Srivastava’s photo exhibit at Epicentre in Gurgaon (visited that on both days after BCD). Awesome pics.
Phew…I finally get down to writing my post on WordCamp India (#wci on Twitter). This was held on 21-22 February 2009 (the first day of WCI was clashing with the second day of freed.in) at the Adobe India office in Noida. WordCamp is conference similar to BarCamp (except for the ‘un’ bit) for WordPress users. The organizers hit jackpot by getting the founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg himself to come for the event – along with top blogger Om Malik of GigaOm fame. We had free WiFi courtesy Adobe so a lot of us did live tweeting / live blogging there. (Signing on to that network was another story. We all had to read agree to a long EULA, sign up for a guest account on the Adobe network. All pretty cool, when you consider that their network was rock solid.) Guess what? Our collective effort made it the most discussed topic on Twitter throughout the world on both days! You can check out all tweets tagged #wci related to WordCamp India on Twitter. I’ve also uploaded photos from WordCamp India in my photo gallery here (mostly contributed by Prashanth), and you can see photos clicked by other people at WordCamp India here.
WordCamp India – Day 1
Reached the Adobe office somewhat late because I had trouble finding where it was. Once you know what it looks like it’s kinda hard to miss because of the funky color scheme the building has (see picture above). The souvenir we got turned out to be…pencils. Now that was a dampner. But they were also giving out WordPress tattoos, stickers and badges. I had one tattoo of Mozilla Firefox on one cheek (from MozillaCamp Delhi). At WordCamp, I got some WordPress tattoos, the other cheek was populated soon.
Some called me ‘cheeky’ (pun intended), but everyone did recognize me as ‘The Tattoo Guy’ – including Matt Mullenweg. I was also wearing multiple multi-coloured badges. You see, when these goodies are distributed people jump on them as if they’re hungry refugees getting aid from the World Food Programme – as evidenced by how greedily they were ‘attacking’ the box where the badges etc to be distributed. Yet, not a single person apart from me bothered to actually wear these. (Even for that matter, nobody other than me used the stickers given at MozillaCamp Delhi.) Love it? Flaunt it! When you’re a user of an open source project it is your duty to be an evangelist. There is no corporation full of moneybags to sponsor any publicity. YOU, as a user of open source software, have to contribute in any way you can.
(This is the same sick mentality as those who order multiple Ubuntu CDs via ShipIt – or forget multiple, even single CDs for that matter – and never bother to distribute / use them. Morons. A lot of money goes into that programme. The least you can do is have a conscience and not misuse it if you plan to sit on the CD like a hen for eternity.)
Adobe Noida seminar hall (free bald head included)
On Day 1 there were around 200 people who were attending – most of them bloggers. I found it surprising that hardly any developers were present. Sessions on Day 1 were:
Keynote session by Om Malik; welcome session by Twilight Fairy: I missed both these because I reached the venue late.
Implementing a radio site using WP (by Shreyas): This session was about how RadioVerve customized WordPress (the website currently runs on that). I refused to listen to this session on principle – because he had used Comic Sans font for displaying code in his presentation.
How to get started after installing WordPress (by Abhijeet Mukherjee): This was a useful session for those who hadn’t used WordPress – and quite surprisingly there were quite a few of these folks. The presentations touched base with the most important stuff and was a good beginners’ guide to WordPress.
[yahoo 12164299] (Partial video of Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” session) State of the Word (by Matt Mullenweg): Matt Mullenweg spoke of how WordPress started of, it’s current state, and where it’s headed. The quick history lesson included screenshots from a bygone era when WordPress was young, goofy photos of Matt, photos from other WordCamps, statistics et al. There was this one photo of Matt from when he was in high school – and very geeky looking.
WordCamp India Quiz (by me!): Thanks to Abhishek and Mayank, who allowed me to hold this session. I conducted a quiz mostly on WordPress and Twitter, with a few questions on blogging in general. You can download the WordCamp India Quiz presentation here. Unfortunately there were no prizes to give away so the audience was kinda not enthusiastic – and Ubuntu went nuts trying to connect to the project, I think because there was a KVM switcher. What I was seeing on my laptop wasn’t what was appearing on screen and I had no way of interacting with elements shown on project via laptop. I could run the presentation somehow. Hit a snag when I wanted to conduct the 6by9 round of WordCamp India quiz (the questions were – 1. Codenames of WordPress releases 2. Blogs currently owned by Gawker Media) So I had to show it directly from the laptop while running around the seminar hall. (Note to self: Send a letter to the developers of Xrandr containing loads of choice expletives.)
Open house discussion with Matt and Om: Matt Mullenweg and Om Malik spoke about how they started of with blogging – basically a session where you could ask questions to them. They’d been giving press interviews when my quiz session was going on, so this open house was an opportunity for the aam junta to interact.
L to R: Prashanth Kanduri, me, Some Jerk Who Walked Into The Pic, Om Malik, Mohak Prince
Then came the time for photo-ops. The level of patience that Matt, Om, and other ‘star bloggers’ like Amit Agarwal showed was commendable. They obliged anyone who asked for autographs and / or photographs – usually, both. Wearing those Firefox and WordPress tattoos got me quite a lot of attention. While everyone else was asking Matt “Can I get a pic clicked with you?”, Matt was asking me “Can I get a pic clicked with you?”. [big grin] 😀 (I’d gone to ask him about what direction Automattic was taking BuddyPress and BBPress. He said that by the end of 2009 they’ll either stop development of BBPress or revamp it radically. BuddyPress is still in RC1 stage, of course.)
Not exactly the pose I _wanted_, but this is the only pic I've got
WordCamp India – Day 2
Day 2 got off to a lazy start with the turnout dropping significantly. Those who didn’t come on day 2 missed a lot though. Socializing (networking, if you may) was much more on day 2 because of the smaller set of people who turned up (but largely because people were getting bored waiting for the event to start).
See the sparse 'crowd'?
WordPress as CMS for business sites (by Ravish Ahuja)
Turning your WordPress blog into a business (by Ankesh Kothari)
Personal galleries and social networks with WordPress and Adobe AIR (by Aditya Mukherjee): He didn’t make much sense. Seemed as if he had too much coffee and was as strung out as Tweek is. (“Oh jeez, this is too much pressure man!”) You can see his presentation here.(About the previous two sessions, I hadn’t paid much attention to those. You see, I had problems installing Adobe AIR on Linux before going to WordCamp. I was at the Adobe office, so I casually tweeted about it. I got a reply from Adobe guys who were present there within minutes. I downloaded and installed AIR again with some apps…and it worked without a glitch! Earlier, I always had to authenticate using gksudo whenever an AIR app was launched.)
Writing WordPress plugins (by Kartik Bala): Interesting session for developers, but there were hardly any in the audience. (= “many people slipped away to have a cup of coffee”)
WordPress.tv (by Matt Mullenweg): Matt spoke about the WordPress tutorial site WordPress.tv. He arrived late in the day – after lunch – for this.
It actually frikkin' does change colour
WordPress feature suggestion contest: Attendees were asked to fill up sheets giving suggestions about what can be improved and / or included in WordPress in the future. Mitesh Ashar suggested better inline debugging tools. He won the first prize – a calculator that runs on water. (You fill up tiny little cells with water – I dunno if it’s hydrogen cell.) I suggested that WordPress should have built-in support for video uploading and embedding. Right now, embedding videos is a convoluted process in WordPress. First you upload the video on some site, then install a plugin which allows you to use WP shortcodes to embed those videos. I suggested that if something like Vimeo (which provides an upload API) could be used then a blogger can upload a video and embed it from within the WordPress interface. I got the second prize for this – one of those mugs which changes colour when you pour hot liquid into it. Which is nice, except for the colour. Mitesh wanted the mug, so we decided to exchange our prizes. Edit: Automattic actually implemented my suggestion! They have recently launched a new upgrade for WordPress.com users called VideoPress. w00t!
Adobe AIR (by Adobe representatives): If found this session interesting* but many others didn’t. I think this is partly because another Tweek-kid was giving a jittery presentation, but the content was good. They spoke about Adobe AIR as a platform.*I wasn’t influenced by the fact that I got a chocolate for answering a question. (“What does ‘AIR’ stand for?”)
Panel discussion on ‘Will blogs replace mainstream media’ (moderated by Rajiv Dhingra of Watblog, NOT; participants were Matt, Om, Madhavan N [Associate Editor, HT], and one other minion editor from Times of India): Quickly turned into an Om vs The Jholawallahs fight, with the ‘mainstream media’ guys so totally not getting the point of blogging. Matt Mullenweg got totally bored and hardly participated in this session; towards the end he couldn’t bear it any more and started signalling to the organizers to end the discussion.
Interactive talk on intellectual property rights and amended IT Act (by Pavan Duggal, one of India’s foremost lawyers on cyber-law): By far the session second-best speaker at WordCamp, after Matt Mullenweg. He was open to questions from the audience and brought up some really interesting questions. He also discussed a few interesting case studies on cyber-law in India.
Me, receiving a Parker pen from Matt which all the speakers got. I forgot to take it back home, but the organizers found it later at the venue. Need to collect it some day.
Soon it was time for goodbyes. The event came to an end with a group photo, and lots of business card / Twitter handle exchanging. It was a real pleasure meeting up with so many bloggers all across India – even more to interact personally with Matt Mullenweg, the guy who started the software project which this blogs runs on (just like millions of other ones in the blogosphere). Amit Agarwal has uploaded a large group photo on Flickr in which practically everyone who was present on day 2 is there (the photo is tagged with names).
