Hear all! Freed.in, an conference on free and open source software will be taking place at Jawaharlal Nehru University on 20-21 February 2009. Now I know what the first question everyone wants to ask is – “Will there be free WiFi?”. From what I hear, we will have that. Can’t think of a conference on FOSS without that. Have a look at the sessions which are scheduled and register yourself as a participant. Participation is free of course. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend day 2 because I’ll be attending WordCamp.
The event was at Indian Social Institute, Lodi Road. (No, you aren’t the first guy to say “What Where the fuck?!” on hearing this.) Without a hot-or-cold GPS navigation system I had to resort to calling people up to find where it was. The only thing that I could positively make out was that it was somewhere near India Habitat Centre, but that still does leave an effing large area to cover. Dilliwallahs habit of saying “Seedha jaake left” for the directions to any bloody place you ask for makes your blood boil rather than providing guidance. After a lot of running around in circles I did reach the venue…to find a few bored people sitting in the same room and Twittering with each other. I joined in (Twittering) with great gusto and scaring my followers that I had Twitterhea.
Seth Bindernagel and Arun Ranganathan were supposed to turn up later, so the discussion fluctuated to every topic under the sun. Someone started talking about large font sizes (in images, I might add) as the defining moment of Web 2.0. That should give an idea of how lame the morning sessions were. We had some interesting free-ranging discussions on Twitter (as in about Twitter) and social media in general. I was shocked to find that the organizers hadn’t arranged for a lava pit so that we could round up a few Internet Exploder users, beat them about a bit (though not very much) and then throw them into lava to let The Cleansing begin. (Even the tagline ‘Taking the Web back one user at a time’ is astonishingly appropriate for The Cleansing.)
The Pit
Seriously, next time, we need to budget for the Airport Hilton. Nothing kicks an conference into high gear other than good ol’ fashion mob beatings. Anyway, the morning session was also spent in making new friends like Kumar Gautam, Sayantan Pal (of Linux For You) and Mohak Prince. We broke for lunch soon at the ISI cafeteria where I got to eat pieces of charcoal under the guise of a ‘burger’. Discussions here were about a) Macs and Why They SUCK – a Me vs Them debate; b) Shiretoko (not a variety of Japanese pr0n); c) nothing else. Also recorded videotestimonials (but had to leave before I could collect my kewl T-shirt).
Official badge
Seth and Arun arrived around 2.30 pm for their sessions. Arun (with his fiery jacket, sorry for the pun) very much looking like one of those guys you see on AXN shows who jump over 27 dumpster trucks ‘for entertainment’ on a lazy afternoon. A Skype conference was initiated with Pascal Finette, but I got to see only a small part of it. Most of that ‘small part’ involved setting up the Skype conference. I had to leave for the Power of Ideas panel discussion for which I had been invited by Economic Times. (That’s a story for another day.) I didn’t want to leave MozillaCamp right when actual discussion were taking place – but I had to. (You’ll get to know the reason in my Power of Ideas post.)
Mosey along now. No more content to write about the interesting bits of MozillaCamp.
PS – Are the presentations which Arun / Seth made available online on Slideshare / Google Docs / anywhere? I’d love to see them, so would many other Firefox fans.
PPPS – Whoops! Those stickers are actually from Mozilla, and not Pringoo! Only ONE sticker – the big MozillaCamp Delhi one – is from Pringoo. The ones from Mozilla, of course, are the awesome ones I was talking about.
