FOSS and Fedora #Labyrinth

Last day (20 August '16), organized the first workshop in my college on topic 'FOSS and Fedora'. It was a great success.

Shivam with 'Fedora Badge'

I have been planning to do this for more than 2 months but we didn't have any Computer Science club in my college. If it was just for one event, we could have done it directly but I wanted to organize multiple workshops (Open-Source, App development, Website making, Competitions, Robotics etc) and thus we needed a proper platform where we could easily organize the events without bothering too many people. So I put the idea to open a club and inaugurate it. Later we came to know that there was already an existing club named Labyrinth. This club was inactive for more than 18 months. No one was aware of it, except 4-5 teachers. The teacher whom we approached to help us in initiating a new club, even he had no idea about it. After talking to the management, he let us know the same. Starting a whole new club would have taken too much time, so we reopened Labyrinth and yesterday we had our first workshop in it.

Poster for workshop

Before talking about the workshop, I must thank few people without whom this wouldn't have been possible.
1. Vinay M: He is the professor who has been supporting us in everything. From the idea to open a new club to organizing the mentioned workshop. He has helped us a lot. Thank you, sir!
2. Karthik and Prakash: These are my friends and were there all the time with me.
3. Sumantro Mukherjee and Kanika Murarka: For giving a talk on the topic.
and last but not the least, all the participants for coming and being a part of it.

So, FOSS and Fedora! For those who don't know what FOSS is, it stands for Free and Open Source software (Please search for it and read about it). We got a Panel room to conduct this workshop which was perfect for organizing a workshop with 50-100 participants. The workshop was just for 1 hour and 30 minutes. I invited Sumantro Mukherjee (My mentor in Red Hat) and Kanika Murarka (Red hat Intern) to give a talk.

Sumantro covered the following topics during the time.
1. FOSS and Feodora.
1.1 What is FOSS?
1.2 Why FOSS?
1.3 Getting Industry ready.
2.Discussions around the diversity and contribution spectrum.
2.1 All Foss projects are open sourced so contribute anywhere.
2.2 All contributors need not code, can be designers or can help in documenting.
3.How to start with FOS
3.1 Introduce yourself: let the world know who you are: Mailinglist
3.2 Every project has identity: Fedora has FAS
3.3 What if you run into an issue, IRC!
4.Fedora and contribution pathways
4.1 start.fedoraproject.org
4.2 https://apps.fedoraproject.org/
4.3 Fedora Docs
4.4 Packaging[Bodhi]
4.5 Magazine
4.6 Recognition Model : Badges
5.Creating Accounts (FAS,mailing list)
5.1 admin.fedoraproject.org
5.2 if its Fedora QA, all the people to be redirected to ML.
5.2 if it's not FedQA,shoot a mail to respective mailing list
5.3 Freenode IRC web [https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels#fedora-qa]

Sumantro speaking about FOSS

Kanika talked about the importance of Women in FOSS.

Kanika talking about women in FOSS

I introduced the Club and spoke about its vision and how it can help others to be industry ready. Then I talked about my journey in FOSS and how I started to contribute to Fedora. Very briefly, I talked about the things I do in Red Hat and how contribution can help everyone in future.

Me introducing and explaining Labyrinth.

As we had very little time to introduce a big topic, we kept things brief.
We realized that people are more interested in getting hands-on experience than sitting and listening to some person speaking about their future.
We got some very good responses from the participants and I have already received a dozen of suggestion emails. Thank you, for being there, being a part of this club and the feedbacks. Looking at their interests, Most probably, next workshop will be on Git. By the end of next workshop, everyone should be able to host their own website on GitHub. They shall also learn how can they contribute to big projects on GitHub and how others can contribute in theirs.
I am really looking forward to organizing next workshop.

I am always open for feedbacks and suggestions.

Email me on siddharthvipul1@gmail.com

Thank-you :)

Here are some more pictures of the workshop.