It was another lazy Saturday with a rare sight of empty Bangalore roads. This FOSS Wave event in Bangalore had been in planning for almost a month. Finally, here we were on September 10th, 2016 in front of the almost a century old structure of University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering.

Five speakers reached the venue by 9:30am. We were to talk in two different sessions starting from 10:30am until 4:00pm on the following topics.

• FOSS, its philosophy, ethics and importance
• Fedora and contributing to the Fedora Project
• Eminent women in the history of tech and FOSS
• Basics of git and GitHub

Special thanks

Before talking about the event, I would like to thank a few people whose presence made this event a huge success. I would like to thank…

• Prathik and IEEE UVCE: For being wonderful hosts and making sure that the event went ahead smoothly. They put in a lot of hard work.
• Sumantro Mukherjee: A mentor, teacher, friend, critic and leader who has always supported me.
• Vipul Siddharth: A friend who is always with me all the time and has my back.
• Kanika and Sarah: For being such awesome co-speakers.
• All the attendees who came in huge numbers and made this event a grand success.

The event started at 10:45am in the seminar hall of UVCE. The five speakers who talked at the event were (in order) :

1. Vipul Siddharth
2. Sumantro Mukherjee
3. Kanika Murarka
4. Prakash Mishra (Me)
5. Sarah Masud

Introducing FOSS in Bangalore

First, we had Vipul Siddharth, who gave an intriguing on FOSS: its philosophy, ethics, and importance. The talk covered various important aspects of FOSS such as…

1. What is FOSS?
2. Why you should contribute to FOSS?
3. Areas of contribution
4. How and where to get started with FOSS contributions

Introducing the Fedora Project

Coming up next, we had an engaging talk by Sumantro Mukherjee who covered a wide range of topics about the Fedora Project and how to contribute. His talk included…

1. How to start with Fedora contributions
2. Where to contribute? – Testing, Documentation, Packaging, CommOps, etc.
3. Creating a FAS account, joining a mailing list, and how mailing lists work.
4. Using IRC to connect with the community
5. Fedora Apps

Power in numbers

Kanika Murarka took the stage next and delivered a stirring talk on Women in FOSS and technology. She shared her own journey so far with FOSS and what motivated her to take the FOSS way. She also showed how prominent women, time and time again, have gone against all stereotypes and changed the landscape of technology in history and the present alike. Some prominent women that she gave examples of were…

• Lady Ada Lovelace: Regarded as the world’s first programmer
• Grace Hopper: Queen of code
• Jane Silber: Current CEO of Canonical
• Jessica McKellar and Preeti Murthy: Winners of 2016 Women in Open Source award

Kanika Murarka speaks about her experience in FOSS communities and prominent female figures in open source

We dispersed for lunch at 12:20pm and met back for the post-lunch session by 1:30pm.

World of version control

Sarah Masud and I spoke in the post-lunch session about version control systems, git, and GitHub. This also included a hands-on demo of git and how to use it to contribute to a repository on GitHub.  Sarah was a helpful co-speaker who took care of much of the demonstration. Though there were a few technical glitches, she conducted the talk with me and we complemented each other on stage. Our talk covered some basics of git and GitHub such as…

• What is version control?
• Need for a version control system
• Methods of version control
• What is git, who developed it, and why you should use it?
• What is GitHub and why you should use it?
• Setting up and configuring git
• Stages of file tracking
• Creating a new organization and repository on GitHub
• Basic git commands: git status, git clone, git diff, git add, git commit, git push, etc.
• Hosting a static website on GitHub

Later, we had Sumantro on stage again to speak to participants about “forking” a repository on GitHub, pull requests, and how open source contributions to GitHub repositories work, with wonderful examples.

Wrapping up in Bangalore

The response by the audience was wonderful and they listened to the sessions with rapt attention. They also raised a few awesome questions to have their doubts cleared. The organizers, looking at the response, also discussed with us the probability of conducting more such events in the future. If plans go as expected, we might have another workshop again in the succeeding months.

We wrapped up the session by 4:00pm in the evening. This was my first experience as a speaker for FOSS and I look forward to organizing and speaking at many more workshops in the future.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please do mail me on prakashmishra1598 [at] gmail [dot] com.

More pictures

Here are a few more pictures from the workshop.

A GitHub recap session led by Sumantro

Prathik giving a token of gratitude to the team

The whole team: organizers and speakers together