On 18 October 2016, we organized a workshop at the CMR Institute of Technology in Bengaluru, India. In the workshop, we covered topics of free and open source software (FOSS), Fedora, and git. 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

• Anirban Ghosh and Arun Teja for organizing the event at CMR IT.
• All the attendees who came in a huge number and made this event a grand success.
• Sumantro Mukherjee for being an amazing mentor and guiding us through the event.

Getting started in Bengaluru

The event started at 1:00pm in the mini auditorium of the institute. We had four speakers who talked at the event.

1. Vipul Siddharth (me)
2. Kanika Murarka
3. Prakash Mishra
4. Sumantro Mukherjee

Introducing FOSS and its importance

I started my talk with discussing FOSS, its philosophy, ethics, and importance. The talk covered various important aspects of FOSS such as…

1. What is FOSS?
2. How FOSS works
3. Why should you contribute to FOSS?
4. Areas of contribution
5. How and where to get started with project-based contribution

Introducing the Fedora Project

Coming up next, we had an intriguing talk by Prakash Mishra, 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? Fedora QA, 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

Women in open source and design principles

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 an open source 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.

Then she explained how one can contribute in non-technical parts of projects as well as design principles.

Git and virtual reality (VR)

In the end, we had Sumantro Mukherjee give a talk on 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. The 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 the 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
  • Hosting a static website on GitHub
• Basic git commands: git status, git clone, git diff, git add, git commit, git push, etc.
• How open source contribution to GitHub repositories works
  • Forking a repository and the concept of “pull requests”
• How web VR works

Wrapping up

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 succeeding months.

We wrapped up the session by 5:00pm in the evening.