On August 20th, 2016, I helped organize the first workshop in my college, Christ University, titled “FOSS and Fedora“. The event was a great success!

Reviving Labyrinth

I have planned to do this for more than two months, but we didn’t have any computer science club in my college. If it was for one event, we could have done it separate, but I wanted to organize multiple workshops (open source, mobile app development, website development, competitions, robotics etc). Thus, we needed a proper platform to easily organize the events without bothering too many people.

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 excluding four to five teachers. The teacher whom we approached to help us in initiating a new club also was not aware of it. After talking to the management, they told us the same thing. Starting a whole new club would take too much time, so we reopened Labyrinth and we had our first workshop in it.

Thanks to mentors and speakers

Before talking about the workshop, I must thank a few people whom without their help, this wouldn’t have been possible.

1. Vinay M.: The professor who has supported us in everything. From the idea to open a new club to organizing this workshop. He has helped us a lot. Thank you, sir!
2. Karthik and Prakash: These are my friends and helped with planning and executing the workshop!
3. Sumantro Mukherjee and Kanika Murarka: For speaking on open source and Fedora!

And last but not the least, all the participants for coming and being a part of the workshop.

Bangalore workshop topics

The workshop mostly covered FOSS and Fedora. For those who don’t know what FOSS is, it stands for free and open source software. We used a panel room to conduct this workshop, which was perfect for around 50-100 participants. The workshop was just for one hour and thirty minutes. I invited Sumantro Mukherjee (my mentor in Red Hat) and Kanika Murarka (Red Hat Intern) as our guest speakers.

They covered the following topics during the time:

1. FOSS and Fedora
   1. What is FOSS?
   2. Why FOSS?
   3. Getting industry-ready
2. Discussions around diversity and contribution spectrum
   1. All FOSS projects are open-sourced: so contribute anywhere
   2. All contributors do not have to code; can be designers or can help in documenting
3. How to start with FOSS
   1. Introduce yourself: let the world know who you are on mailing lists
   2. Every project has identity methods: Fedora has the Fedora Account System (FAS)
   3. What if you run into an issue? Use IRC!
4. Fedora and contribution pathways
   1. start.fedoraproject.org
   2. apps.fedoraproject.org
   3. Fedora Docs
   4. Packaging (and using Bodhi)
   5. Fedora Magazine
   6. Recognition Model: Fedora Badges
5. Creating Accounts (FAS, mailing lists, etc.)
   1. admin.fedoraproject.org
   2. For Fedora QA: all the people redirected to the QA mailing list
   3. Otherwise, shoot a mail to respective mailing list
   4. Freenode IRC webchat

I introduced the club and spoke about its vision. One of our goals is how it can help others be industry-ready. 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 contributions help everyone in the future.

As we had 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 received 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 providing the feedback. In the next workshop, the audience  will learn how they can contribute to big projects on GitHub and how others can contribute on their own with Fedora QA.

Workshop pictures

Here are some more pictures of the workshop!