FOSS Wave arrives at another destination! On 24th September 2016, we conducted an event at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore, India. The event was a joint effort of Mozilla Indore community and FOSS Wave.

The main agenda of our event was:

  • Introduction to open source
  • Web development
  • Internet of Things (IoT)
  • Web-powered Virtual Reality (Web VR)

Introducing open source in Indore

The event started by highlighting the term “FOSS”, or “free and open source software“. We talked about what open source is, why is it important, and how to get started with it. A brief discussion took place on open source projects. Soon after an interactive session, we started with a short discussion on community-building practices by Pushpita Dey (Mozilla).

Web development

After a fruitful brainstorming on open source communities, we followed with a session on web development. Kanika Murarka delivered the session explaining the role of browsers, what their purposes are, and how they work. She then explained the basics of web technologies like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Since most of the students were in their first year of classes, we also gave demos and hands-on workshops.

Kanika Murarka delivers a session on web development technologies and how to get started working with them in Indore, India

Kanika Murarka delivers a session on web development technologies and how to get started working with them

Internet of Things

Next, Sumantro Mukherjee stepped on stage to enlighten the crowd about the Internet of Things (IoT).

He gave a summary of ultramodern technology—connected devices—and their role in the growing world. GitHub was something out of the agenda, but since we wanted students to understand how they can collaboratively build and contribute to projects, a short hands-on was given on git. We talked about how students can commit code and do basic git operations.

Sumantro Mukherjee explains broad concepts about the Internet of Things and also a basic introduction to using git in Indore, India

Sumantro Mukherjee explains broad concepts about the Internet of Things and a basic introduction to using git

After the basic architecture of the IoT, we jumped into writing small API functions. We made our way to controlling a LED attached to a particular PIN number on an Arduino. For ease of understanding, we made sure that the code and the step-by-step process were clearly documented. He also explained the physical architecture of Arduinos and Raspberry Pis as open hardware devices.

Web-powered virtual reality

The next session was on Web VR, taken up by Shubham Geete (Mozilla). He talked about how people can create VR content on the web using A-frame. Students were amazed to see the power of three.js and WebGL. He also talked about various open source projects working on Web VR and how one can start contributing to them.

You can watch a recording of his session on YouTube.

Closing out in Indore

The event ended with the launch of a Mozilla Club at IIT, Indore. Students showed great participation and enthusiasm for open source and were looking forward to evolve as great open source contributors. We distributed swag and had one-to-one sessions where students discussed their ideas and shared technologies they want help to explore.

Closing out with one of the final sessions on Web VR in Indore, India

Closing out with one of the final sessions on Web VR

We would like to thank Mrinal Jain (Mozilla Rep), IIT, the Indore tech club and management, and the Mozilla community for their help in conducting this event.