Acedip

Chill in the air, a foggy morning, dew drops sparkling on flower petals, asking for anything more from a morning would only be greed i my opinion. And that was the kind of morning when I started out from my home to awakening the mortals in my college, and the event was aptly named JAGRITI ( जाग्रति ), which means awakening in sanskrit, and that is exactly what I had intended to do.

lab ready with fedora machines

And soon enough I was waiting for all lug-jaipur members to arrive and help me in the workshop, infact more than just helping me, speak at the workshop. We had intended to take the workshop for teachers but were also given the permission to take a workshop for students as well. so we have invited steve to take teacher’s workshop and jai, udit and pranav to help us with students one, along with out college gang comprising of mukul, anuj and some juniors which to my surprise were very interested. And everyone seemed to have arrived at almost the right and steve started his session at the lab running over 30 fedora machines. And he soon started his session on linux basics, making them feel at home on fedora so that those teachers can in return go and do the same to their students, atleast that was is our plan, thankful to our comp science HOD he made it mandatory for all teachers to make their students work on open source technologies, which eventually brought us in.

steve talking to teachers and teaches listening intently

So after leaving steve with teachers I went to see start the students session. And I was amazed at the seminar hall we were given, I had seen it for the first time in my college and it was awesome, with 2 screens and a seating capacity of over 300 students, and fully air conditioned, it surely felt so good to even get onto that stage and talk.

So pranav started talking about a little introduction to foss and then I took a few more minutes asking for some queries and talking a little bit more about foss and in general why linux. And we soon went to jai to talk about web development. Which seemed like an interesting topic for students and they thoroughly enjoyed getting to know intricacies of web, which they were all new to.

A view of the students seminar

I could now leave the seminar hall to fellow hackers and see what is happening around and also talk to nandeep who had just arrived, and was being told the interesting things sarai is doing and there are some possibilities of sarai working with some colleges in jaipur to spread foss. After an hour of talk we moved onto the snacks, and there again, my college surprised me and swept me off my feet. Or it can be that, this is the first time I have organized/done something in my college that I came to know that my college can be a very wonderful host to its visitors. Steve had also come there on a break from his teachers workshop and the response was quite good, some of them were really interested to know what he was talking about. While we were having snacks students had already started moving out, partly because, audience always decreases after the first talk and only the interested ones are left, so its kind of good for the organisers. And udit sharma was sent to hold the crowd in place with his expected to be mesmerizing talk on drupal and advance web technologies (but it proved otherwise ). Well so now we were only left with people who were interested in learning.It seemed they were so interested that some of the guys ended up on stage taking drupal setup from udit and udit soon got swamped by the crowd. So we had to step in between and take the control and move the house back in rest.

Though we had planned for a BoF session, but it dint come out as one instead jai ended up going on stage and talking about stuff from mailing lists, IRC and we also showed them how to get there, community contribution etc etc. And more over I was amazed to see such a wonderful seminar hall in my college.

The whole session was so good and interactive that all of us lost track of time and we had far exceeded our limits but the audience was still in place and wanted us to carry on, but after promising them that we will return soon with more interesting things we parted.

To call it a day, we sat in college lawns to reflect on the day, Also discussed plans for the sarai workshop at MNIT on 14th and 15th, though its already done now and was a success too.

So it seems like lug-jaipur is out again in the socially active world and a spree of workshops to welcome its coming back.Will soon write about the MNIT workshops and the first full-day out with lug members, doing loads of stuff.