FOSS.in is back and it is bigger than ever, stretching for five full days from tuesday to saturday (04-Dec to 08). But as I said last year, there are sort-of miniconfs this year. Instead of doing ordinary mini-conf style, this one is going to be project specific rather than topic-specific. This works out nicely for the big projects to get a little momentum going, but might be slightly bad for the small projects or platform coders (like me). I guess that's a chicken & egg problem which a conference cannot solve by itself.
Since my previous post was about freed.in, I think there's something that needs to be said. While I was at OSCON, trying to convince people to submit talks to foss.in, I was asked an interesting question.
Not enough speakers ?: Sure, India does have enough qualified speakers to run a 5 day conference with the people we have. But foss.in, IMHO, has the resources to actually bring some really interesting people to India. Somehow the assumption that bringing in foreign speakers is an admission of weakness has to be debunked. I consider the fact that the conference can afford that as a strength. Actually being able to be in ad-hoc discussions with these folks itself brings about interesting results. No, I'm not talking about b-school style "networking". I'm talking about ideas getting thrown around, bounced off and suggestions being made by a group who probably would not have met if not for the conference. After all, the aim is to encourage communication, collaboration and contribution from India - not to merely showcase last year's work.
The new avatar of the conference itself has some modifications. The conference dinner is one of the things which has been borrowed from some of the more successful conferences. You can read the full announcement for more details.
--You're not an alcoholic unless you go to AA meetings.
posted at: 03:53 | path: /conferences | permalink |