I’m really excited today ! This is because, I had just attended my first Software Freedom Day Celebration at Chennai. Here I am, to tell you the story of how it went, my experiences and meetings with the local biggies and my thoughts about the first FOSS event I had participated in !
The Software Freedom Day – Chennai chapter was organized by the Indian Linux Users’ Group – Chennai Wing at the Madras Institute of Technology Campus, Chrompet and I had been there to represent Mozilla India along with Arun Prakash and Harvish Sekar, both of them being Open Source enthusiasts. Well, back in the morning, we had been one among the first to reach the college and we got a chance to look around it. We were guided by the personnel inside to the SFD Venue – MIT Aircraft Hanger. There were some odd twenty other stalls who were already preparing for the event. Others who had come for the event were, python, LibreOffice, GIThub, spoken-tutorials.org, etc.
Honestly, I had no great or big ideas on how to proceed with the event. After all, it was my first event and I was getting kind of nervous about my participation for the reason that I was informed, we would be hearing some of the big names in the FOSS circles later the day. All I had in mind was, “I shouldn’t mess it up”. But, trust me, the moment we introduced ourselves that we are from Mozilla, we were treated so nicely. The event co-ordinator stood up, shook hands with us and was there with us all along, to help sort out things. He even asked if we were comfortable and things like that. He expressed his happiness over Mozilla’s participation for event.
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Over the years, Mozilla has carved a nichè for itself in the world of Open Source. Remember that, it has brought in so much for free software and open source, that telling others that you are a part of it, brings you so much pride. It makes them look at you with so much dignity and respect. I realized this face to face during the event. But, it’s not just about boasting ourselves to be a part of Mozilla that is great. It is the contentment and satisfaction that you get on contributing something to the people, for their good and living that makes you happy, by being a member of such organizations.
So, we had got our slides prepared the event and had brought with us a laptop. We didn’t have the swag shipped in time. May be because, we had requested only a couple of weeks back. So, we didn’t have much to do there, but to speak. The slides titled “Mozilla and Software Freedom” – contained notes on how Mozilla had come up, what it is trying to convey, on how it has been actively involved in various projects worldwide and on how people could contribute – A general presentation to give a brief idea about the Mozilla’s Mission.
Check for the Slides here :
One by one, people had come up to listen to what we had to say. We weren’t going much technical into the details of Firefox, Thunderbird and other products as such, unless asked for from the slide. Here and there, we were throwing bits and pieces of information, facts and figures, like, “hey, do you know that Mozilla was one among the first to introduce tabbed browsing ?”. Things like that had really kept them kind of engrossed. In between, they had few questions to ask and thankfully, we knew the answers to them. lol :D Some key people who visited our stall during the day were, Mr. Manivannan, the editor of howopensource.com, Mr. Shrinivasan, the ILUGC founder himself, people from HCL Technologies to name a few. We got chance to meet people from Tamil Wikipedia Project and Mr. Arun SAG from fedoraproject.org. We also had college students coming in to listen about Mozilla.
One thing that I had noticed with all of them was they were very excited and kicked about drumbeat and WebFWD. Some had asked me to repeat, few had asked some doubts and a little number of them had even promised me that they would apply for the event. Hope they get selected ! God Bless !
We were asked to wind up at around half past four the evening that day and had a general discussion on the day’s proceedings. Though, we didn’t have as much crowd for the event as anticipated, the people we saw were enthusiastic.
Mozilla Wins Best Stall Award
This had come up as a mixture of both shock and surprise to us. Before we proceeded to leave, we were announced that ILUGC was giving away prizes for the best stall of the day. We knew we did well, although never thought that we did so well to get a prize. But we were one among the top three to get a prize for the best stall of the day. I had been very happy with that.
And hey, one final word - My description and presentation of the event to you as a whole might be a little unorthodox in the manner and in the way I put. Nevertheless, IMHO this would appeal to most of you and would help me reach all of you much better.
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