2. Opportunity Open Source in the IIT Kanpur in India

Events
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After a successful OpportunityOpenSource last year in the IIT Mandi in India (I got 11 GSoC contributors this year!) we are doing another one!

On August 24-26 in the IIT Kanpur in India there will be the second Opportunity Open Source!

Be a part of it!

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Are you astonished by what one can accomplish with free and open-source software? Are you amazed by what open-source communities put together with great enthusiasm? Would you like to know how this all relates to our daily life?

Would you also like to become one of these individuals? Are you interested in coding for one of the many great free software projects? Applications? Desktop environments? System components? Cloud? IoT? OS Distribution integration? Immutable OS distribution?

But also as non-programmer you are highly welcome for documentation, design, web, community, …

And all this does not only give you the good feeling of helping in the community and making free software better, it also raises you chances on the job market, mentioning your contributions and accomplishments in your resume, especially for the numerous positions in the area of open source …

So come and join us! In this conference you will learn a lot, about projects, coding, documentation, … On Saturday and Sunday there will be talks, panels, Q&A, interactive workshops, demos, … and lots of great hallway sessions … And on Monday (class-free in IIT Kanpur) there will be hackatons …

We will cover many great topics (more to come):

  • OpenPrinting: Responsible for printing in Linux, Unix and similar (POSIX-style) operating systems.
  • Zephyr: Lightweight Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) for IoT, For low-resource hardware (like micro controllers) for which Linux is to large
  • Immutable distributions and sandboxed packaging: Snap, Ubuntu Core Desktop, blendOS, …
  • Google Summer of Code: Work up to 3 months full-time on a free software project with a stipend from Google and mentored by the project’s developers
  • Open Documentation Academy: Not a coder? Like to write? Canonical’s documentation team and several free software organizations will mentor you on a wide range of documentation tasks.
  • Working at Canonical: Having completed you course you want to have a great open-source-related job at a leading employer?

The actual subject matters also depend on the submissions we get on our Call for Proposals. We are eager to see your amazing ideas! Note that you cannot only submit talks and workshops here, but also ideas for demos, hackathons, and evening events. Your submissions will make up the conference.

We are also on Mastodon: #OpportunityOpenSource Follow this hashtag to stay imformed!

The Call for Proposals is open, until July 22.

We hope to see you all in Kanpur!

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Update for the Call for Proposals: I have added 2 new tracks:

  • Security
  • Artifical Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science

Join us in Kanpur and submit your amazing talks and workshops!

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We have an official web site now:

https://oosc-next.vercel.app/

and please submit your amazing talks, panels, workshops, and hackathons in our CfP! Until July 22.

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The Opportunity Open Source conferences are organized in universities in India, to show students (and also professors and researchers) the world of free/open source software and how to get involved and contribute to it.

I participate with OpenPrinting in the GSoC since 2008 and in 2015 I met Aveek Basu who worked at Lexmark in India that time when he joined OpenPrinting. He reached out to leading Indian universities (mainly IIT - Indian Institute of Technology) to find students as GSoC contributors for us, especially important as printing is not a very attractive subject matter, and by that we had something like 4-6 GSoC contributors each year.

As most of our contributors happen to come from the IIT Mandi, Aveek did a one-afternoon meet-up in the IIT Mandi in 2019, to show off OpenPrinting and attract students by that. In 2023, we thought about to do such a meet-up again, but with Aveek having also gotten ambassador for Zephyr and me having gotten a Snap enthusiast we decided to not only present OpenPrinting but do a little conference, by ourselves already covering OpenPrintig, Zephyr, Snap, GSoC and opening a CfP for further topics. So we had run the first Opportunity Open Source in the IIT Mandi last year, one and a half days, 2 tracks on half a day, also 2 workshops, a panel (“Work at Canonical”), and several talks.

First Opportunity Open Source in the IIT Mandi

It was successful, especially also for OpenPrinting, as in 2024 we have 11 contributors, most from IIT Mandi.

11 GSoC 2024 contributors for OpenPrinting!

This made us discussing a second edition, and the folks of IIT Kanpur showed themselves very enthusiastic, so that we ended up selecting the IIT Kanpur as the location for the Opportunity Open Source 2.0:

Second Opportunity Open Source? - Brainstorming
Opportunity Open Source 2.0 in the IIT Kanpur - Announced on OpenPrinting
IIT Kanpur Announcement
Hindustan Times

Canonical (exactly, the Community Team, thanks a lot!) gave me, as last year, an Indico site for the conference and StreamYard for recording, live-streaming, and remote speaking. I filled the indico site with everything needed, description of the event, where it happens, how to get there, … Call for Proposals (CfP) with all instructions, descriptions of track, session types, …

Event site on Canonical’s Indico
Principal event site, made by IIT Kanpur students

Only there were not many proposals coming together to fill the 2 intended rooms, plenary room and workshop room, so Aveek put up a list with all his contacts and the folks from IIT Kanpur e-mailed all these people, inviting them to give a talk or workshop and quickly we got so many submissions that we had to add a third room, also for talks, the breakout room. So we got more than 50 sessions in 3 rooms, 9 of them being workshops.

Opportunity Open Source IIT Kanpur - Schedules announced on OpenPrinting
The schedules, more than 50 sessions in 3 rooms!

Then I had to send many e-mails to the speakers, especially instructions how to give a good workshop, asking them to upload profile photos so that their faces appear in the talk announcements, asking who stays in a hotel and does not need a guest house room, …

And I also had to put together the schedules: Most interesting into plenary room, remote speakers preferably into breakout room, talks with same subject matter as a workshop before the workshop, and then people tell they only come on day X and need their talk to be on day X, and remote speakers from western countries need their talk in the Indian afternoon so that they do not need to speak in the middle of the night … And many late submissions after the CfP deadline, sponsor’s talks, … But I succeeded with this puzzle game …

Students at IIT Kanpur did the on-location organization, getting conference rooms, accommodation for speakers and participants, nice posters to advertise the event on the campus, web site design, and a great conference dinner for speakers and attendees to meet and network, … and to be able to do this, local start-ups as sponsors, raising ~10000 USD. They did really excellent work! Thanks a lot to them.

Report in OpenPrinting News August
Report by Tushar Gupta (@tushar5526 )

On LinkedIn:

Announcement of the event

Report by Aveek Basu

Report from speaker and former OpenPrinting GSoC contributor Sahil Arora

Report by Aditya Nigam
Report by Aditya Narayan
Report by Abhipsa Nayak
Report by Mayank Porwal
Report by Apurv Gupta
Report by Kaushal Sharma
Report by Garvit Bhardwaj

Report by Garvit Bhardwaj about the Hackathon

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Recordings

The recordings are not edited and it is possible that on some there is a bad audio quality.

Also note that the closing plenary has taken place in the breakout room and not in the plenary room.

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Pictures

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