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:
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