[Fsf-friends] FSFI@LA2006 - Participation Report

Amol Hatwar amol@[EMAIL-PROTECTED]
Wed Feb 15 03:28:29 IST 2006


Disclaimer: These are my opinions and doesn't reflect that of FSF in
particular. Also, this was my first time at Linux Asia 2006, so I am not
aware of tradition and expectations towards the event.

Thanks to the good people at FSF, Kerala, we got handouts for SPACE and
FSF in time (one day before the show). The SPACE handouts are all out,
the FSF one's are still remaining. Sameer had gotten the posters and
stickers printed well in advance. There were plans about T-shirts and
CDs... but they remained plans. Well, next time.

FSF India had 2mx2m space in the Org mela. The Org mela itself was
unconveniently located at an unsheltered area; well away from where
the main events were taking place. However, as early birds on Feb 8,
we got ourselves a stall that was very visible from the entrance. This
had its own benefits... Quite a few people, three to be precise, asked
me whether the Org mela was a part of the main event.

Besides that, our stall was an easy target for freebie mongers. There
was a small card that was circulated with stall numbers on it. Get it
signed/stamped at at least 15 stalls and get a freebie. Guess what?
Stalls in the Org mela had no stall numbers at all! They weren't fetured
on the stall directory or the stall map.

General visitors to the stall included young students who wanted to do
something on Linux but had no idea what; and middle-aged to old managers
who knew that Linux runs somewhere in their organization but no idea of
exactly where. I'd say 95% of people that came fell into these
categories easily. People who knew about FSF was quite surprised to find
an FSF stall. These guys got the GNU sticker.

The rest 5% were uber-clever people from the Fedora stall... with the
general opinion that FSF is all advocacy, and that we should do some
projects for community benefit. They were right, but had no reason to
cry about it. There is still quite a lot of confusion around. I'll
clear it for one last time: FSF _IS_ advocacy. And yeah, we do
projects... please head to http://gnu.org.

Rahul Sundaram (Fedora) in particular gave a good suggestion of
keeping a list of ongoing projects on a very visible URLs where people
can get engaged. Someone (sorry I don't remember who) said that we
should keep printed manuals for sale.

I guess we were quite succesful in showing the 95% of the audience the
differences between Open Source and Free Software. It was a good
opportunity to tell how the GPL works, why there so few software
companies for India's one billion+ population and how a few people got
filthy rich. As far as fellowship and donations go, two people wanted
to hand over cash... we asked them to go the URL at http://fsf.org.in/
instead. Cash corrupts!

The FSF stall had quite a lot of people behind it: Sameer Ingole
(_strike_), Vinod Ganjre, Bir Chandra Sanasam and Milind
Paralkar. These guys stuck to stall even after being sponsored to
attend the Tech Talks at the event. A special mention goes to Nikhil
Prabhakar (nipra). He took a lot of effort to start the show early in
the morning.

However, there were a few times when the stall did get left
unattended: lunch and private sessions with the Gurus (Knopper and
Shuttleworth) with the rest of the guys from ILUG-Delhi.

We were expecting Bhaisampayan to come and talk on Django. His last
minute ditch wasn't going to go down well. Ramki and I made sure that
Indranil Das Gupta utilized that space and gave a talk on the Free
Software Philosophy. Unfortunately, I got stuck in traffic and
couldn't attend the talk personally, but people spoke highly of
it. Indranil and Ramki deserve kudos for being available at the last
moment and saving the day.

I was expecting to talk on Free Software in Education. Things turned bad
at the last moment... made a presentation in distress and tight
schedule... got no intimation of when and where the talk will be held...
concluded no talk better than a bad talk... shelved the talk.

Due to the event's extreme commerical nature I had a set kind of quality
expectations in my mind. Many people (including me) felt it was a let
down. It probably didn't get the audience for the hype. If there was
any, only a few came down to the Org mela.

Still, I'd say it was worth the effort as what the FSF and we had to
say did change quite a few opinions. Also most of the 95% had a
misconception of Free in Free Software equals Free Beer. Some had used
GNU/Linux without knowing a thing about GNU or FSF for that matter. So
our, handouts, discussions and talks did have a shattering
effect. From my personal experience, this is a good thing. A
paradigm-shift in one persons thinking goes on to affect at least 10
more people.

With this, I'll repeat Dr Nagarjuna's words: "We'll go wherever we get
a chance to tell people about our efforts". Our participation in the
event wouldn't have been possible without his encouragement at the
right time. Further, we should always keep events like FOSS.IN, GNUnify
and Linux Asia 2006 in our radar and participate regularly with even
better planning and preparation.

Stall Pictures (thanks to Karunakar):
0. http://www.cartoonsoft.com/gallery/linuxasia06/271_7153 (Org Mela
Area)
1. http://www.cartoonsoft.com/gallery/linuxasia06/271_7156 (FSF Stall -
Bir and Vinod)
2. http://www.cartoonsoft.com/gallery/linuxasia06/272_7273 (Me, Sameer,
Vinod and Milind)

Warm regards,

ah




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