FOSS Meet NITC 2008 Ideas

Most people who come to our event are novices to the field of programming. Mostly they know just a single language(c). They come because either they like the ideology, or just want to understand what the nifty word means. So any event should try as much as possible to assume little of the participant.

1. Gearing participants for Google Summer of Code

Reply to the fossmeet group on how you can help us in doing this.

2. Intro to Bazaar style software development

A complete life cycle of a open source project can be shown.

Setting up the development platform.

SVN workflow, syntax rules, getting the change approved.

A small workshop, where each pariticipant makes a small change to some open sorce project.

3. Encouraging course projects in open source

Btech students usually have a course project(in software engineering, dbms etc), mini project and a main project. We can encourage students to do a contribution to some foss project. But the main trouble is that the student lack knowledge of the development tools, foss projects etc. The event can get them started on the prerequisite knowledge so that they are able to make a good contribution as their project.

4. A workshop on Internet Relay Chat

5. A workshop on Wireshark/Ethereal. Ethereal is by far the best Network Traffic analysis tool in todays scenario. Networking is one domain where FOSS holds a huge edge over most alternatives because of the thriving developer community and free availability of Network Adapter Driver source code. A simple look at an Ethereal dump will impart a whole lot more networking knowledge to a student in a University, than a whole week of studying networking protocols from a textbook.

6. FOSS.NITC website Last two times, we had difficulties in maintaining the server for the website, which used to go down frequently at many crucial times. So, this year, if there is still difficulty to get good server at NITC, it will be a better idea to purchase some webspace for the FOSS.NITC domain (at the earliest)