FOSSकृति - Call for Participation

fosskriti@techkriti.org

Introduction

FOSSkriti [1] is a mini-conference aimed at students in India with the aim of making open source software,open standards more popular. It also hopes to serve as a meeting place for young developers of open source software among the students in the country with representatives of open source projects.

Format

FOSSKriti spans the four days of Techkriti [2] , the science and technology festival of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K). It consists of talks, BoF sessions, workshops, hackfests and more, with enough variety to suit the initiate and veteran alike. In addition, we have stalls for promotion of various projects and FOSS in general, which are open throughout the conference (as long as there are people there to man them).

Last year we focused on FOSS on the desktop - Desktop Environments, writing applications for the desktop, etc. This year our focus is on the "Open Web". Anything from web frameworks and browsers, to server setup and management, network security and web standards (and by extension, most open standards) is fair game.

-Workshops

Workshops are 2 - 3 hour developer led sessions which introduce web technologies with a considerable hands-on component to it. For the most part, workshops will be held in institute computer labs with about 40 or 50 computers.

A proposal for a Workshop must contain the following information:

Purpose of the workshop
Outline of what will be done at the workshop
Software required on the machines
Pre-requisites for participants, such as:

Technologies the participant must be familiar with
Tools required

-Talks

Talks in FOSSkriti can be either technical or nontechnical in nature with a focus on the open web. Talks are expected to last 45-60 minutes and are held in lecture halls. The level of the talk can range from the very basic and general to the more specific, requiring moderate previous experience to understand. We plan to have around 1-2 talks per day during FOSSkriti. Technical talks may showcase a web technology, software, or industry best practices. Alternatively, it can compare different technologies. Comparisons must be objective, though - talks that are just about bashing competitors are not what we are looking for.

Talk proposals must have the following information:

Abstract
Intended audience, and prerequisites

-BoFs

A Birds of a Feather session is an informal meet-up at conferences, where attendees group together based on a shared interest and carry out discussions without a pre-planned agenda. There is no strict protocol, and there is no clear center of discussion -- everyone takes part in whatever way they want to. In general, a BoF would either be for a large open source project or for something common to a number of projects, such as open standards or best practices.

-HackFests

HackFests usually start late in the evening, and are events where people can code/debug/localize into the night on the codebase of one of the projects that will be represented at FOSSkriti. Due to the predominantly novice level of Techkriti participants, we would prefer that the project has a reasonable (as in, not too high) entry barrier as well as something that will scale easily to more experienced participants. It is also preferable that at least one core developer from the project be present to help the participants.

Speakers and Workshop/Hackfest/BoF Leads do not need to pay any registration fee, and accommodation will be provided on campus. Domestic travel sponsorship will be provided if required. Due to limited resources we are unable to provide financial support for international travel.