[Fwd: Re: Anybody from surat?]

["Sankarshan (সঙ্কর্ষণ)"]

binod bhattarai wrote:
> Our team won't only be confined to  awareness only. Awareness is  must.
> You may be surprised to know that less than 5 % students of my college
> use OSS. Engineering has become  so commercial that students don't think
> about anything else except for job. If we could make them aware by
> arranging the talks by expert about OSS, i personally think  that will
> be a great social work. We don't have here authorized place to get DVD
> of newer version of OSS. Downloading from internet is very tedious , so
> people don't show so much interest on it also.

On the premise that you'd be best placed to assess and work out what
will strike a chord with students at your college, I'd not go too far to
write up an agenda for the event for you.

Since less than 5% of your college students use Open Source Software,
the first time you meet with a significant population like that, you'd
like to demonstrate to them where and how Open Source fits into their
daily tasks. There are generally two ways to do this:

[i] have a first meeting that is a discussion of the politics and
economy of Free and Open Source Software

[ii] have a first meeting that is more of a show-n-tell of the actual
software themselves with a set of handouts given which your audience can
take back and read at leisure

You'd be better placed to take a call on what works.

You don't really need to be an 'expert' to talk about Open Source
Software. If you have been doing bits and pieces of it and can share
experiences, your story would resonate more than some outside expert
coming in and telling high level stuff.

These days a large number of the 'computer' magazines (and especially
Linux For You) carry the operating system on the DVDs they ship. If
obtaining them is an issue, it would be good to designate yourself and a
few others as points of contact for your college and receive the first
set of media which you can use to make DVDs for those who request.
Access to the DVD is a barrier to usage and adoption, but handled
smartly it is a problem that can be resolved.

>               Initially our team wants to have talks by expert on it .
> Making them freely available DVD . Convincing them that OSS is no more
> unfriendly. Most of my collegue complains that it is unfriendly. If we
> could make an intiation , i am sure it is going to grow faster.

Like I stated above, most of the 'unfriendly' bits are generated via
perception. Demonstrating that usage of Linux and Open Source Software
isn't taking a leap of faith would be a good start. The NIT-Hamirpur
folks have done it, as have the Durgapur LUG team. All of them are on
this list and on #fedora-india so feel free to adopt the best of the
ideas and adapt them to your needs.

>         I am talking with my friends . I have found many friends are
> interested on it. I am happy  to inform you that i have created Fedora
> server in my Department and providing internet internet accounts to the
> students.

Nice work.

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