[fedora-india] Event Report: TechTrix '08

[susmit shannigrahi]

Hi,

As I said on 29th, I had a talking event at a local engineering college.

As the day progressed, excitement grew.

It was morning when the organisers called us up and asked if they
could shift our talk to open stage. They were having space problem :)
No, we said. we are no bollywood stars..are we?


Around 10:30, we assembled. It was around 11:10 when we reached the college.

Upon entering the room we found that there was around ~100 students,
mostly from first and second year. Unfortunately, there was a power
cut as soon as we entered the room and though they had backup and
generators, they were unable to fix it.

Time was running and audience was getting bored, so we decided to
start without the microphone and projector.

First was the talk by Indranil Das Gupta, upon enquiring the audience
let us know, that they have heard of Linux in general, they have no
detailed idea but now that they have an opportunity want to know
specifically what Fedora and Linux was all about.

And there was the HOD of the Computer Sc. who wanted to know more
about Fedora as they were migrating a whole lab to Fedora.

Interestingly, a few students honestly confessed that they were here
because the tech fest was on and they had to come to it anyway. ;)

In the middle of talk, power came back and everything was back to normal.


After that there was my talk[1]. The audience was listening to it
carefully, they asked a few questions, and after the talk a few came
up to me and asked that they have already installed Fedora and they
were having such and such problems. As I didn't have much time, I told
them to follow it up with mail.

The scenario there is not much encouraging, as people never heard of
sourceforge and kernel et. al., but that give us a lot of opportunity
to teach them new things.

What I found, they have a LUG, had an install fest and then they had
no idea how to proceed.
So, I talked to them and asked them to make it a in a workshop format.
Probably, I shall go back there soon. :)


Next, Sayamindu from OLPC spoke, and demoed the sugar desktop, people
was entertained. Unfortunately, time ran out and he had to cut his
speech short. (He did a 2 hour presentation in ~20 minutes :D.)

So that was all about the event.

On our return leg, there was rain, so we had to walk a bit, cross a
bamboo bridge with toll tax....("bamboo bridge with a toll tax") and
went into the china town to have some nice...but that's a different
story. :)

Thanks.




[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Image:Final1.pdf


-- 
Regards,
Susmit.

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