OSScamp Delhi March 2009 came to a successful closure this Sunday with a total participation of 76 campers from in and around NCR. This camp was a little different from all its predeccesors on a number of factors.
Firstly, only 11 sessions took place on the span of two days as opposed to the 20+ sessions of the past camps. While this, in some ways, reflected as poor quality of event, it encouraged people to make better utilisation of time by participating into a number of informal discussions (something that I call Social Sandbox). The lack of sessions, to an extent was intended, as a lot of emphasis was on encouraging people to come together. A talk-oriented unconference is only a step away from a typical conference, which is something we worked to avoid. Though, we would have loved to have more sessions.
The sessions that took place included: an Introduction to BackTrack by Rohit Srivastwa, Kerberos by Jegnesh, 3D Scientific Visualization using MayaVi and Mlab by Suyog Jain, CSS: In and out by Manu Goel, How do companies leverage on open source (an informal discussion based on the primary research conducted by Swanand Deodhar), The Semantics Web by Prateek Saxena, Ignite Talks – Can you? By Rohit Lodha, R: Open Source Statistical Package by Swanand Deodhar, SLIME: Why is it the IDE of choice for LISP by Chaitanya Gupta, Social Sandbox – an Ignite Talk by Kinshuk Sunil, and Code Revision with Git by Pratul Kalia and Prateek Saxena.
Secondly, the participation from Delhi was only 40%. Major chunk of OSScamp Delhi was from outside Delhi. This is, both, encouraging and alarming. Encouraging as OSScamp Delhi (the only OSScamp in North India, as of now) is growing into a premier event where people are converging from at least Northern India. It is, however, alarming as the Delhi community is getting dormant (don't forget that the total particpation was only 76). Although this may change with the organization of OSScamp Kanpur and OSScamp Ghaziabad (yeah! They are now in the works).
Thirdly, The composition of particpants also shows a drastic change. 30% were students, 20% Developers, 10% Bloggers, another 10% Entreprenuers, another 20% comprised of a numbr of roles that were non-technical. This is different fromw hat teh camp used to be. Primarily a Develoeprs and Stduents haven.
The event was wholly sponsored and promted by OSSCube and actively promoted by YourStory, Delhi Live, IndiBloggers, and Linux For You. The venue for the event was provided for by LUG@IITD. We, at OSSCube, have always believed in encouraging local communities and have helped them through promotion and participation. OSScamps always keep us focussed and on our toes with the latest in technology. I would encourage fellow team members to take active participation in future OSScamps.
See some pictures from the camp at our Flickr page. Read more about the camp at OSScamp.in
All in all, OSScamp Delhi was another fun event making further strides in the OSScamp series of unconferences. It is not for nothing that we are the largest unconference on open source.
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