My experience in IndiaFOSS 3.0

Hello everybody :) I am writing after a long break as I felt high on energy and had a compelling story about my experience attending IndiaFOSS 3.0 by FOSSUnited. It's a flagship 2-day conference for encouraging FOSS users and developers nationwide. I am glad I didn't miss attending the conference and moderating the panel discussion on the topic `Women in FOSS`.

About my panel discussion

The panel discussion I moderated included Dr. Preethi Saryan Chief Scientist @SoftCircuits, Priyanka Nahata Architect @Flipkart, and Vindhya Shanmugam Director of Engineering @Myntra. Meeting such long-term passionate women in STEM and hearing their stories was inspiring. I asked questions on the part where I struggled most in my career and got multiple views from all of them which broadened my perspective.

Met many unsung (s)heroes

Unlike other tech conferences that I have attended, this one stood out and had a positive vibe in me. People attend this 2-day conference to show their support for FOSS, how they are building projects in FOSS, and nurturing a community around FOSS. For me contributing to the FOSS project is empowering and liberating and the mural at the entrance of the FOSS conference spoke more than 1000 words :) Being part of this conference and meeting many like-minded people felt like playing on home ground. At this conference, conventional talks were lined up in the auditorium, and project and community workstations were displayed in the exhibition model. I will share some of the interesting experiences that I had at the conference.

Women in Tech Collectives by Bhuvana Meenakshi - This is a self-help community for women that was formed during pandemic times when unemployment among women in tech was high. I could resonate more with this initiative as I was also one of those women who had to quit her job during the pandemic. It was backbreaking for me to juggle a newborn baby, office work that is adapting to WFH, and the health issues due to COVID-19 followed by childbirth experience. I applied for the Outreachy Internship at this time and got selected to be an intern for Apache Airflow. This was a life-turning phase for me. This is a similar initiative focussed on women in rural areas and bringing such life-changing moments to them by creating opportunities to work in tech.

VGLUG - a grassroots-level organization working to uplift the underprivileged students around Vilupuram using FOSS technologies. They choose students from underprivileged sections in remote villages, train them during weekends, and encourage them to attend tech conferences with sponsorships. With this FOSS community support many students have contributed to FOSS programs like Wikimedia, Firefox, Debian, etc. They have been doing this for about 10+ years now and work with the mission of spreading such FOSS communities in the villages around Tamil Nadu. I spoke with Karkee and Vijayalakshmi from their team and was amazed by their strong will to spread FOSS. Check here to learn more about their effort.

Mostlyharmless.io - They had these glowing LED lights on their project showcased. So I approached them to find out that they give hardware solutions like routers, hackable keyboards, LED lights, etc without the proprietary software running on it which collects user data( yes the modern LED lights with the controller can hack our data too). I just checked how they build liberated computers here. It had a set of steps done to liberate your computer with troubleshooting and a user guide to help the users hack into the system. This sort of openness gives you the kind of power and puts you in a place where you can learn, explore, and do things on your own. I am glad to find out about such a sustainable business model that thrives around the FOSS.

Ttscribe digitization scanner - Volunteer effort to preserve rare Indian books and manuscripts by digitizing them and uploading them on Internet archive for access to all people. All these contents are open-accessible, downloadable, and searchable with the option for text-to-speech conversion for visually challenged people. They have put an incredible effort into building their cost-effective scanners to digitize the book and collaborate with libraries to digitize the book. I was amazed by the power of the work they are voluntarily putting in to make the knowledge open and accessible for anyone. You can read more about their work here.

Revitalizing student projects with FOSS - This is another mind-blowing talk that I heard at the conference. Prof. Mohit gives tasks/issues in the Open source project NS3(Network Simulator) as the course assignment across semesters. He explained how students made a generic Ubuntu cache and migrated the campus network to IPv6 as part of the assignment using FOSS. The cherry on the top of the cake is his students taking part in the Internet Standards conference as a result of their efforts in FOSS contribution. I still remember vividly how I struggled to make my first contribution to FOSS and listening to his story made me awe the students of NITK, Surathkal. If more professors and college comes up with this idea, many students will come out of college with rich industry experience and land in better places than the normal standard

Hoppscotch team - It's an open-source API development tool. I met the team behind the Hoppscotch and expressed my thanks for liberating me from Postman and saving a lot of time that I spent loading the Postman app on my laptop

BuildWithHussain Frappe - I went at the end of his talk but it struck me when he said he learned a lot from YouTube and now he is giving back to the community by evangelizing the Frappe product by educating through YouTube. I was hoping to build a marketplace kind of site and this talk rekindled my long-pending work and I hope to start it soon.

TinkerSpace - Unlike other talks, I have listened to so far on the IndiaFOSS, this talk is about the physical hackerspace in Kochi and spoke on the events and work happening in the TinkerSpace for the tech enthusiasts. Imagine walking into a room filled with like-minded people working and tinkering on their projects around you or conducting a meetup to learn things together. The vibe and the energy from such a community would reflect in the work we do. I am adding this place to my travel list and hope to go there and reach out to many people.

Internet Freedom Foundation - I will end with this last one. Contributing by writing code is just one dimension of the FOSS while so many dimensions exist around technology. One such dimension that I have not explored much is the legal problems around the technology. This foundation is fighting for judicial cases around internet shutdown, surveillance, web censorship, etc., and the presenter of the work Ashlesh explained about fighting cases about internet shutdown in West Bengal owing to public exams and fear of paper leakage and how the court case caused the internet shutdown to be revoked. Hearing such different dimensions of work around technology made me think from a different perspective about how technology is impacting many people. I am glad to know about organizations that fight for the cause of establishing justice in the digital space.

Overall attending this conference had a positive impact on me. I met a large number of college students, and volunteers from different organizations and interacted about their work. The venue chosen for this event was good and had neat restrooms.

The cherry on the top of the cake is speaking with Dr.Preethi Saryan about her experience in the forest as a field biologist and hearing her story about encountering wildlife in the forest and losing the dog near her stay-hut around the forest to a leopard!

Thank you Riya for inviting me to the conference and for constantly supporting me in having the panel discussion on the topic `Women in FOSS`. The conference was so good and I could feel the effort behind it by all the volunteers. I hope to come back to IndiaFOSS4.0 :)