So the Beagle Hackfest happened on Thursday, starting at 10 p.m. We expected a few people, but were pleasantly surprised by the 60 who turned up. I might’ve scared off 20 of them with my initial presentation on what and why were were there. That still left us with 40+ really enthusiastic people.

We had some trouble starting up the machines, but our awesome participants stuck it out till we got things hammered out, with an amazingly patient dBera helping a lot. Things went on till 4 a.m. (at which point we needed to get just a little shut-eye (a few didn’t sleep at all) to prepare for the next day). At this point, we submitted a Firefox Beagle Search Bar written by Jai Kumar Singh (a.k.a. flukebox). In a day or two, another group should be able to submit a patch for a BibTeX filter. And there’s another project that I hope to talk more about in the days to come.

Yesterday (Friday) morning, we had Shreyas Srinivasan delivering a talk on building sexy UIs with Clutter. We had about 200 people in the hall, and it was a huge success. How do I know this? There were a lot of questions after the talk and they were almost all relevant and insightful. Afterwards, a bunch of people even got in touch with Shreyas about getting started on contributing. ‘Twas good!

Today started with Ankita Garg delivering a workshop on the Linux kernel. The lab was packed, and we had to turn away a huge number of people. A lot of the crowd was too new to Linux to appreciate what was happening, but some people took away what was intended.

This was followed by Piyush Verma’s talk on KDE4 for users. This went well — good turn out, and people learnt about KDE, asked good questions. He’s going to be talking about KDE 4 from a developer’s perspective. Looking forward to that. :-)

Next up was Ankita again, with a talk on LinuxChix. We had expected a large turnout but had about 13 women and 20 men. But the crowd was interested, and we had a good discussion after the talk covering the LinuxChix organisation, and how it can be useful in the context of the audience. Ankita’s got the list of stuff that came out of the discuss so I’ll link to it when it’s out.

Since we ticked off a whole bunch of IITK people by turning them away from the kernel workshop (we decided to keep only the non-IITKians). So Ankita very awesomely agreed to take another session. And we had a packed lab again. This time, the crowd was a lot more savvy, and things went better. If only we’d had more time, we could’ve had a longer session with more questions. But bravo to Ankita for talking for 6 hours today. Anyone who’s delivered even an hour-long talk will know what a feat that is.

As the finale for today, Saurabh Nanda and Chaitanya Gupta of Cleartrip.com are conducting a Ruby on Rails workshop, followed by a hackfest. We’ve got the CSE department’s largest classroom full of interested and engaged people, so we’re happy to go as late into the night as we need to. :-D

So that’s how FOSSKriti’s been going so far. Tomorrow’s the last day. It’s been legendary! (I told you so ...)

[photos soon]

Can't believe I forgot this — even before the Beagle Hackfest started, Sainath got started on hacking up a Beagle search plugin for Pidgin. You just select some text, and you can easily start a Beagle search with a couple of clicks. And it extends well to any search service. He's going to release this soon, so the dude's made FOSSKriti even better!

FOSSKriti is winding up now. Today was also very good.

We started with Piyush continuing the KDE track, this time for developers. It was a good talk — the quick ‘n dirty PyQt demo was the icing on the cake. It really showed people how easy working on desktop apps can be.

We had a BoF session in the afternoon that rotated around Open Standards and Open Formats. We had about 20 people there, and after a 5-10 minute intro, we got around to a pretty interesting discussion. We started talking about whether open standards are really a “good thing”. The general consensus was that companies should be able to make money from their products, but vendor lock-in is bad. People agreed that the Adobe’s PDF model of keeping the format open and making money off the tools seems to work well. We then progressed to talk about how we can impact open format adoption. We settled on:

• Use open formats
  
• Accept only open formats in communication, to what extent is possible
  
• Get people to use open formats
  
  
  
  • Start with people who are willing to experiment and change
    
  • Then move to people who don’t care, and show them how open formats are better for them
    
  • Keep trying, no matter how bleak it looks
  
  
• Keep bugging companies that use closed formats to open them
  

The discussion was lively, and went all around the board — good fun.

Finally, Chaitanya Gupta of Cleartrip.com gave (actually, is giving) a talk on Common Lisp. People are sitting in there instead of standing in the queue to listen to Strings, so I’m guessing something is going right. *Grin*

Oh, and did I mention that we distributed 200+ Ubuntu/Kubuntu-KDE4/$distro_of_choice CDs just today?

So it’s been a fantastic four days. Neither the weather nor colds, sore throats, and $illnesses could get in the way. We had awesome speakers who came here against a whole bunch of odds (thanks Shreyas, Ankita and Piyush!)

Saurabh Nanda made it possible of course, to arrange the event at all.

And of course all the volunteers out here kicked butt. They tirelessly did stuff late into the night if it needed doing — designing and putting up posters, waking up early (or not sleeping) to get to the airport in the morning, and on and on.

A *very* special thanks goes out to Atul Chitnis — our event would’ve floundered somewhere right near the beginning. He guided, helped, prodded, pushed and made FOSSKriti what it is. And there’s Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, Pradeepto Bhattacharya, and Runa Bhattacharjee who supported us from the moment we told them what we were planning to do. Thanks, guys!

So things are winding down, and I’m off to pass out in a ditch somewhere. :-)

[Rohit has to get photos up (put ’em up, dammit!), and I really really hope we can get videos of some of the events (update soon)]