So here´s the long, long put off post. I was supposed to post about it about 3 or 4 time in the last 6 months and never really got around to it. Now that the dust has more or less settled, here is some of the inside story from FOSSkriti 2009.

The theme this year was ´The Open Web´. I´m not sure how exactly we came up with that theme, and how it stuck. There were many rationalizations for the theme to oppose the expected ´open source is not always about open standards´, and a number of discussions with a whole bunch of other themes thrown around. Once we decided on the theme, though, a lot of ideas for the event were proposed. Some of it we were able to implement, others didn´t quite happen. We had, for example, planned on having a panel discussion on standards compliance with representatives from the various rendering engines there. We also considered doing a PGP key-signing party. Both didn´t happen because of logistical issues.

The things that _did_ happen, though, went great. Just like last year, the participation was far beyond expectations (which makes us wonder if our expectations need to be scaled up for next year). Our sponsor, Mozilla (thanks, Mary) started the conference with Arun Ranganathan leading a workshop of web development with open source software, with Seth Bindernagel helping us out as well. With about 200 people in the lab and a hacked up screen made of chart papers and packing tape, Arun took the participants on a tour of the web, showing off HTML5, Mozilla´s Bespin editor (whose alpha was released to the public later that night) and showed people a glimpse of how the web - and web development - works. When we finally got it wrapped up by about 12:30 AM, we chatted as we walked down to the SAC for a bite to eat. The next morning, Arun delivered a talk on HTML 5 and the standardization process, again to a packed room. Soon after the talk, Arun and Seth had to leave to catch a flight to Pune and GNUnify, and we had to start preparations for the next event. All the folks from Mozilla were terrific during the whole process, right from the first emails about sponsorship and participation to the events to the 200 t-shirts Mary had sent over to give away. Oh, and Seth, thanks for the chocolates

The next event on Day 2 was the Drupal Hackfest. Led by Pratul Kalia and Gurpartap Singh (aka Durpal Singh :P), we again started off with a full house (a full house in CS101, and over twice the lab´s capacity). We decided to do a ahort talk first and then move to the hackfest, hoping the attrition in moving from place A to place B will be enough to let us handle the capacity issue. Fortunately, that plan worked out rather well and we had just enough people in the lab. Due to the wide spread of the kind of people there, it turned out to be a workshop for the first hour or so and then a hackfest. All sorts of fun stuff happened because of the network setup and such, but everything got sorted out thanks to Praneeth and Gurpartap´s constant tinkering (which sometimes involved flushing mySQL tables). Again, at well past 1 AM we finally wrapped up and ended up in the SAC, sitting there chatting about random stuff, including the history and concept of Navya and the people who came before us.

The next morning, Zakir went off to pick Ajay Kumar of Sahana from the airport while Praneeth and Naresh worked on a talk they were going to give to fill in for the Yahoo! UI ones that got cancelled due to logistical issues. The talk was about primarily about server administration, and surprisingly went alright. Between Praneeth, Naresh, and myself I think we were able to get the message across. Once that was done, Ajay´s talk on Sahana was up next. A delay in his flight caused a bit on confusion in the schedule and there were only about 20 people in the talk. The hackfest just after, though, was again packed. With about a hundred people in L2, we had to turn a few people away. Fran Boon, satyag, Massimo Del Pierro, and others joined in online via skype and IRC and helped people find their way (quite patiently at that). After a couple of hours of that, once people were able to do their own thing, Zakir and Gurpartap played bzflag while the rest of us sort of strolled around the lab, lending a hand where necessary.

The last day turned out to be the lightest day of FOSSkriti this year. There were just two talks - one on Open Web Standards by Shwetank Dixit of Opera and the other on Webkit by Siraj Razik of Collabora over Skype from Sri Lanka. The attendance in both was less than the other days, about 30-40 people in each talk. We probably need to try to figure out why that was the case and what we can do to avoid this next time. On the other hand, that is about the attendance we expected to begin with in _all_ the events.

On the whole, FOSSkriti 2009 was a success by our standards. Comments and feedback are solicited, though, so that we can make FOSSkriti 2010 even better (they go either here as comments, or via email to fosskriti@techkriti.org). As for next year, we plan on having two tracks - one at the very basic level, and the other in a much more focussed setting (the most likely candidate right now is Open Source in Embedded Development)