Call for Participation

FOSS.IN/2005
November 29 to December 2, 2005
Bangalore Palace
Bangalore, India

Introduction

FOSS.IN/2005 is an annual conference for the Indian FOSS community. Historically, FOSS.IN/2005 evolved out of the Linux-Bangalore conference series that ran between 2001 to 2004. This year, the scope of the conference is widened to cover free and open source in general, rather than limiting the focus to Linux alone.

The four day conference intends to bring together the entire cross section of players in the FOSS scenario - users from different target communities, technologists, developers, educationists, businesses as well as policy makers.

The theme for this year's conference is "Conversations". On the FOSS horizon, there are several efforts that are represented or addressed across the country. In, parallel, there are various technical discussions and dialogues that have happened at the earlier conferences and meetings and are expected to happen at this conference too.

At FOSS.IN/2005, the focus would be to catalyze mutually beneficial interaction between the technologists and technology implementers (FOSS developers) and the end users, policy makers, educationists and industry. This focus would be in addition to the intent of enabling technology knowledge dissemination across the community through talks and/or demonstrations.

Conference Format

The conference consists of four broad activities:

TECHNOLOGY SESSIONS that represent content related to core technologies, implementation, development, deployment, operations, maintenance, performance tuning, developer concerns such as copyrights, reuse of open source, etc., policy and strategy sessions for better FOSS proliferation across end user segments, strategy for encouraging contributions to FOSS from our country, socio economic issues in FOSS proliferation as well as the role of civil societies in FOSS development, deployment and proliferation. These sessions are open to all participants of the conference and will be held in the lecture halls.
BUSINESS SESSIONS that represent content related to current Industry concerns regarding FOSS, the business of FOSS, Industry panel discussions to discuss policy, ambience, adoption, business cases and so on. These non-technical sessions are for invited participants from the industry.
CONVERSATIONS that represent free form discussions between speakers and participants or participants themselves that might be user groups, special interest groups, educationists, or any set of people that have a common topic of interest, relating to FOSS, to discuss. This is open to all participants and speakers.
CONFERENCE EXPOSITION, PRODUCTS & SOLUTIONS that comprises of a FOSS expo and a vendor EXPO coupled with a set of talks on FOSS based products and solutions presented by vendors of such products. This is open to all participants and will be held in a separate hall. The FOSS Expo, meant for the FOSS community to showcase their efforts, packages as well as solutions will be held in a separate hall. This will be an informal table-top display supported by posters and demonstrations, where possible. The vendor expo organized with standard stall space will be held in a separate hall.

The four day conference comprises of a day for workshops and tutorial sessions and three days of talks.

Participation

The organizers of FOSS.IN/2005 invite you to participate in the conference. Participation in this conference is by being a speaker, an invited speaker, exhibiting at the FOSS expo or at the vendor expo or by being a paid registered participant.

Other means of participation involve working with the conference organizers as part of the organizing team. More information at the end of this document.

Conference Topics

Every major technology has an implementation to it and consequently related discussion on awareness, the implementation platform, deployment, operations and administration, security, maintenance and performance tuning are inevitable. Instead of taking a platform centric approach to the talks, as in OS, kernel, kernel development, administration, security, etc., with technologies getting classified under them, the accent is on the technology/topic.

In the earlier conferences, such a "Track" approach caused a fragmentation of interest, distribution of talks on aspects of the same technology across different halls and at times concurrent making it difficult for a user to attend talks of her/his interest.

By focusing on the topic, the idea is to create a wholesome approach. Each technology in itself would address specific issues related to the platforms, development, cross-platform development, deployment and HOW-TO, administration, security, etc. This ensures that all talks relating to a specific topic are grouped together and under one roof, preferably.

The conference topics are therefore mentioned as a list of technologies. In addition to these technology topics, well known current non-technical issues of interest are also listed for deliberation. For purposes of organizing these topics into streams, six appropriately named streams will be evolved and each of these topics will be classified under them.

Some of the proposed topics can be seen here.

Important Dates

20-Sep-2005	CFP opens
08-Oct-2005	Due date for abstracts/proposals (No submissions after this date)
16-Oct-2005	Notification to speakers begins (First list)
31-Oct-2005	Second selection list (No more changes to abstracts after this date)
14-Nov-2005	Due date for initial slides & tutorial/workshop materials (Talks/workshops/tutorials without material will be dropped)
19-Nov-2005	Due date for final slides & tutorial/workshop materials
29-Nov-2005	Conference begins

Tutorials and Workshops

Tutorials and workshops address audiences that require a practical understanding of a technology or about the use and deployment of resources relating to that technology. Accordingly, these sessions should be practically oriented with illustrations and/or demonstrations. The duration for these sessions will be either half day or full day.

Those desirous of participating in the conference as a speaker at the workshops or tutorial sessions would require to present a proposal clearly mentioning the title, an abstract of the session, duration of the session, target audience, audience prerequisites as well as their resource requirements at the venue, other than standard data projection equipment and a PC meant to be used with the projection system. It is important to include references to establish that you are familiar with related work and have offered such sessions earlier.

The proposals will be evaluated based on relevance to the conference, quality of the written proposal as well as by the references provided by the speaker/s making the proposal.

Conference Talks

The talks will address a topic in the list mentioned above and consist of a 30 minute presentation with a ten minute interactive session at the end of the presentation.

As a potential speaker at this conference, you will have to register as a speaker, provide a title for your talk as well as a talk abstract clearly indicating what you intend to address in the talk, the level of your talk as well as the audience it addresses. Please include references to establish that you are familiar with the related work and have made such presentations earlier.

Talks that are submitted will be reviewed by an undisclosed panel that will comprise of members of the community in India as well as abroad. After this process, a talk may be rejected or asked for resubmission with changes or accepted.

Talk submissions will be through a speaker registration page available at http://foss.in/2005/register. Speaker guidelines will be made available through this page.

Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) Sessions

Birds-of-a-Feather sessions (BoFs) are informal gatherings of attendees interested in a particular topic. BoFs are held at the end of every day. To schedule a BoF, you would need to send an email to bofs (at) foss.in or contact one of the organizers at the venue so that an appropriate hall for your BoF can be fixed.

Panels

A small number of 30 minute panel sessions are planned, should there be enough time after scheduling the talks. The panel sessions should involve lively discussion (not flame wars) as well as a mention of important developments or controversial opinions. Proposals should come from prospective moderators, in email form as plain ASCII text, sent to panels (at) foss.in. The proposals must be structured as below:

Moderator: name, title, affiliation, contact information, short biographic sketch, and experience in organizing panels.
Panelists: names and affiliations of those who agreed to participate, along with a short summary of their role and planned contribution.
Purpose: theme, goals, objectives, desired effect of the panel.
Rationale: explanation of why this panel will be of interest / value, why the panel format is most suitable, and what type of interaction will take place with the audience.

Content & Copyrights

As part of the conference, content presented at the conference such as speaker presentations, papers presented, lectures can be published on the conference web site for restricted/unrestricted distribution.

Authors will retain their copyright for all their content and must grant a non-exclusive license to the conference to publish and redistribute the content (presentations, lectures - audio and video recordings) using multiple means (downloadable files, streaming, distributing these files on CD/DVD).

Travel Support for Speakers

There is limited funding available for outstation speakers. Support would be available as part funding of the travel costs for outstation speakers. Accommodation costs cannot be supported. Should there be enough funding available for travel support the quantum of the part funding will increase. Watch the conference web pages for details. Speaker travel funding commitments will be made to speakers who have requested for such support by November 12, 2005, along with their talk/workshop/tutorial proposals.

Where to send

Tutorials/Workshop Proposals	: workshops (at) foss.in
Speaker Clarifications (registered speakers)	: speakers (at) foss.in
Travel Funding Request (registered speakers)	: travel (at) foss.in
Slides submission	: slides2005 (at) foss.in
Everything else	: info (at) foss.in

For Registration Information

To register as a participant of FOSS.IN/2005, please visit the registration area of the website.

For more information, write to

FOSS.IN/2005
Conference Secretariat
I floor, No.1, Kamakshi Complex
Sanjaynagar Main Road
Bangalore 560 094
Tel: +91-80-5771 4075
Fax: +91-80-2351 9623

Alternate Means of Participation

Organizing a big event such as this requires a lot of things to be coordinated. Should you be willing to provide voluntary support, you could take up roles of Topic Marshals, Content Designers, Content Reviewers, Operations Coordinators, "conference rapporteurs", and generic volunteers. For more information, please write to support (at) foss.in indicating your preference of role with relevant references to establish that you have prior experience in such voluntary support or your knowledge levels in a specific field.

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