Team FOSS.IN is happy to announce FOSS.IN/2010.

This year’s edition of India’s foremost Free & Open Source Software event will be held on December 15-17, 2010, and the venue will be again the NIMHANS Convention Centre, same as last year.

There are several differences between this edition and previous ones:

Duration:

This year, the event is 3 days instead of the usual 5 days -  a 5 day event was simply too exhausting for everyone (participants and team). Also, we have moved the event into the middle of December, to give students of colleges that usually have their exams end-November or early-December a chance to attend. Our American friends will be happy to note that we have moved the event safely out of Thanksgiving range

Scope and content:

As has been made clear since last year – we are enlarging the scope of the event to include more technology. While FOSS is still very much the heart of the event, we are encouraging people to be more involved in technology, and get into the “hacker mindset” that has been the basis for the FOSS movement across the world, but has been more or less avoided here in India.

Note to the media: “Hacker” is a good thing – it refers to a person who pushes the technological envelope,  and extending technology beyond its known limits. What the media has been calling “hackers” is really “crackers” (criminals who break into computer systems and networks). We will have a separate note for you soon on this subject).

The content of the event will reflect the technological scope of FOSS.IN – there will be more practical hands-on, more “workouts”, more workshops, and fewer talks and tutorials. This is in line with our credo “Talks is cheap, show me the code”. More details about this will be in the Call for Participation that will be published on August 30th, and also in posts following this one.

Funding the event:

As most of you know, funding an event such as FOSS.IN is a hard problem, and to avoid the problems we ran into last year (the less said, the better), we are making some changes that were long overdue:

1. While we are keeping the participation fee for students the same (Rs.500, or about US$11), which includes the cost of lunch and tea/coffee, we are raising the fees for individuals to Rs.1500 per head, and to Rs.5000 per head for corporate attendees (this will be acknowledged as support for the event). We know that some of you will complain about this, but we introduced the Rs.500 fee six years ago, and the Rupee just doesn’t go as far as it used to.
2. We have to unfortunately drop the travel sponsorship for international speakers, except for very exceptional cases. As we did last year, we encourage speakers to seek travel sponsorship from their employers, user groups or other sources. We will treat this as support for the event and will acknowledge this on our website. However, no changes in accommodation and other hospitality – we will continue to cover all costs for outstation speakers – bed&breakfast, (lunch is at the venue), local travel, conference fees, etc.
3. As usual, the event will depend on sponsorship from organisations supportive of the concept of people getting more involved in technology, and gaining a deeper understanding of it. There will be a separate note for you, but if you are keen to get the process going ASAP, please do get in touch.

Talks:

We have been steadily reducing the number of talks during FOSS.IN, because we want people to participate in workouts, but we are not eliminating talks. There will be two kinds of talks as usual – talks during the Main Sessions (ie daytime) and “hacker sessions” in the evenings and late at night. There will be one keynote every evening. More about all this in the CfP when we release it.

There are a lot of other little things that we won’t cover in this note, but be prepared, as usual, to have the time of your life.

More information will appear soon on the FOSS.IN website, and a detailed Call for Participation, Call for Volunteers and Call for Sponsorship will appear there soon.

And as usual, May The Source Be With You, people, and get ready to ROCK!

Team FOSS.IN

p.s. DO follow us on Twitter and on the FOSS.IN Mailing List to keep updated on emerging details about the event, and to participate in the discussions leading up to it.

p.p.s Happy Birthday, Linux!