FOSS Events @ Shaastra 2008

As always, I’m a week late on this post. Shaastra, our annual techfest wrapped up on the 5th of October. This last week has been terribly hectic with all of our teachers catching up on lost time.

We handled three distinct “events”, namely a mini-FOSS conference, a HackFest, and of course the VC with Guido van Rossum. Looking back, we probably could have handled things better, but as a first attempt, I think we fared rather well. This is a retrospection of the event, in the hope that it will help others find out something that helped and a lot of things that didn’t.

Big Red Button

This is my entry for Shaastra’s Online Science Fiction Writing contest (Shaastra is my college’s annual technical festival). It was judged by Cory Doctrow, and won first place. I am estatic.

In retrospect, I’ve noticed several places where I really screwed up my “flow” and lost “coherency” (quotes because I can’t exactly define either) and other where I just pushed ahead too fast, but I guess Cory liked the underlying story (hey, I’m not complaining ). Either way, credit where it’s due:

• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
• Dune, Frank Herbert
• Kirtika Ruchandani for a proof read
• The Acad block for instituting courses like BT101 (Introduction to Biology) and ID130 (Ecology and Environment) in a classroom of 120-140 students, without which I would never find the time to come up with a story line.

Saying Hi to Guido

Sure, it isn’t the most awe-inspiring of events, but then again you don’t get to talk to the Guido everyday. Besides which, a considerable amount of effort and FOSS pimpage went into this.