So in a land alien to me, I recieved this news about being made a Chairman of FOSSMEC for the coming academeic year. Let me document what all activities had taken place at FOSSMEC in the past few months.
During the month of March we conducted a GSoC motivation talk, to find out the really interesting people who are planning to participate in GSoC 2019. About 15-20 people turned up for the event, where all the four GSoC scholars of 2018- Saran Narayanan, Vidhyadheeshan, Adarsh S and Ashwin G conducted the session. We planned for a proposal review section there after in the coming weeks.
The various students who particpated in GSoC proposal review section and submitted a GSoC proposal for 2019 were:
1st year - Pranav sridhar, Sandeep(didn’t submit proposals finally) 2nd year - Arun Hari, Ashwin M Prabhu, Devdutt Shenoi. 3rd year - Kurian Benoy, Jithin James.
Finally GSoC results came and Ashwin M Prabhu got selected as a GSoC scholar from Moira organisation.
FOSS in 30 Days was an awareness event conducted by FOSSMEC to learn the foundations of what is FOSS, it’s core principles and applications. This event was co-ordinated by Sneha and various posters were designed by Priyangini, Ashwin G, Arun Hari, Devdutt, Joel, Nithin S(sorry if I have missed any names).
MEC.Conf, Developer conference held on July 27, 28 and 29. This event was jointly organised by FOSSMEC, IEEE MEC and IETE. This event took enormous amount of effort in organising. There were 10 - 12 team like Software, Talks team, Documentation team, Devsprints team, ambience and much more. The theme which was initially planned was to be a FOSS Conference for both hardware and software. Then we moved to somewhat neutral term of Developer conference.
The organising team involved in activities ranging from outreach to various schools(to particpate in MEC.Conf), to bringing the best speakers, ambience of the venue, anchoring the sessions and arranging Devsprints. Devsprints was a unique first in Kerala for MEC.Conf. We had 5 Open source organisations like FOSSASIA, Dynamic Learning(from Processing foundation), Zulip, DVC and MEC.Contrib(from FOSSMEC) participating. Most of the participants made their first contribution during Devsprints.
Algorithm challenge which consisted of solving more than 50 Hackerrank challenges was the idea of Rahul R. He single handedly organised the entire event with the help of Ashwin G. About 40 participants participated and best part is even though there was no prize, there was active participation. It was amazing to hear people saying how much they had learned by even finishing in the 10 th position for this challenge.
Orientation day of FOSSMEC for first years was conducted on September 5, 2019. The session of how to prepare for GSoC was taken by Adarsh S and the GSoC scholars Aswin G and Ashwin M Prabhu talked about their experience participating in GSoC. Also Varun and Mohita talked about the how they got an amazing internship in first year itself. I would like to thank everyone from FOSSMEC team for making it a memorable day 140+ first years.
Code-a-pookalam contest at Govt. Model Engineering College and invites entries for pookalam designs made with code. The event details can be found here.
Also there are exciting events like Devsprints, FOSSMEC special section for GSoC, and much more coming soon. So stay tuned.
Fin.