Dear all,

There's a three-day workshop on open source software being organised by a non-profit organisation, together with assistance from local bodies and companies, in Bombay. It will be a purely technical workshop, with the aim of introducing some of the popular ideas, concepts, and application layers to the participants. All interested individuals are invited. There are no delegate fees.

The details can be found in a generic invitation letter which was sent to many institutes and colleges:

http://www.starcomsoftware.com/tmp/aoss-invite.pdf

and the programme schedule can be found at:

http://www.starcomsoftware.com/tmp/aoss-programme.xls

The body responsible for organising this workshop is an int'l non-profit organisation, with their office in Singapore, called the CICC (check http://www.cicc.org.sg) These people facilitate various computing activities in Asia, and OSS is one of the areas they have decided to promote. They have been organising a series of AOSS Workshops (AOSS = Asian OSS) all over Asia and have been getting very good responses. They have now arrived at a new model for organising these workshops with practically zero central funding or corporate sponsorships, so that it remains a grassroots movement. Their first attempt at doing one in India was in May, in Chennai. This one, in Navi Mumbai, will be their second. They intend to do one in some corner or other of India every two or three months, in parallel with similar events in other parts of Asia.

Wherever they organise these events, they try to rope in local volunteer bodies or SIGs, and the Chennai workshop was heavily supported by CDAC Chennai, CSI Chennai Chapter, and NIC Chennai. Most of the delegates were teachers from colleges from the four southern states, and researchers from academic institutions. CICC are in the process of exploring their network of contacts to reach out to the ILUG groups in various cities, so it is very likely that they will come to each LUG in India for organisational assistance for future events. Currently, this Bombay event which was organised in a bit of a hurry has CDAC Bombay acting as the host and providing the venue, and a group of three or four organisations providing speakers and organisational support totally on a non-commercial basis. All course material prepared by speakers for these workshops are contributed into the central pool, and are re-used for subsequent events.

At the Bombay workshop, we have a mix of speakers who are young and technically competent hands-on techies, and senior managers who have headed major OSS-based projects in their organisations. The speaker from Mazgaon Docks Limited is the Head of IT at MDL, and has headed major enterprise-level application development projects on OSS platforms for MDL.

It is likely that the members of this LUG mailing list are quite knowledgeable and may not find anything much to learn from the workshop. But if you know someone who is a beginner with Linux and OSS, or a boss who wants to learn about this "new Linux thing", please pass on this workshop pointer to them and let them apply as per the details given in the invitation letter.

Thanks and warm regards, Shuvam Misra