My field notes - IndiaFOSS 3.0 Experience

It was my first time attending IndiaFOSS. I was very excited to meet OSS developers, familiar faces from past events, the NGO partners I've been working with, and especially those I've only interacted with online. The event felt like a warm gathering, especially because most participants were from Kerala, and I spent most of my time with the TinkerHub team.

On Day 1, I attended Hussain Nagaria’s talk on “Teaching FOSS on YouTube”. He's my favorite tutor from Frappe. He shared effective techniques for teaching Frappe through his YouTube channel, #BuildWithHussain. Hussain also had a booth showcasing the features of the Frappe framework. I was amazed at how he demonstrated almost all its features in just a few minutes. I learned about some cool features in v15 for the first time 😇. There were also talks from people representing Discourse, Chatwoot, and Plane.so, all of which I have experience in installing. Another highlight was Mujeeb ikka's session on “Poorna - The complete Malayalam Unicode character set keyboard”. It supports all Unicode characters in Malayalam. I was eagerly anticipating Mehar MP’s talk about Tinkerspace. Personally, Tinkerspace is where I spend most of my time in Kochi ♥️. We work out of Tinkerspace and are good friends with all the TinkerHub coordinators. TinkerSpace is a unique hackerspace in Kochi where civil society and technologists come together to create solutions. Mehar passionately explained why public infrastructures should exist for communities and how they created such a community space. The impact they've had on the tech community in Kerala is truly amazing.

On Day 2, I was looking forward to Subin Siby’s session on Webtorrent trackers and Kailash’s “Toying with DNS”. Subin gave a clear explanation of how webtorrents work and how he developed p2pt, which utilizes WebTorrent trackers for creating P2P apps. He did demos on webdrop.space (which I've been using and loving for the past year), dots.subinsb.com. He also explained how people in Kerala have become fond of FOSS tools, and how the Kerala education system supports FOSS. Showcases on the Openrefine tool and Bruno were also quite interesting. Bruno's journey was amazing. He gave a detailed session on how Bruno differs from similar products like Postman and Insomnia, and even launched v1 live from the IndiaFoss event 🎉. Another exciting panel discussion was about FOSS for Social Good, moderated by Shemeer. Ramya from WeLive foundation shared how tech is essential for NGOs, and talked about the lack of tech talents in the social sector. Akhila shared her insights on how they provide tech support to NGOs, while Vinay and Akhilesh shared their views on developing FOSS products for NGOs. It was an inspiring discussion, and I hope it encouraged young people to contribute to tech in the social sector. if you want to know more about how different organisations and people are coming together to support NGOs with FOSS, please visit OASIS Network

I spent most of my other time at the TinkerHub booth, where they showcased some ML models with demos in ComfyUI, Code Llama, Tortoise TTS, Lang chain etc. (They even brought a GPU from Kerala along with 50 students 😅). Many people came to the booth and had a hands-on experience with those models.

Overall, it was an amazing and exciting event. Thanks to the FOSS United team for organizing such a great event!