Bar Camp Kerala 9- Report

Nov 15, 2010 by Nirmal    3 Comments    Posted under: Events

After a pretty long gap, I attended the BarCamp Kerala 9 held at Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham. The campus was a huge one with very good facilities. The organizers have done an excellent job with the arrangements. The Internet connectivity was one of the best and provided around 4Mbps speeds. I arrived at session around 10:15 with Albin, Binoy XJ and Shyamlal and we missed the first session by Binny on WordPress plugin development.

The second session was by Praseed Pai on FOSS in Kerala – a case of inmates running the asylum? One of the interesting points put forward by Praseed was that a developer should be comfortable with all platform and he also pointed to the fact that FOSS users only talks about licenses.

The third session was on Campus Blogging where Hari spoke about his experience with creating a campus blog.

The next session was on Blender an awesome open source tool for creating 3D animations, followed by a demo of a movie Sintel created by this tool.

Hiren talked about the Open movie project Chamba, which sounded interesting. But to talk about this project the complete Sintel movie was shown to the audience which I felt was unnecessary as most of the audience was not interested in watching a animation movie at a BarCamp. This was pretty evident from the tweets which was going around at that time.

Audience was getting desperate with lunch session and thanks to the organizers, they had arranged an “Full Open Source” lunch, yes its was free lunch at Amrita. I guess it was a combination of Free as in “Free Beer” and Free as a in “Freedom”.

Post Lunch session on Open Street Maps looked good and the presenter showed some of the capabilities of the maps when compared to Google Maps. But the main issue for Open Street Maps is its data, unless users contribute to it, its going to be useless.

Next was a session on PhoneGap by Sherin followed by a session on Wi Fi. The WiFi session was pretty too basic explaining the concepts of Wireless networking and the demo was not very effective as the screen was not very much visible to the audience.

There was also a session on Machine Learning in practise followed by an interesting session on Haptics. There was a live demo on Haptics by Unnikrishnan as well.

There was a live tweet board at Amrita which showed all the tweets with the tag #bck9 which was really nice idea.

It was nice networking with lot of people and had a great time at Bar Camp Kerala 9th edition.

Not sure how many noticed this, but it was more or less an Open Source Bar Camp . The organizers had a big banner at the center stage which showed Firefox and Linux logos indicating the support for FOSS among the organizers.

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