A brief Report on OSSCamp at Lucknow, Dated 26-27th March, 2011
On 26-27th march there was an OSSCamp organised at Babu Banarasi Das Group of Educational Institutions at Lucknow. College has taken
the initiative to invite the representatives of various OpenSource
communities like Wordpress, Joomla, Mozilla Firefox, Drupal, Php etc. Wikimedia volunteers were also invited for the event. The purpose of the
event was to make students aware of the various open source technologies
and their advantages. Also, it was an effort to motivate students to come forward and contribute.
Students from
various colleges were gathered to learn and explore new and different
technologies. I went there to represent Wikipedia. My presentation was
scheduled on 26th of March, 2011 in the post lunch session. I talked
about the different projects of Wikimedia foundation, some Wikipedia
statistics, Wikimedia India chapter and discussed the role of volunteers
and in the end I tried to motivate them to contribute.
Over there, I was surprised to know that awareness of the students
towards Wikimedia foundation was minimal. Most of the students over
there were not even aware that they can actually edit the contents of
Wikipedia. Only couple of them knew about the other projects of
Wikimedia foundation other than Wikipedia like Wikitionary , Wikiquotes,
commons etc.
After the talk, on special request of students I demonstrated the
editing process in Wikipedia and took hands on workshop of interested
students. Students were very keen and enthusiastic to learn about
Wikipedia. The session went on for almost ninety minutes and I had one
to one interactions with the students. The inquisitive questions and
their high level of interest made me more motivated to explain.
Pic1: http://tiny.cc/stu1
Pic2: http://tiny.cc/stu2
Even after the hands on session, many students contacted with
different queries. For me also, it was wonderful learning experience.
The college authorities and student organisers namely Nitesh Sinha and Abhinav Upadhyay deserves huge round of applause for their
tireless effort for organising a successful OSSCamp.
Regards,
Piyush Aggarwal