[Wikimediaindia-l] A brief Report on OSSCamp at Lucknow, Dated 26-27th March, 2011

[Piyush Aggarwal]

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
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