Opportunity Open Source conference in the IIT Mandi, India: Motivating people to be a part of us!
Organizing every year the participation of [the Linux Foundation](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/) as mentoring organization in the [Google Summer of Code](https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/) (GSoC) and mentoring contributors for [OpenPrinting](http://www.openprinting.org/) I work together with Aveek Basu who joined OpenPrinting when he worked at Lexmark in India. He is reaching out to colleges and universities in India and this way we have every year around 5-7 students as contributors for OpenPrinting, most studying at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mandi.
With the DebConf being in India, Aveek and me have decided to meet most of our current and former contributors in-person and motivate the students, professors, researchers to join the community of developers, designers, doc writers, … in a 1-1/2-day conference, the “[Opportunity Open Source](https://events.canonical.com/e/mandi2023)”.
We had talks about what free and open source software is and how to contribute to it, a panel on working at Canonical, a talk from one of our GSoC contributors about his work, OpenPrinting and Zephyr tracks, talks about Snap, Ubuntu Core Desktop and blendOS, about documentation, and even interactive workshops, about how to develop for Zephyr and how to package applications as Snaps. By allowing remote speakers we were able to get the most important people for each subject, even being at such a remote location.
We got ~100 excited attendees, mainly people studying or working at the IIT Mandi.
And we got excellent support by one of my GSoC contributors and a team of volunteers in Mandi for organizing rooms, guest house accomodation, meals, A/V helpers, …, from Canonical with internet infrastructure, Indico for setting up the conference site and StreamYard for live-streaming, recording, and remote speaking, support for getting all this going, and tons of swag, from Zephyr not only with their talks but also developer boards sent to Mandi.
This talk is about how we have organized the conference, the challenges, and naturally also the outcome and experiences with running it. And we will have a Q&A session about organizing conferences and also being a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code.
So everyone interested in running a free software conference and/or participating in the Google Summer of Code is welcome to participate in this session.
See also [this report with links to slides and videos](https://openprinting.github.io/OpenPrinting-News-September-2023/#opportunitiy-open-source-in-the-iit-mandi-india).
by Ubuntu OnAir
linux foundation
