Open Source India Tech days (aka LinuxAsia) | 12th-14th March, 2009

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A Note from the Organisers

We must start off by saying, “Thank You, Chennai!”

We are lost for words to express our gratitude for the amazing response and support we received for Open Source India 2009. This was, by far, the most successful edition of Open Source India (and LinuxAsia) that we have organised in the past six years!

Every year, once the event gets over, we review the highs and the lows. This year, the list for ‘highs’ was long, while that of ‘lows’, much shorter. What topped our list of ‘highs’ is getting the target audience, and in appreciable numbers.

Right from Day One, we had decided to focus on different user segments of Open Source.

First, we targeted those who take the strategic decisions and set budgets - the CXOs. From our last year’s experience, we had realised that virtualisation was a topic that many from this segment were interested in. So we created a CXOSummit focusing on virtualisation, cloud computing and SaaS. Now getting the busy senior executives in this segment is very difficult, but at Chennai, we achieved a ‘House Full’.

We then looked at the IT managers and systems administrators, who actually implement IT in their organisations. In fact, for small and medium firms, they often play the strategic role of CIOs too. We had a full day session for them, where they were to be presented with Open Source options for various tools and resources required for IT management. The response? We had to shift the session from the 120-seat hall to one that could at least accommodate 200. The final attendance was over 230.

So, we had the decision-makers and influencers covered. Next, we focused on those who would develop applications for them—the developers. We had two seminars for them—one focused on software development for mobiles and the other for everything else. We also opened these sessions for budding developers - the engineering students - so that they were exposed to and hence motivated to adopt Open Source. The seating capacity for this event was 500. At times, the hall witnessed over 800 attendees!

Last, but not the least, were the members of academia who were on our list. If the next generation is to be open source aware, then it’s important that their gurus are convinced about its merit too. We organised a special half-day workshop for them. We’d planned for 50, and finally welcomed 80 into a 70-seater hall. So we managed to get quite a few people in, but were we able to deliver the right message? First hand feedback at the event was positive. But we decided to not go by our
individual perceptions, but to poll our visitors. At the time of writing this piece, we had received feedback from 350 attendees through our website (www.osidays.com) and on an average, we had scored a ‘Good’.

While there are many who need to be thanked for making OSI 2009 successful, someone who tops the list is Dr Rajagopalan, who heads C-DAC, Chennai. He had repeatedly told us that Chennai was the city that deserved an event like Open Source India. Now, we hope to keep OSI at a level, where it lives up to the standards set at Chennai.

Latest Updates

The Tweetup taught us that it’s all about “free beer”, and hardly about “free speech”
(April 18, 2009)
We had an attendance of about 20 people, including @PlaneMad, @narananh, @indiblogger and @abattoir. While the agenda of the meet was to discuss about the latest social media rage, businesses sprouting up around the same and marketing opportunities opening up, one of our look outs was to figure out how to amalgamate the open source ethos with micro-blogging services like Twitter and identi.ca.