FOSS Club Siliguri Government Polytechnic

Welcome to FOSS Club @ SGP!

Well, hello there folks and welcome to the forum thread for the FOSS Club at Siliguri Government Polytechnic (referring to it as SGP from this point onward for ease)! We’re in the works for creating a hub for open-source collaboration and innovation, beyond the campus and across the region of North Bengal. More than just coding, we’re here to build a culture of knowledge-sharing and accessibility.

Expect engaging seminars and hands-on workshops covering everything from open-source basics to whatever’s hot in the tech world. We aim to equip students with skills, insights, and a passion for libre software, as well as open data and open knowledge, shaping the tech landscape in the region.

The Team (and the structure)

The club is managed by a team of 6 members, including me, who’ll be acting as the Club Lead, and a Co-Lead. The structure is as follows:

  • Technologist: 2 Members
  • Designer: 1 Member
  • Outreach: 2 Members
  • Social Media: 1 Member

Apart from that, we also have a couple of juniors (students who are late into their first year) as shadow members, who are going to assist the core team members whenever needed and will be replacing the current core team after graduation.

We’ll be releasing the program schedule (and other stuff) soon, so stay tuned! :))

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Minutes of the Meet

1st March 2025 @ 16:00 Hours

Attendees: Me (@nilabrata_sanyal) and @fossdot

What we discussed on/about:

  • Tentative dates for the event/s.
  • Potentially having an online event or two in case we can’t avail the college’s resources (The answer? It’s highly discouraged; defeats the whole purpose of doing it offline in the first place).
  • Having a couple of folks join in-person for the talks/workshops. Doesn’t necessarily have to be from the very beginning and could be there from events in the next semester.
  • Invoicing - What if vendors don’t have GST Invoices?

Summary

  • Tentative dates to be announced shortly in this thread, with the first event on March 6th.
  • All events will be offline, temporarily restricted by college to students within our own college.
  • Will coordinate with Core Team members from 2nd March to ensure that the event goes smoothly.
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Plans for Even Semester (Jan-Jun), AY 2024-25

February (already done)

  • Club Announcement
  • Core Team Recruitment
  • Faculty Advisor and Official Approval

March

  • Social Media Presence: (As “Drushti”*)
  • Official Launch with an inaugral event/talk session (Planned on 06th March)
  • Orienting Core Team members to FOSS alternatives
  • Outreach across both campuses to get more members
  • Another event on 21st March (Education Freedom Day)

April

  • Schedule dates for events
  • Announce events (Social Media + FOSS United Platform + FOSS United Forum)

May

  • Schedule dates for events
  • Announce events (Social Media + FOSS United Platform + FOSS United Forum)

June (end semester examinations)

  • Nothing likely to happen
  • Will summarise and document our successes, problems we may face while hosting events throughout the semester and work on a way to get around them.
*Since we also have a YouthMappers Chapter in our college, all events under FOSS Club SGP & YouthMappers at SGP are organised together under the banner of Drushti. Do note that Drushti has its own branding, which differs from that of FOSSU/FOSS Clubs, however, we’ll try to design for events under the FOSS Club per its Branding Guidelines.
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Updates on the inaugral event (06th March 2025)

So, it finally happened! The event went quite great, with about 37 attendees (including our HOD and Core Team Members), with a turnout of roughly two-thirds of people who had RSVPed for the event.

Pictures:

  • Session 1: “An introduction to FOSS & Liberated Hardware” by @Het_Joshi
  • Session 2: “An introduction to OpenStreetMap” by Kiran Ahire
  • Session 3: “An introduction to YouthMappers” by Sawan Shariar
  • 1st YouthMappers@SGP Mapping Party
  • Miscallaneous

The Goods:

  • 2/3rd of people who RSVPed had joined.
  • Most of the students showed great interest in the talks.
  • 8 People joined for the mapping party.
  • The HOD, as well as another lecturer joined the event and showed interest in the talks.

The Not-so-goods:

  • Most of the students from 1st year didn’t join, including those who had RSVPed.
  • We started with a delay of ~30 minutes due to issues with the college’s networking infrastructure.
  • Some students found it hard to comprehend the ideas because of their limited proficiency in English.
  • The mapping party was cut short due to our semester results being announced.

What’s next?

  • Communicate with all faculty members and HODs of other departments to ensure low-to-none friction in attending future events.
  • Organise follow-up sessions in Bengali to ensure the knowledge gap is bridged.
  • Not rushing things too much. I believe this is what caused the limited outreach amongst students of other departments, especially juniors.

Updates on activity for Academic Year 2024-25, reflections, and plans for AY 2025-26

Since we had started out with the FOSS Club back in early March this year, there has been only 1 event out of the 4 planned for the semester, that being the inaugral session with an introduction on FOSS, OpenStreetMap, followed by a mapping party.

Where exactly did we go wrong?

Since our first event was done in a haste, it resulted in limited outreach, especially amongst students from other department and juniors. Some of the students also had a hard time comprehending the talks, because of their limited proficiency in English. Also, bureaucracy within the college limited our ability to make a clear-cut schedule, and plan for the sessions accordingly. To make matters worse, just days before we were ready to resume and announce our second session in late April, notice came for preponement of our end-semester exams to Mid-May, naturally also preponing dates of submission for several assignment within our own department (as well as the same for every other department). That completely shattered any chances of us being able to do an event at all.

However, this did not stop me from trying. I have conducted 2 knowledge sharing sessions, 1 within the core team and another one with students who had a hard time comprehending during the inaugral event, along with a few more, at their request.

How do we fix things?

Now this is where it really depends. Assuming that our college helps us out by helping us guide through the bureaucracy, it’s just about scheduling, what do we present, and how.

Scheduling is pretty straightforward, and partly falls under the bureaucracy. Once we have the dates blocked, we are pretty much sorted. The real challenge is the content for the actual sessions.

Plans for the sessions

Based on my observation and conversations with students and faculty members alike, most of the folks are new to using devices like a computer, with many being the first in their families to use one. While this is somewhat disadvantageous, it also gives us the ability to help them tinker around, and convince them to move to FOSS pretty easily, for they’re only so far in the learning curve that it actually makes switching almost frictionless. For these, we’re looking to do 1 or 2 Linux installation fests.

Since these folks are also new to programming, following the same logic, we can also bring them to open-source dev tools quite easily. We have planned 3 sessions, 1 of them being on Git, 1 on IDEs, and are yet to decide on what to pick for the third one. Currently, it’s a tie between self-hosting and using specific tools like Bruno.

Apart from these, we also have sessions planned for alternative ways of contributing, such as by adding data to knowldege bases like Wikidata and OpenStreetMap through mapathons (remotely mapping places) and mapping parties (visiting a neighbourhood/marketplace and adding every bit of data, from shops to public amenities).

And another important thing, even though we’d really love to have guest speakers, we chose not to, except who are native Bengalis. This is solely because of the language barrier that I have mentioned before, and has nothing to do with any other aspect whatsoever.

So yeah, that’s all I had to say, and once the dates are confirmed, we’ll share the schedule and other relevant information in due course of time.

P.S: I could’ve definitely skipped a lot of the details here, but I’m dropping it all here for anyone and everyone who wants to start their own club as well, but might be facing issues similar to mine. :slight_smile:

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