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. 