OSDC, or Open Source Developers Community, started out as being based in and around JIIT Noida, India. A community of OSS maintainers, web developers, android freaks, machine learning enthusiasts, hackers, designers, game developers and most significantly Explorers. We welcome those who believe in the open source philosophy and are willing to sacrifice their naps in order to change the world.
We organize various workshops, (nearly) weekly meetups, talks and hackathons in an effort towards encouraging more people to lean into the open source world! We love having late night conversations on tech and building new things. If you love the same just hop in, we are looking forward for your participation: links to join!
Our main means of communication remains our Discord server with Matrix and Telegram bridges.
We started out as a college community but have now expanded beyond that and have all sorts of active members. We see international members. students from other colleges, working professionals, people pursuing their PhDâs active on our discord. This has lended two aspects to community management: one online as an open-for-all forum for discussion and another as a college community that needs to conduct events and maintain an active presence and OSS culture (+ a tech culture in general ) at college.
As a college club, have an assigned faculty from the CSE Department overlooking us. The CT (Core Team) is more-or-less flat with distribution as follows:
3 Coordinators (3rd years)
25 Core-Team members: Twenty 2nd years + Five 3rd years
Our model for a core-team has been based on very âfreeâ values with no departments as such. Before every event, we get on a Jitsi call and do polls on whoâll be interested in taking up which aspect: posters, talk, logistics, permissions, etc and receive very enthusiastic participation (Someone has been left unassigned everytime so far, touchwood on this much CT enthusiasm).
Good interactions via community discussions/activities and leading by example have been able to help us avoid having to nag/push core team members to take up tasks and make them genuinely curious about trying out new things. Weâve found an emphasis on shitposting and active non-tech, off-topic channels really helping with community bonding and in turn the more on-topic i.e. the tech + volunteering activities (especially for college students).
Though itâs no issue if someone canât make it on occasion, we do have a CT-purge between semesters to remove those whoâve been consistently inactive in events or discord (the bar is low) and havenât started with any OSS contributions either. So this number is subject to going down a bit by next sem.
We have some 4th years and alumni active in the community online which has made all the difference. Aside from contributing in daily discussions and mentoring pretty much everyone, they help in guiding the CT decisions, giving talks on events, and judging + mentoring participants in our online events like the CodeJam and OSDHack. Having active moderators and members from outside college, really gets the server through on occasions when college duties pile up for the rest of us.
Though new ideas that come up, like the recent crontab community project, are mostly spontaneous, so are the topics for most talks. Also starting from October to maintain a record for reference and posterity.
All the events listed above in the roadmap (except for DevOps December were successfully conducted.
5-6 events have been conducted in a short span since the last 3 months,which is great.
However there is a lack of documentation of the events, Akshit will document the past events soon and also assign a core team member the responsibility to post regularly on the forum
The college was initially hesistant of the workshop from https://gofr.dev but later after tallking to the project maintainers got interested, and conducted the event as part of the placement drive.
Projects
Crontab (linked in the roadmap) is going well and should become more active
A newsletter based on Hugo is being worked upon as a major project by the club.
Future events
CodeJam
A 5 day casual hackathon
*People are grouped together based on their tech stack and experience
The purpose of the event is for students to socialise, collaborate and build together
Was conducted online last year, switching to in person/hybrid
OSD Hack
Need to make it a true OSS hackathon, inspired by FOSS Hack
Willing to follow FOSS guidelines, and removing blockchain track ( standard devfolio rules were followed last year because of time crunch and lack of sponsors
Hybrid model - Virtual edition is open to everyone(one international submission last year)
Hackathon website
2023 Projects
Support required from FOSS United
College is supportive for hackathons, and sponsors prize money for winners, but operational costs are not covered.
Grant can be provided (hackathon details need to be posted on forum)
General Discussion
FOSS hack local edition is difficult, college does not allow people from outside to attend hackathons and wants to keep it restricted for their students only
The college has made attending a hackathon compulsory for second year students, and the participation carries marks as well.
This is a double edged sword, since on one hand it encourages people to participate in the hackathon and build together, but people canât be as creative as theyâd like in their projects since it carries marks, and need to be explained well to and understood by the teachers.
The club members should start attending Delhi FOSS meetups, it will help to build connections, find suitable speakers etc.
More activity on the forum will be helpful to get necessary support and reach for the events.
I brought up OSDHack since I felt it provided context to the Codejam, as in how itâs different. Thereâs more flagship events that weâve started and I figure I should list all of em.
A 5 day casual hackathon where we group students together by ourselves and they socialise
3 iterations happened so far, weâre planning to have the 4th in the first two weeks of January.
The event is limited only to students of JIIT-Noida. The 5 day length makes it hard to maintain an online open-for-all version on the side for that long.
For more details, you can look at osdc/codejam-v3 with submissions. Hereâs the same for v1 and v2 (different branches).
This event has mostly been funded by membersâ community-pooling, you may look at the biryani monies in the README above, sponsorship could be of great help!
Wait, WTF?
Wait, Whatâs The Fix? is a troubleshooting contest we came up with last year for the first time.
We prepare a .iso image with some bugs and challenges which the participants boot up and have to figure out how to solve. The participants are allowed / encouraged to use the internet to figure it out.
The idea is to get participants used to working with new technologies and learning on the fly and being dynamic.
The challenges included for example figuring out why sudo wonât work, setting up the emojicode compiler, learning emojicode syntax and debugging code, recovering files from a .git folder, etc.
Those previous challenges can be found at osdc/wait-wtf.
The event is only for students at JIIT Noida as well. Itâll be difficult to ensure no foul-play and make sure all participants have a good experience if we do it open-for-all online.
biryani monies / community funded as well, will try to push college for sponsorship for upcoming iteration.
OSDHack
A 2-day hackathon, organised at a college // Offline as well as at an open-for-all // Online level.
Itâs kinda our main âbigâ event, we have side-events (mentioned below) and talks in parallel as well.
Weâve had OSDC Alumni and members in the past as speakers for the talks.
Currently there have been three iterations of the hackathon, weâll have the third this April.
This is also where the college is supportive by sponsoring prize money for the top 3 teams in the Offline, college scoped version, of the event. For the open-for-all prizes, domain, etc. we require sponsorship (this is where Devfolio came in last time + some generous alumni funding the side-events).
The format is like any other regular hackathon, though we would love to somehow figure out a way to have it so that we can have a hackathon of OSS PRâs i.e. where contributions to big OSS projects can be submissions as well. I suppose thatâll require partnering with some OSS projects?
OSDCTF
An open-for-all Capture-The-Flag competition which we have in parallel with OSDHack.
Will push college to increase fund but else needs sponsorship for prize.
The Terribly Long Quest for The Treasure of Trivia Town
A day-long open-for-all CTF-styled trivia contest which we have in parallel with OSDHack (kind of like Hallidayâs Easter Egg hunt from Ready Player One ).
The idea is to not just promote tech among newcomers but also the culture around tech. The questions require intensive google searching, sitting through movie scenes for quotes, looking up sci-fi short stories etc. Weâve seen it massively improve participant experience, expose them to media famous among the tech community (Tron, Monty Python, etc) and act as a brilliant way to promote our culture and gain active nerds/members/volunteers.
We incepted the idea and had the first iteration last year with overwhelmingly +ve feedback!
Not backing-up the questions is one of my biggest life regrets
Funded by college. (itâs either this or CTF event)
Meetups at OSDC
We try to hold an offline talk every week whenever itâs not exam season.
Information of all our meetups with slides and links are maintained at the osdc/meetups repo. Weâre lagging behind and will be updating all the info of the past 9 months here by the end of the week.
Our Instagram also makes for a less attractive but working record of our meetups.
Link: osdc/codejam-v4 (All the projects would be open-source and be submitted to this repo as git submodules. (previous ones for reference: osdc/codejam-v3, v1 and v2 (in different branches))
We decided the theme to be that of music âGive Life Back to Musicâ.
Itâs a 5 day casual and 100% Open-Source hackathon where we group students together by ourselves on basis of skills and then music taste.
The event is limited only to students of JIIT-Noida.
This event has mostly been funded by membersâ community-pooling, you may look at the biryani monies in the README above!
Weâve added extra points to anyone who makes use of something from here and even more so if they can make contributions to existing open-source projects.
The structure:
The event is from Opening ceremony at 5 pm on the 12th. Teams announced after opening ceremony.
Hacking period starts on the 13th. Registrations still open till day one midnight (reasoning later).
Core-Team dissolves teams due to dead members and groups up new teams with active ones by day 2 (the 14th).
Mid-Evals on the 16th, mostly to just check-in on what everyoneâs doing and see if we can offer support/guidance (though weâve asked everyone to hold their discussions over discord, which helps in verifying authenticity and the core-team / alumni all have access to the discussions and can chip in / be mentioned).
Final evals and results announcement on the 19th.
Weâll be having a talk on OpenTF in the middle as well.
Prizes:
First Place - INR 2,000
Second Place - INR 1,500
Third Place - INR 1,000
The two tracks:
The Daft Punk track: - INR 750
A lot of participants are very much beginners and we encouraged them to explore new technologies and domains even if it may make for a more hectic experience (we added a rough no websites, please rule). After seeing everyoneâs discussion of their skills after day 1, weâll be announcing a Daft Punk track now for rewarding people going experimental and âgoing outside the comfort zoneâ which can also apply to projects which may not have gotten completed in time. Weâve shared GitHub - noteflakes/awesome-music: Awesome Music Projects for reference.
The Joel Zimmerman award - INR 750
For tools related to music production (plugins, synthesizers, live music via say sonic pi integration, etc) since a lot of people are inclined towards making music players, or sentiment analysers and other stuff on the music consumption end and we felt like encouraging engaging with the theme more actively.
After a lot of moving around of dates and other changes (it was going to be compulsory for all 2nd years but is no longer), the final dates were finalised 4 days before the event started. We had the posters up for full 3 days. Especially due to these less-than-ideal marketing conditions, we didnât expect to get many registrations. This is why we extended registrations till midnight of day 1 of the ~hackathon.
However we already hit >80 registrations before the opening ceremony (more than the last iteration). We had really fun interaction (music in bg, Core-Team karaoke, fun Q&A) once faculty left. and then received 20 registrations before midnight.
Requested Support from FOSS United:
Like I mentioned before, the prizes weâve planned so far are based on biryani monies / membersâ community pooling afterwards. Sponsorship for the prizes and logistics: posters printing, travel (covering both JIIT Noida sec-62 and sec-128 campuses), decorations for the lab would be awesome!
Logistics costs of INR 500 and the prizes of INR 6,000 should bring us to a total of INR 6,500 in sponsorship.
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