-------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Dharan P Deepak - dharanpdeepak@gmail.com To: undisclosed-recipients : ; Subject: Free And Open Source Software (FOSS) Conference in Amritapuri Campus Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:18:14 +0530

Hi all,

We are conducting a FOSS (Free and Opensource software) conference in Amritapuri campus on March 28th and 29th .

The website is constantly work in progress and will take a while to be done. Meanwhile you can check out http://foss.amrita.ac.in

Tentative agenda is at http://foss.amrita.ac.in/site/foss-conference/agenda - We are planning a track 3 as well - social aspects of FOSS and also include mysql.

We are targeting 150 non Amrita students, 50 faculty (inviting free of cost), 150 Amrita students and 50 working professionals to attend this conference.

The main aim is to promote awareness about foss and help get started with contributing to foss.

As you know due to the economy people are finding it difficult to get jobs now a days. But jobs are available still for the right candidate.

Getting in to FOSS is an added advantage for students or working professionals as it helps to improve their confidence and resume too. Recently when the VP of Nokia visited our campus he mentioned that he would definitely hire some one who has been contributed to opensource because it implies certain level of skills and attitude the student has.

In this conference we have hands on session not just demos. This will help newbies as well as those who want to know how to contribute to FOSS. (Working with source code, making changes building etc).

We are envisioning the website foss.amrita.ac.in to be a comprehensive foss portal for anyone who is interested in foss and working with foss.

In the coming months we plan to have tutorials, links, video lectures etc to be uploaded and help people get started with foss.

If you could inform all your friends, alumni etc that you know about this event.

Registration is first come first served. It will definitely help the delegates as we have seen from the experience of our students.

There are 4 outside speakers (3 from Sun Microsystems and 1 from InApp solutions - Mr Amrnath Raja) and the rest of them are students sharing their experience with the hands on session.