Hi all,

Heads-up for anyone interested in Free & Open Source Software, FOSS.IN is here.

FOSS.IN/2005 (the successor to the well known Linux Bangalore conferences) is from November 29th to December 2nd, at the Bangalore Palace in Bangalore, India. This is India's biggest FOSS conference.

If you want to know more, check out http://foss.in/2005

Imp: Last day for speaker registration is 8th October 2005, till midnight IST! So hurry.

FOSS.IN/2005 is a community-oriented event. For it to be successful, it needs to reach the people who would benefit the most from it, and help in increasing the tribe of contributors and users of Free & Open Source Software.

The four day conference intends to bring together the entire cross section of players in the FOSS scenario - users from different target communities, technologists, developers, educationists, businesses as well as policy makers.

The theme for this year's conference is "Conversations". On the FOSS horizon, there are several efforts that are represented or addressed across the country. In, parallel, there are various technical discussions and dialogues that have happened at the earlier conferences and meetings and are expected to happen at this conference too.

At FOSS.IN/2005, the focus would be to catalyze mutually beneficial interaction between the technologists and technology implementers (FOSS developers) and the end users, policy makers, educationists and industry. This focus would be in addition to the intent of enabling technology knowledge dissemination across the community through talks and/or demonstrations.

The call for participations has been out for quite some time now.

You can see the Call for participation @ http://foss.in/2005/cfp/ A list of possible topics is available at http://foss.in/2005/topics/

If you would like to give a talk, tutorial, do a workshop or organize a Birds of Feather session, then register it at the earliest.

Imp: Last day for speaker registration is 8th October 2005, till midnight IST! So hurry.

To register as a speaker visit http://foss.in/2005/speakers/

Giving a talk for first time? Do read do's & don'ts compiled by past speaker experiences http://foss.in/2005/guides/speakers.php

If you are planning to speak or attend (or even if you cant attend due to reasons beyond your control), you can help getting the word out in a variety of ways: eg. talking about it friends, colleagues, clients etc, putting it up on your blog if are planning to speak or attend, putting up posters about the event at your school/college/organization etc. See http://foss.in/2005/promote/ on ways to promote it.

If you are part of a LUG/GLUG/FSUG etc post on your mailing lists about this event, especially if you stay in south.

Also keep a watch on http://linux-bangalore.org/2005/wiki/index.php/Community_Issues where we would be planning for some pre-event activities where we welcome participation of all FOSS communities. Primary action items being conducting a web-survey of FOSS usage in India in academic and business environment. And also on mapping the FOSS movement in India. More on this in a future mail.

So are you IN?

Karunakar