Hi,
I was at FREED.IN/2007 in Delhi - a event organised by ilug-del. This even was known as FreeDel earlier. This was the first even I attended by ilug-del. Some luggers from BOM have attended FreeDel many times before.
It was a wonderful experience. Meeting many old friends and making many more new friends. Quite a few from ILUG-BOM were present. Many if not all of them were actually speakers at the event.
The event kick started with Raj Mathur opening address and lamp lighting ceremony. Shawn Kwon gave a wonderful talk on his experiences with FOSS in Korea. It was followed by Atul Chitnis's interesting talk on innovation and startup. Was a good topic for budding entrepreneurs in the audience.
Speakers from LUG-BOM included, Devdas Bhagat,Philip Tellis Barkha Khatri, Anurag Patel, Friji Karthikeyan, Arun Khan, Ananth A, Gaurav Chaturvedi, Dinesh Shah (who is a temporary Delhite atm) , Kartik Mistry and me. ( hope I didnot forget anyone, sorry if I did ). I finally met some people for the first time whom I knew from mailing lists and irc - Raj Mathur, Kingsly John (nicest and most helpful person ever!), Karanbir Singh ( you *have* hear him speak at least once, especially in a bof sort of environment ). There were quite a impromptu bofs. It often started as a chat and went on to become a fullfledged bof. One example was - when Mayank Sharma ( of Linux.com fame ), Aanjhan Ranganathan and me were discussing how we often meet at foss conf at various places - when Karanbir Singh joined us and Kingsly a little later. Since then the discussion took a right turn and went straight into discussing how certain aspects of ISPs work and "pairing" between ISPs work and other things even. After that a reporter from Tehelka.com joined us and asked many questions about FOSS. From that point on, many others joined the bof. That was one enlightening discussion.
There were two panel discussions even and many many talks in different tracks. There was a lot of new things to learn, I must say.
I had the opportunity to meet two GSoC candidates for the first time - Piyush Verma (KDE) and Anant Narayan ( Bell Labs ). Interesting chaps. Hope to see them again in future.Met old friends and known people from the Indian foss scene.
Other lugs represented were - Pune LUG, ILug-Cal, people from Bangalore were there even
ILUG-Del hospitality was awesome. I have never seen so many kababs at one time. ;). Some of us stayed in JNU campus, the place is really nice.
The event was co-organised by JNU - School of Information Technology.
Bottom line - great conference. You should seriously consider attending the event next time. Btw, it really is a community event. The line between speakers and volunteers is almost invisible. Quite a few speakers happily got "volunteered". Be there next time to see it yourself and experience it first hand.
Cheers!
Pradeepto