Community Issues
From LBwiki
| Table of contents |
User Groups
We hope to get FOSS user groups from across India involved in the event. Here is a post on the Mailing List that you might want to think about:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linux-bangalore-2005/message/1823
Can you think of a way to get user groups to participate, instead of just keeping to themselves? Make islands become a nation?
Get on the Mailing List and let's talk about it!
Student Communities
The fire is dying in the student community - how do we rekindle it?
One immediate task is to document the FOSS penetration into educational institutions. Students who read this please respond:
- To what extent do you have linux/free bsd servers in your institute for mail, web, file etc?
- To what extent are the enduser machines in the labs using FOSS?
- What percentage of desktops used by staff and admins are FOSS?
Please give the name of the institution when replying
We are considering publishing a list naming educational institutions that support FOSS openly.
Mapping the FOSS movement in India
Its been more than 10 years since FOSS & the community has been active in India, but little is known as how it all started and progressed, the events that shaped up things, the turning points, the people behind them etc. Some bits and bytes are avialable on this Saga, but would need deligent hands to write it out, putting it all piece by piece to gether to give a complete picture.
What is needed
- How the LUGs were born, people behind them , maybe a saga on each LUG.
- Projects - how some projects were initiated here, the work they did, people moving them.
- The people - who made it all happen in their own ways. About them how they got into this, the work they did, the vision of the future they have.
This work needs not just a few hands, but all the hands behind the movement in India.
Also this work need some hard decisions. Like FOSS movements in the rest of the world, the FOSS movement in India has also primarily been run by IT professionals. Or, to put it in a simpler way, geeks. The result has been - initial euphoria, and then a retreat into cynicism as internal politics kick in. A lot of the people who fueled FOSS in the initial stages in India are now still contributing in their own way to FOSS, *but* are reluctant to be part of the mainstream of the movement. We need these guys back - or at least we need to document their contribution to the movement.
We also need to compile a database of companies/organisations using FOSS. Three categories spring to mind:
- Organisations that use FOSS and develop and deploy only FOSS
- Organisations that run on FOSS and deploy at least some products
- Orgs that mainly or exclusively run on FOSS
Draft Questionaire
Related External Links
- List of LUGs/SIGs/UGs by Fred (http://www.wikiwikiweb.de/LugsList)