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MozTI@BESU

# Image source: Official poster for event

After a long time did attend a really big FOSS event today at Bengal Engineering and Science University, commonly known as BESU. It was my first visit to BESU campus. The beautiful campus did welcome me this morning with loads of greenery. The very surrounding did fill me up with energy and enthusiasm for the day. The on-spot registration process for this event began by 9am. By 9.30am, when sufficient crowd had already gathered at the seminar hall, the crowd was welcomed by the Vice-Chancellor of BESU, Dr Ajoy Kumar Ray. He addressed the crowd with a very simple but powerful speech which was the perfect start to the event.
After his address, Sayak Sarkar (a Mozilla Representative and also the organizer of the event) took over. He made a presentation on Google Summer of Code, introducing to the crowd the idea behind GSoC is, how it is run, how to apply for it and so on. Though his talk was supposed to be on GSoC, the enthusiastic crowd made him talk in details about some more topics such as managing GitHub accounts, using IRC channels etc. Sayak gave a demo of using both GitHub as well as IRC channels. He also explained in details about his own GSoC project. The crowd was so much interested in his talk that they kept firing him with questions unless Sayak finally had to stop them due to time constraint, promising to answer their queries over lunch later.
I followed Sayak to the dice. After his session on GSoC was over, it was my turn to talk about OPW (Outreach Program for Women) and WoMoz (Women in Mozilla). Since the concept of OPW came from GSoC itself, it wasn't much tough a job for me to talk on it. Sayak had sufficiently set the stage up for me. 
WoMoz was the only Mozilla oriented session which was covered today due to two reasons. Firstly, there was a free slot available today and all slots for tomorrow are jam-packed with different Mozilla talks and hands-on sessions. And secondly, being the only female Mozilla Rep available around for this event, I had to cover this topic and I could be present only for today.
Some simple but delicious lunch was provided to all participants from BESU and post lunch there was a hackathon session by HakerRank. The hackathon session was a real fun as the problem given was awesomely challenging!
We got free by around 6.30pm after which we had a small talk with Vice Chancellor sir. He was very encouraging and also a great enthusiast of Open Source Software. 
All in all, it was a great day. An event whose first day can be called a great success. The response received from the crowd was really awesome. After today, will be expecting to see some faces from among today's crowd, in Mozilla community and other Open Source communities very soon.

Comments

  1. Thank you Gaurab Patra, Subhasish Kundu, And Aveek for supporting us throughout the event... and special and heartiest thanks, to Priyanka Nag, Sayak Sarkar, and Sankha Narayan Guria..

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