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Campus Konnect II


The event was rightly named and it was organized exactly a year after the version I. This time, the venue was chosen to be Techno India college at Rajarhat, Kolkata.
This event was meant to open the doors of the Open Source world to the first year computer students of this renowned technical college. The event was planned and organized by Sayak Sarkar, presently a Mozilla Reps Council member, with the help of Srijib Roy,a local Mozillian from the college.
Kaustav Das Modak, a Mozilla Representative, and I were invited as guest speakers for the event. The event start unfortunately got delayed by an hour due to some technical issues faced by the organizers. Instead of 10am (IST), we began at 11am. I took the stage to begin the day with an introduction to Open Source followed by a Mozilla introduction. I touched a bit upon what are the different Mozilla products and current projects being supported by Mozilla. I also spoke a little about how one could get involved with Mozilla and start their open source contribution.
After an introduction session, I handed it over to Kaustav who introduced the MDN project to the participants. After Kaustav, Vineel Reddy Pindi, an ex-council member and one of the oldest (I only mean in terms of experience and absolutely not in terms of age) Mozillians from India, took the stage and spoke about the Firefox Student Ambassador program.
After all the introduction sessions got over we decided to turn the passive listers to active coders and thus divided the crowd into two groups and began parallel hands-on sessions on MDN Code Sprint and MDN Documentation Sprint. As always, Kaustav led the code sprint and I took care of the Documentation sprint. This time, when we had a proper planning done on our end to not let anything go wrong, the Internet did fail us. The connection was so poor that both these sessions turned out to be mostly one way talk sessions where we just explained the participants how to do stuff instead of getting a change of doing something for real. With all the internet issues getting pretty common in most events now, the Mozilla India community is brainstorming on how best we could deal with the situation.



Post lunch, it was a Firefox OS app-building session led by Sayak and Kaustav. Sayak gave a detailed introduction about Firefox OS and Kaustav carefully tutored the participants to build some apps in a very simple and easy way.
Now that the Indian technical crowd is partially aware of the new mobile operating system in market, their enthusiasm to learn more and get more details about it makes our Firefox OS sessions a great hit always. We get fired with a lot of interested questions.
Though we didn't have too many swags this time, we tried giving away the little things we had, to the crowd, in the best possible manner. The deserving participants did depart with some Mozilla stuff which they could proudly show off to their fellow mates later ;)

Take aways from this event:
1) MDN is highly Internet dependent. We need to find ways to make sure not to trust on the event venue's internet facilities and  the organizer's promises. Need some kind of backup plan from our end.
2) Need to think if we could implement a simple username-password authentication method for MDN instead of depending on Persona. 
In the absence of stable Internet, Persona keeps us from getting even user-profiles created.

Other blogposts of this event:




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