In India undergraduate academic conferences are conducted regularly by colleges/universities to show their expertise and for publicity purposes. The challenges faced by the organization range from selecting speakers to arranging audience. Most technical conference in undergraduate streams are just programs consisting mainly of cultural and fun events. If the task is to conduct a Free Software Academic conference then it is more challenging. It involves
- Selecting speakers from Free Software Stream
- Convince authorities to conduct a Free Software Conference
- Getting audience to attend the event
- Using only Free Software for organizing and other purposes
First problem we faced was whether or not to involve technologies from Google and Mozilla. With Free Software Foundation strongly against Google products, especially Android; we decided not to go for the Android Workshop, one of the most popular and easy to organize tech workshop conducted in our part of the world. With Mozilla in its earlier stage of development and its intentions not clear we have decided not to go for that also. Anyway we could solve the first three points easily, since my task was to conduct the program in its third edition. I am talking about ICEFOSS , a Free Software Conference conducted by Federal Institute of Science And Technology. Here I will be writing about the Free Softwares we used and how we tried our maximum to stick to the Free Software ideology.
Brochure, Poster…..
First task was to create a brochure. There are lots of tools available. We had already created some using LaTeX. This time we went for Gimp. Next task was to create poster, and used Inkscape for that purpose. Inkscape being a vector graphics editor proved very helpful. Since it uses geometrical primitives, to represent images the quality remains same even though we try to enlarge it. When creating brochure using Gimp we faced the problem of quality. For invitation we used LaTeX.
Web Site
Major criticism we face usually is of about server and site templates. This time we took extra care to create the site using Free Software tools. So we went for Bootstrap,which is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Also the all the images used in the site are under public domain.
Conference Presentation
We provided laptops loaded with Debian for speakers.
Certificate
Certificate is made using LaTeX template available.
Comments !