Barcampkerala 9 an introspection

Barcampkerala 9 is my first barcamp as a management student. First of all a big thanks to our coordinators at Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham including Binu P. K. , Saranjith and Anish Chandran. Thanks for the superb venue with 4Mbps Wifi connection, hospitality, refreshments and the FREE lunch. College Bus Service to Oachira was a big help to many of us.

Barcampkerala 9 was blessed with mature, interactive audience and informative sessions. The unconference started with self intro followed by the first session by Binny V. A. on wordpress plugin development. The session was a very informative one with live development of POPINS plugin.

Then it was Praseed Pai’s turn – the much awaited session on FOSS in Kerala – a case of inmates running the assylum ? Praseed started by giving a brief history of the Free Software movement, the advantages of Free Software and then the problem of ‘irritatingly assertive’ people running the FOSS movement in Kerala. Praseed Stressed on the point that a programmer should be comfortable with different platforms.  ” How can you win a race with out knowing your enemy” ? There is a great potential for you as a Linux Developer if you have sound windows programming knowledge. The session was very interactive with feedback from FOSS evangelists and FOSS enthusiasts.

A short tea break and now Harikrishnan C. K of Cetlylive on stage with his session on Campusblogging – “Some insights about Cetlylive”. This session brought nostalgic memories of my Vosree days at Sree Buddha. Hari’s session was effective as i heard some students among the audience speaking about starting a campusblog at their college.

Session on “Introduction to Blender API” by Unnikrishnan K. V. followed. The session ignited a heated discussion on Blender and Maya. Screening of an open movie – Sintel followed. Then Hiran Venugopal explained the concept of an open movie and introduced an indian open Movie Project codenamed Chamba. Any one interested in associating with this project can contact him.

<——- Lunch Break ——–>

Post Lunch sessions are always boring but Pavithran Sakamuri intentionally chose the first slot after lunch for his session on Open Street Map- “Lets make Desi Maps”. This session was very interactive with questions like “Whats the difference form google map ? ” coming from the audience.

I couldnt give full attention to the next three sessions ‘phoneGap – Build mobile apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript‘ by Sherin C ,  ’Why(i) Fi? – a winged wend to the world without wires‘ by Gokul C. gopinath and  Abhi M. Balakrishnan and ‘Machine learning in practice‘ by Jaganadh G. I was busy with some networking during these talks (i hope thats the spirit of an unconference like barcamp). The sessions were informative according to the reports from my fellow barcampers.

The last session –  ”Introduction to haptics” by Unnikrishnan R was the real attraction of #bck9. The live demo was very interesting. A million haptics project ideas went through the audience after this session.

The idea of having a tweetscreen on the stage was awesome..Some of the tweets displayed here ignited informative discussions.

Personally, bck9 like the previous barcamps was an oppurtunity to network with more like – minded people. We had a small alumni meet of Sree Buddha college of engineering with Our Riji Sir and representatives from 2006 -2011 batches.

NB: More photos will be uploaded soon.