Twincling Vijayawada

To better serve the interests of Open Source enthusiasts in Andhra region and create a focussed engineering team along the lines of the professional Twincling team at Hyderabad, we've started Twincling Vijayawada.

The core team is lead by Sandip Tiwari (sandip AT twincling DOT org) and is expected to be supported by Bishal and Saroj. The first set of activities in terms of infrastructure and projects has been identified.

If you are located in Vijayawada, Guntur and are passionate about Open Source vision and projects, please drop in a line with your contact details to Sandip Tiwari. We'd need many volunteers to work on the various initiatives and will appreciate all the help we can get.

Please take a look at http://vijayawada.twincling.org/

Open Source Days 2008 (Aug 2 - Aug 10)

Open Source Days 2008 is a 9-day event scheduled to be held from Saturday, August 02, 2008 to Sunday, August 10, 2008.

The theme is - 'Get Smart, Do Well and Have Fun' !

The Objective of Open Source Days 2008 is to educate and empower participants with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed in todays fast changing IT world.

You need solid technical skills to do well in your academic career, in your job to deliver results. Open Source software helps you acquire those skills and build your credentials.

Open Source Days 2008 is a fun-filled yet technically focussed event which has a mix of technical presentations, interactive discussions with professionals and workshops. There will be many hands-on Workshops at multiple locations.

There is also going to be a Quiz on 9th of August from 4:30pm - 5:30pm.

Writing code, executing test cases, reviewing bugs, participating in Open Source community projects helps develop software programming and communication skills. As part of the Twincling mentorship programme, you get to learn about the various Open Source project opportunities and how you can participate. You'll also have a chance to discuss and know about mentors.

Thanks to sponsors, You can win yourself Software CDs, T-shirts and other exciting prizes like Headphones, DVD Player !

Workshop Focus Areas (Technical areas)

. Linux/UNIX Administration

. Gentoo Linux 2008.0 Setup and Administration

. OpenSuSe 11 Linux Setup and Administration

. FreeBSD 7 administration

. OpenSolaris 10 administration

. Package management (portage, ports, pkg, rpm)

. Ruby scripting

. Portable shell scripting

. Regular Expressions

. Linux systems programming

. Linux network programming

. Building Linux Clusters

. OpenSolaris Systems Programming

. Linux File system (ext2) concepts and programming

. File system development

. Linux TCP/IP stack internals

. BSD TCP/IP stack internals

. Network Security (SSL, IPSEC)

. OpenSSL and PKI infrastructure essentials

. Developing Anti-Virus software

. Anti-spam software development and Bloom Filters

. PostGreSQL database setup and administration

. PostGreSQL C++ / Ruby / PHP database programming

. LAMP setup, configuration and PHP 5 programming

. WebServices and SOAP programming with PHP

. Drupal module programming (for Drupal 6.2)

. ISO C99 Programming and library development

. OpenSSL API Programming using C

. Firefox architecture and developing Firefox plugins

. Firefox XPCOM C++ programming

. C++ Programming (class based design, functors)

. C++ and STL (Standard Template Library) Programming

. C++ GUI Programming with QT 4.3

. KDE 4.x plugins programming

. Open Source Games design and programming (using KDE/Qt/C++)

. OpenGL Programming (using KDE/Qt/C++)

. Semantic Web Essentials, RDF, Ontology, DAML

. XML essentials and programming (DTD, XMLSchemas, XSLT)

. XML Security vocabularies (XMLDSig, XMLEnc, XMLKMS)

. Core Java Programming

. Enterprise Java Programming (Servlets)

. Middle-tier Java Programming (EJB)

. Software Design Patterns

. Model Driven Architecture (MDA)

. Middleware technologies - CORBA - C++ programming

. AI Agent programming using Prolog

. Developing Distributed Applications with Erlang and OTP

. Real-time Streaming Multimedia using Helix Community server

Workshop Focus Areas (Community)

. Getting started in Open Source Projects

. How to contribute to OpenSuSe Linux project

. How to contribute to Gentoo Linux Project

. KDE 4.x project and opportunities

. Twincling projects

. Open Source Games projects


All Workshop sessions have been modularized for 1-day, 2-day or 3-day sessions with focus on programming and follow up projects. To the maximum extent possible, the Society will be providing course material for the various workshop sessions online and in PDF format.

How to register your college ?
Write a mail to info@twincling.org with your college name, contact number and the topic (please select upto two topics) you are interested in having a workshop on. The Organizing team will get in touch and finalize the event.

Please note that the best three participants from each college will get T-shirts and also an offer of mentorship in the Twincling Open Source projects.

So, Get Smart, Do Well and Have Fun' !

Organizing Team

Namita Iyer
Twincling Society.

Leela Manoranjan
Cordys.

Maruthi Vutla
AppLabs.

Rajesh Sarangapani
Accenture.

Sumit Upadhyay
Bank of America.

Sampath Inturi
Open Source Geek.

Ananth Pattabiraman
Open Source Geek, Music composer.

Umamaheshwararao Lankoti
Azingo.

Saurabh Bhatia
Safew Labs.

Ragu Pattabiraman
Intergraph.

Saifi Khan
Twincling.

About Us
Twincling Society is India's "first" independent, professionally managed, not for profit, registered Open Source promotion and development organization. Incorporated in Hyderabad AP, India, the charter of the Society is - to promote and develop Open Source software.

Twincling Technology Foundation is an initiative of Twincling Society with a single track focus on technical excellence and innovation. All the software developed by Twincling Society is released under Apache Software License 2.0 (ASL).

Website
http://www.twincling.org/

Helpline
+91-98484 59669
+91-98492 53753

Contact Us
info@twincling.org

Sponsors
Twincling Society would like to thank Avansec for sponsorship of the event. Avansec is a startup, focussed on developing green solutions for datacenters.

Would you like to be sponsor for the event ?
We'd love to hear from you. Please write to info@twincling.org

OSEF 2008 - bringing entrepreneurs together

It was an exhilirating experience working towards OSEF 2008 and Community 2008, and accomplishing the goals of promoting the Open Source vision.

Maruthi, Namita, Alolita, Nilayan, Uma and Saurabh had done an amazing amount of groundwork thinking through, involving the right set of people and executing it.

Poorna Shashank, Sumanth Krishna, O V L Kiran Kumar, Ramesh Rajamani and E. Sivakrishna of Synovel, were supportive of the event and volunteered for assistance. A big thanks to all. You guys rock !

The event started with Ms. Namita Iyer, President of the Society, talking about Open Source and how it helps boot strap product companies that can go on to build market leading products and nurture a community as well.

Ms. Alolita Sharma, Director of Open Source Initiative (OSI) and CEO, Technetra, started the session by asking the attendees a simple question - "what are three words that come to our mind, when we think of Open Source". The question really set a buzz among the members and make the people really interactive.

For the first time it has been possible in the IT industry that corporates can access "fairly" and "openly" world class software developed by world class developers.

Sharing between competitors provides them a level playing ground to compete in developing innovative applications over Open Source platform.

According to Alolita, "The competition is in innovation and providing services. It is a key enabler of change for prosperity".

The talk by Mr. D D Ganguly, founder and CEO of DimDim was awesome and as candid as ever.

He shared his startup experience and how he acquired seed capital and further funding from VCs. He talked about how to play the mating game with VCs in order for them to find your venture attractive enough to fund. VCs fund in millions, hence will never do seed funding. For seed funding, entrepreneurs should find someone who loves them and will fund them for being them. Last but not the least, he emphasized that the primary motive of entrepreneurs should be to create wealth for themselves and for their stake holders. The audience thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity for a heart-to-heart talk with a successful open source entrepreneur - who actually got big VCs to fund his venture.

Mr. D D Ganguly from DimDim, Mr. Suren Poruri from Polaris, Mr. Pramod and Mr. Sivakumar from AppLabs, folks from CA, Mr. Sivakrishna from Synovel, budding entrepreneurs from Genpact, NIC, Satyam and many startup companies actively participated in the session. Mr. Saurabh Bhatia, of SafewLabs shared his journey as an entrepreneur with the audience.

Mr. Sivakrishna, CEO of Synovel, presented an overview of Spicebird at the event. In his words, Collaboration is much beyond e-mail communication – it's a process where individuals work together to achieve a common goal. Apart from having e-mail, instant messaging and group calendaring, an ideal collaboration system should make 'working together' possible – like creating a proposal, launching a new product, developing software, managing group knowledge and publishing websites even while working from different continents. Spicebird - the collaboration suite developed by us, creates a platform to do precisely that. In addition, Spicebird makes customization easy and ensures that the software can be adapted to your business collaboration needs.

Ms. Kavita Vemuri of Innovation Lab, and Dr. Vikram Pudi of Open Source research at IIIT Hyderabad, were very supportive of the event from the word go. Kavita also teaches Product Management at IIIT to the students and is also involved with academia to industry transfer initiatives.

In the future, we look forward to interacting very closely with students and faculty at IIIT, Hyderabad on Open Source activities and also conduct course on Open Source software licensing and legal issues. At Twincling Society, we invested a lot of time in working through Open Source licensing, Copyright and Trademark issues. This is critical as we are focussed on infrastructure software products development and want to create the largest ecosystem in the world ! more on that later.

To keep the participants energised and vigorously participate in the discussions, lip smacking Samosas, Paneer Pakoda and delectable Kala Jam from Tiwari Sweets (one of Hyderabad's best sweet shops) was laid out for all the attendees to savor.

We wanted to make sure that the best people, the best speakers, the best food and the best arrangments are made for such a special and first of its kind event ! At all Twincling events, the focus is on the quality of interaction, discussion and genuine interest.

The best part is that Hyderabad has that kind of people with energy to engage in discussions.

If that sounds incredible, then you should remember that OSEF 2008 came to an end at 4:15pm and Community 2008 started at Applabs GEC at 5pm. The GEC is located atleast 10 km from IIIT and a lot of the attendees of OSEF turned up for this event as well.

Sreeram Kaviliga, AVP and Arun D. Rao, VP, my close friends at AppLabs, were the hosts for Community 2008 at 3XL Conference, AppLabs GEC. Arun, spoke on the occassion, sharing his vision about Open Source and how he sees close synergy between AppLabs goals and Twincling Society.

Sai Chintala, VP, and Rajesh Patil, Architect, made a presentation on Open Source initiatives at AppLabs, TEMA product and also shared their experiences.

Alolita who is a Director on the Board of Open Source Initiative, spoke on "How to build an Open Source Community".

The importance of nurturing an Open Source community with the right elements and Community leads cannot be over emphasised.

At Twincling, we have cultivated a "user" community with an excellent mix of professionals and students in the last 4 years. The experience that we have gained is immensely valuable and positions us uniquely.

Now, as we move to the GLOBAL orbit of developing world-class Open Source products (licensed under Apache License 2.0), we need to mentor and cultivate a "developer" community.

A "developer" community will create a better quality IT workforce in Hyderabad and provide Andhra Pradesh a competitive advantage.

How are we going to do that ? Well, i'll talk about that in the next blog.

Coming back after the event, we had a long day and all of us were physically tired and yet we had a 5-hour long Strategy meeting to chalk out the go-GLOBAL plan.

Special thanks to our dear friends Pratima and Ajay at Cybermedia who helped with the subscription form and May 2008 issues of the DARE magazine. It is an amazing magazine, 'DARE - Because entrepreneurs do'. Guys, we still have a few magazines available to give out to folks. So, if you are interested, please drop in a line to info@twincling.org and collect it at the next Saturday meet.

Thats not all :-) To further discussions on entrepreneurship, we have WiTi (What I Think Is) list. Consider joining it at, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/witi

See you all at, TWINCLING Open Source Summit 2008 on Saturday, December 13, 2008.