Hi all,

Heads-up for anyone interested in Free & Open Source Software,
FOSS.IN is here.

FOSS.IN/2005 (the successor to the well known Linux Bangalore
conferences) is from November 29th to December 2nd, at the Bangalore
Palace in Bangalore, India. This is India's biggest FOSS conference.

If you want to know more, check out http://foss.in/2005

FOSS.IN/2005 is a community-oriented event. For it to be successful,
it needs to reach the people who would benefit the most from it, and
help in increasing the tribe of contributors and users of Free & Open
Source Software.

The four day conference intends to bring together the entire cross
section of players in the FOSS scenario - users from different target
communities, technologists, developers, educationists, businesses as
well as policy makers.

The theme for this year's conference is "Conversations". On the FOSS
horizon, there are several efforts that are represented or addressed
across the country. In, parallel, there are various technical
discussions and dialogues that have happened at the earlier
conferences and meetings and are expected to happen at this
conference too.

At FOSS.IN/2005, the focus would be to catalyze mutually beneficial
interaction between the technologists and technology implementers
(FOSS developers) and the end users, policy makers, educationists and
industry. This focus would be in addition to the intent of enabling
technology knowledge dissemination across the community through talks
and/or demonstrations.

The call for participations has been out for quite some time now.

You can see the Call for participation @ http://foss.in/2005/cfp/
A list of possible topics is available at http://foss.in/2005/topics/

If you would like to give a talk, tutorial, do a workshop or
organize a Birds of Feather session, then register it at the
earliest, only 4 days left for speaker registration.

To register as a speaker visit
http://foss.in/2005/speakers/

Giving a talk for first time? Do read do's & don'ts compiled by past
speaker experiences
http://foss.in/2005/guides/speakers.php

If you are planning to speak or attend (or even if you cant attend
due to reasons beyond your control), you can help getting
the word out in a variety of ways:
eg. talking about it friends, colleagues, clients etc, putting it up
on your blog if are planning to speak or attend, putting up posters
about the event at your school/college/organization etc.
See http://foss.in/2005/promote/ on ways to promote it.

If you are part of a LUG/GLUG/FSUG etc post on your mailing lists
about this event, especially if you stay in south.

Also keep a watch on
http://linux-bangalore.org/2005/wiki/index.php/Community_Issues
where we would be planning for some pre-event activities where we
welcome participation of all FOSS communities. Primary action items
being conducting a web-survey of FOSS usage in India in academic and
business environment. And also on mapping the FOSS movement in
India. More on this in a future mail.

So are you IN?

Karunakar

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* Work: http://www.indlinux.org *
* Blog: http://cartoonsoft.com/blog *
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