A brief Report on OSSCamp at Lucknow, Dated 26-27th March, 2011 On 26-27th march there was an OSSCamp organised at *Babu Banarasi Das Group of Educational Institutions* at Lucknow. College has taken the initiative to invite the representatives of various OpenSource communities like Wordpress, Joomla, Mozilla Firefox, Drupal, Php etc. Wikimedia volunteers were also invited for the event. The purpose of the event was to make students aware of the various open source technologies and their advantages. Also, it was an effort to motivate students to come forward and contribute.
Students from various colleges were gathered to learn and explore new and different technologies. I went there to represent Wikipedia. My presentation was scheduled on 26th of March, 2011 in the post lunch session. I talked about the different projects of Wikimedia foundation, some Wikipedia statistics, Wikimedia India chapter and discussed the role of volunteers and in the end I tried to motivate them to contribute. Over there, I was surprised to know that awareness of the students towards Wikimedia foundation was minimal. Most of the students over there were not even aware that they can actually edit the contents of Wikipedia. Only couple of them knew about the other projects of Wikimedia foundation other than Wikipedia like Wikitionary , Wikiquotes, commons etc. After the talk, on special request of students I demonstrated the editing process in Wikipedia and took hands on workshop of interested students. Students were very keen and enthusiastic to learn about Wikipedia. The session went on for almost ninety minutes and I had one to one interactions with the students. The inquisitive questions and their high level of interest made me more motivated to explain. Pic1: http://tiny.cc/stu1 Pic2: http://tiny.cc/stu2 Even after the hands on session, many students contacted with different queries. For me also, it was wonderful learning experience. The college authorities and student organisers namely Nitesh Sinha and Abhinav Upadhyay deserves huge round of applause for their tireless effort for organising a successful OSSCamp. Regards, Piyush Aggarwal
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