MindTree tries out an unconference

Since I'm maintaining the India Unconferences and Events group on upcoming, I often spend a bit of time looking for events to add. While doing that today, I came across Osmosis. Apparently, Osmosis is MindTree's annual technology festival, and its coming up in December this year - with a difference.

This year, the event is going to be held as an unconference, and they are opening it up to external participation. Which means (if I understand correctly) that anyone can attend.

Open space technology (closely related to unconferences) has often been applied in corporate environments, so it will be interesting to see how this works out.

One thing that caught my attention was this line from the site

Osmosis final day will be an ‘unconference’ where MindTree Minds will decide the topics to be discussed. In the true spirit of an unconference, MindTree Minds will decide, organize and lead the discussions on the final day of Osmosis.

Now, I'm not sure who a "MindTree Mind" is. Does it mean a general participant? Or it is a select group of people? If it is a select group of people who will decide the topics etc then it might just defeat the purpose.

Anyway, if anyone attends, I would be interested in knowing how everything went. The website is http://barcamp.org/osmosis and the event takes place on Saturday, 15th December 2007. Check it out and let us know what happened.

Design of Programmer Spaces - My DCamp Presentation

We spend a lot of time on improving productivity through better languages, tools and processes. How often do we look at the environment in which the team works? Cubicles are probably the worst environment for programmers because they are poor when you want peace and quiet to work alone and poor when you want to work collaboratively as a pair or group. In this talk we'll look at some environmental factors that impact teams and how we can design better programmer spaces.

Resources

• The Ultimate Software Development Office Layout: Tons of good links
• The Psychology of Computer Programming: The first book to look at programming as a social activity. Published in 1971.
• IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory: A study on designing spaces for programmers while IBM was planning out the Santa Teresa Lab. This was done in the late 70s.
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams: Another classic book on programming as a human activity. First edition in 1987.
• Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game: Has a good discussion on programmer spaces, especially with regard to agile processes. Published 2006.

There is a narration for the slides available in the comments section here

DCamp Photos

Sagaro, Arpit and I just got back from attending DCamp in Bangalore.

I'll post about the sessions later. For now, here are some photos from Allagappan's flickr stream, more photos from Muthu's flickr stream and a description of the sessions by Saurabh Minni.

Some Post-event Blog Posts

A couple of events happened this weekend.

On Saturday, SkillsCamp Pune took place. Freeman has a post-event blog post.

On Sunday, the Bangalore OpenCoffee Club meetup was held. Ramjee has the post-event blog post for this event.

Looks like both the events went off pretty well. Good stuff. Waiting for photos and videos ;)

The problem with voted content: Homogenisation

A couple of things occurred the past week which made me think about voted content. The first was Dharmesh Shah lamenting the loss of reddit and the second was an idea floated on the bangalore barcamp mailing list of having an event where all the talks are voted on by the audience.

Why do I think an audience voted event is a bad idea? Tyranny of the majority. Tyranny of the majority is a term applied to pure democracies where the majority can constantly out-vote the minority and therefore impose their view on the entire population (which is why there are no purely democratic countries, but lets not go there).

Lets take a simple example to see how this works. Say we have an event and 100 people turn up. 60 of them want to attend startup sessions. 40 want to attend photography sessions. There are ten speaking slots. Common sense dictates that having 6 startup sessions and 4 photography sessions is a "fair" distribution for the given audience.

But what happens when topics are put to vote? In every slot, the startup crowd can out-vote the photography crowd. Therefore when put to vote, the most likely outcome will be 10 startup sessions and no photography sessions.

But it doesn't end there. The next time the event comes up, the audience will be reinforced by those who liked it the first time around. Therefore in the second edition, there will be more startup enthusiasts in the crowd and fewer photography buffs. Over time, this positive feedback cycle will reinforce itself until the crowd and the topics become homogeneous.

This is exactly what happened to reddit for example. Topics that appealed to the majority go to the front page. As users visit the site, those who like the topics on the front page tend to stay, while those who don't will leave. Those who stay cause more such articles to get to the front page, which in turn attracts people who like those topics. A vicious positive feedback loop occurs as the crowd and the topics become homogeneous, eventually driving out minority interests.

The cool thing about a barcamp is that there is a great deal of variety in the topics. Therefore, even if you are in the minority, there is a good chance that you will find someone with your interests at the event. The biking collective was a good example of this. Such a session would never have survived a voting round. But the barcamp format meant that it was possible for those interested in the topic to meet up and have a session.

That is why I feel that efforts must be taken to preserve diversity.

Having said that, there is merit in voted sessions. Voted sessions avoid the situation where people talk about stuff that no one wants to hear about. But it makes more sense if voted sessions are just one of the tracks in the barcamp, not the whole event.

Organising your own OpenCoffee Club

Bangalore OpenCoffee Club Meetup

Following on from the Chennai OpenCoffee Club, Vaibhav and Ramjee are organising an OpenCoffee Club in Bangalore. OpenCoffee Club is is a place for people involved in the startup ecosystem to meet in an informal setting.

Read more about the Bangalore OpenCoffee Club and if you are interested in attending, join the bangalore opencoffee google group.

Organising your own OpenCoffee Club Meetup

Starting your own opencoffee meetup is very simple. Here is what we did:

• Decide on a time and place. The place should allow a small crowd to have noisy discussions as they roam around the place. Make it easily accessible. We chose 3pm Sunday mainly because there is less traffic — otherwise it is a pain driving through rush hour.
• Next you need to announce the meetup. We
  • Posted about it in our blogs. Kiruba picked it up and posted it in his blog
  • Sent a mail to the python, ruby and linux user groups
• For other cities, the local Barcamp, MoMo, LUG and other such groups are good places to announce the event
• Finally you need to turn up at the give time and place and let the event happen. We had a quick introduction at the beginning then broke for food/coffee and let the individual discussions happen.

Thats pretty much it. The cool thing about OpenCoffee Club meetups is that there is very little organising overhead, which makes it easy to organise and attend.

Lightning Talks at BCB4

We decided to have a session of lightning talks at the Python hall at BCB4. A lightning talk is a quick 5 minute talk. Usually there are a number of lightning talks one after another. The idea of the lightning talk is to give a quick introduction to a topic that might be new for the audience, with the discussions taken after the session.

It went of pretty well, one of the more fun sessions. It's really nice to see ideas bouncing off every five minutes, and with Kausik keeping strict time, the session flow was good.

After seeing it work nicely at the Python hall, I converted my Speed Geeking session into a lightning talk session. The reason was that there were about 20 people in the audience, which is too small for a speed geek, but good for lightning talks.

In this post I'll summarise the topics from the two lightning talk sessions. Click the links for more information on the topic.

• Code like a Pythonista: Brad Allen from the Dallas Python User Group talked about David Goodger's tutorial, Code like a Pythonista.
• Printing badges with Python: This was my session on how I used a python script to create attendee badges for Proto.in. If you attended Proto, you would have seen those badges. They were generated using a Python script.
• Restructured Text: Restructured Text is another variant of text markup languages like Textile and Markdown. It is the standard markup language used in docstrings in Python.
• Sudoku Solver: Anand had a talk on writing a sudoku solver. Very nice little program that uses a backtracking algorithm to solve sudoku puzzles.
• pygoogle: pygoogle is a python interface to the Google web search API. This session showed how you can use it for search engine optimization.
• Web.py: Demonstation of a quick web app written using the lightweight web.py framework. Web.py powers sites like Reddit and Open Library.
• Wicket and JTrac: Peter Thomas gave a talk on his open source project, JTrac, which uses the Apache Wicket framework.
• Agile Software Development: Agile software development explained in a few minutes!
• Second Life: An intro to Second Life, with an emphasis on the Second Life economy.
• Creative Commons: An intro to the CC philosophy.
• ShowMeDo: ShowMeDo is a site for the sharing of technical material through the medium of screencasting.
• Tempostand: Tempostand is a platform for independent artists to share their music under a Creative Commons license

Two sessions of thirty minutes each for a total of one hour of lightning talks. That one hour threw up these twelve topics. Good ideas and technologies to investigate in more detail. If you are going to be taking a session at an unconference, try out the lightning talk format.

SkillsCamp Pune

SkillsCamp Pune is coming up on the 18th of August. The aim of SkillsCamp is to create an open courseware focusing on technical topics. Think of it as MIT OpenCourseWare for software development. The idea is that each session will be a 15 minute workshop which will be recorded and then put online or on a DVD. It's an unconference, so participants can take a session on any topic that they want. Expect tech stuff like python, rails and so on to be recorded.

The organisation team for SkillsCamp is being led by Freeman Murray. I first met him at BCB3 when he was wearing a very nice creative commons t-shirt and then again at Proto.in and BCB4. At BCB4 he recorded a videocast while I showed him ShowMeDo, which aims to do something similar to SkillsCamp via screencasts.

It's interesting to see these initiatives for bringing in sharing of technical knowledge, especially because there is a serious shortage of good training material for a lot of newer technologies. Personally, I am a huge fan of screencasts as a wonderful medium for capturing and distributing this knowledge.

Review of BarCamp Bangalore 4

So BarCamp Bangalore 4 has come and gone. It was interesting as always. Lots of interesting people and things going on. I already wrote a post about Anand and the Open Library project and I'll be writing a few more detailed posts about the other stuff that I found interesting at BCB4. In this post however, I want to concentrate on the event itself.

Also, on the topic of BCB4 reviews, some other posts from across the blogosphere -

• http://latelyontime.livejournal.com/155355.html
• http://ramblings.ajaxed.net/2007/07/30/barcamp-bangalore-4-day-2/
• http://silicontryst.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/caution-demoing-product-at-barcamp/
• http://mataal.multiply.com/journal/item/42
• http://remainconnected.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-missed-day-1-of-barcamp-bangalore-4.html

To start off, the event was huge. Around 600 people turned up I believe. Now whether that is a good thing or not is something that we'll discuss in the last section of this post.

Another interesting innovation was the introduction of collectives. A collective is a group getting together to discuss a common topic. This was in response to the last time when a complaint was that if someone was interested in one topic it was hard to know where all it was happening. This time you could just head out to the collective venue and sit through all the collective sessions.

Now to dissect the event ;) I'll start out with the broader principles and finally come to the minor areas.

The law of two feet

To start off, one thing I liked the large number of parallel sessions. This is an area where a number of people complain - too many parallel sessions - but according to me, there needs to be way more sessions than you can possibly attend. This is because a crucial cornerstone of an unconference, borrowed from open space technology, is the law of two feet. Harrison Owen, the creator of Open Space says this about the law:

This law says that every individual has two feet, and must be prepared to use them. Responsibility for a successful outcome in any Open Space Event resides with exactly one person -- each participant.

The basic principle is that if you are not getting anything out of a session, use your two feet to move to a better session. The law can only be useful if there are enough sessions to choose from. So for the law to be successful, you need to have a lot of stuff going on. By "stuff going on," I don't mean formal sessions only. Hallway discussions and informal or ad-hoc sessions also count.

One of the things that I really enjoyed this barcamp, and thought was an improvement over last time, was the amount of stuff happening in parallel. I was able to extensively use the law of two feet to good effect and ended up in a number of good sessions.

Small groups in a circle

Another thing that I took away from Owen's writings on open space technology was the role of the circle. I've seen this validated time and time again — the best discussions happen with a small number of people facing each other in a circle. Take a look at this photo from the social tech session. I can't display it here since it is all rights reserved :( - http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=937911412&size=l

Studies have shown that the design of an interaction space has a profound effect on the types of interactions that go on there. Put people in a classroom and there is a clear divide between the presenter and the audience. The result is that you will likely get a presentation plus Q&A format, with a mostly passive audience. Put people in a small circle and you will get a completely different set of interactions.

Again for first timers, it often seems that the thing to do is to sit passively in the sessions. This often leads to confusion when a lot of interesting discussions are happening in the hallway.

I thought the classrooms at IIM are too big. I liked the rooms at Thoughtworks from BCB2. Probably the right size for having a session.

Whenever they start is the right time. When it is over, it is over.

These are two more principles of open space. Basically what it means is that a group will start when it needs to. The discussion will run its course. And then the session will end. "Run its course" could mean 5 minutes, half an hour, one hour, whatever. As long as participants are interested, the discussion is on. When the energy drops, the discussion is over and the session is closed.

The conclusion to draw from that is that it is impossible to fix an exact start and end time on a session. Some sessions start late because you are waiting for people. Some start early because there are interested people around.

I am reminded of Prayank's hands-on tutorial on flex (a detailed post on this will come later), a very nice session that was conducted in the middle of the lunch session when everyone was out eating. But there were a few people interested and the room was free, so the session was held then.

Again, sessions finish when they finish. Some discussions go on for a while. It can be a killer to cut the session short due to time constraints. Some sessions only go on for 15-20 minutes. It makes sense to move on rather than to fill the time.

I thought that the idea of encouraging sessions outside the rooms were brilliant in this regard. When the session is held on the garden or in the hallway or in coffee day, there are no time constraints and the sessions follow the principles automatically.

The paper wiki

The paper wiki just didnt work properly this time. One of the by-products of having a collectives system is that each collective had its own schedule. This is great if you plan to sit in one collective, but it was confusing if you wanted to move from room to room and wanted to see what was going on at a particular time across collectives. In the end I just went to the rooms to see what was happening instead of relying on the paper wiki. This was kind of messy and definitely one area to look at.

For instance there were a lot of corridor sessions scheduled for post lunch, 3pm on Sunday - Bikers, Photo, Speed Geeking, Python, Functional programming, and virtually nothing for 4pm. Session coordinators didn't realise this situation because there was no centralised paper wiki where you could see the timings across collectives properly.

I liked the paper wiki at BCB2. Very straightforward and everyone knew at what time a session was happening.

Dissecting the hallway discussion

The interesting thing about a hallway discussion (or any session outside the classroom for that matter) is that it follows these principles automatically. No one needs to tell anyone anything, it just happens like it is just the natural state of things. Hallway discussions are by nature limited to 10-15 people due to practical constraints. The participants are almost always in a circle facing each other. Those not interested almost always move on, and interested people join in. It is almost always participatory. And hallway discussions just start on their own and end when its over.

Amazing isn't it? Can we replicate these in planned sessions? I say yes. Hold the session outside the rooms — in the corridor, garden or coffee day or anywhere outside — and it will automatically follow the principles.

Getting the first-timer oriented

The thing about a barcamp is that it can be extremely disorienting to a first timer. Almost everything is structured in a way that is counter-intuitive to previous experience. The large number of parallel sessions, sessions that start late or early, sessions that end late or early — it can all be very disorienting.

A good paper wiki can be critical here. I also think if there are a large number of first timers, it probably makes sense to have an introductory session on 'navigating through a barcamp.'

Other minor points

An issue was that many uninterested people came along. This might be true, but it could also be a case of first timers not knowing how to get the best out of an unconference. The main thing is to get interested people into the event. I think pitching the event to the mainstream is a bad idea. Whoever is interested should come. If that is 50 people then that's okay. If that turns out to be large, then that's okay too. But it should happen organically. There need not be a deliberate focus on doing a big event. BCB is popular enough that it doesn't need to focus on publicity.

One more point that irked a lot of people was companies that did repeat sessions in the rooms because 'they didnt get enough of a response the first time.' Guys, the idea in a barcamp is to share and learn, not to use a captive audience as a focus group. I have no problems with companies showing a demo of their product. These sessions can sometimes be pretty interesting. But to do it again in the room is probably not correct. If you really, really want to do a repeat, use the corridors. Especially if there was not enough response the first time. If there was a great response then maybe its okay, but even then I'd suggest a corridor for the session.

Many complained about sessions overflowing their time. This is the problem with rooms. It's hard to apply the "when its over, its over" principle because the next session has to start. This was hardly an issue with the corridor discussions because there is always more corridor space.

Conclusion

Okay, this post is big enough already. What did I like? I liked the stuff happening in parallel and the hallway discussions. I thought the session rooms were too big and the paper wiki was very confusing. On the whole I was mostly in the hallway discussions, so it was a very good barcamp for me, though I can see how those who tried to decipher the paper wiki and plan the sessions to attend would have had a tough time.

Bangalore Roof Top Film Festival

Bangalore is about to get it's own roof top film festival next month. Nice to see the idea spreading. It's kind of funny how most good ideas happen by accident. The initial idea was to watch the cricket world cup on the terrace. Great work by Sagaro in getting it the RTFF concept started.

Which reminds me.. when is the next RTFF in Chennai? And more importantly, what is the venue [let me guess on that one ;)]?

Now that Sagaro is officially still alive, I'm pretty sure that the next RTFF won't be far away.

Barcamp Bangalore 3 Roundup

I was in Bangalore on Saturday and Sunday attending the third Barcamp to be held there. Here are bits from the event that I found interesting. This is a long post, you have been warned :) Note that the following is not in chronological order.

Python Conference

I met a few guys from the BangPypers groups - Anush, Anand, Kushal, Swaroop and Sidu. Apart from the Python conversations, I also asked if anyone knew what was happening on the planned Python conference. No one had much information, so I'm not really sure whats happening. Is the Bangalore python conference going to happen?

The Knowledge Foundation

The Knowledge Foundation is the name of the group that is behind various unconferences (plus Proto.in) in Chennai. We had a discussion on how to spread the unconference movement to other cities and other non-tech settings. While Barcamps have been a big success in India, there has not been much activity outside of a few tech events like Barcamps and Mobile Mondays. TKF has been working on that in Chennai where apart from Barcamp we've had Blogcamp, Wikicamp, Proto.in and Rooftop Film Festival (that reminds me - I have to upload the RTFF photos tomorrow). Coming up are another edition of Proto, Mobile Monday and Shoot. Quite a few people were enthusiastic about having small gatherings on other such topics. It would be great to see more unconferences on a whole range of topics in various cities.

Silver Catalyst

I talked to a few thoughtworkers about Silver Catalyst - Amir, Sidu and Vivek. Amir had recorded my session and had also interviewed me at the second barcamp bangalore back in December. I also met Umesh and a couple of other guys who had also attended my session in the previous barcamp. It was interesting to see how the tool had progressed in the three months between the barcamps.

Sidu took some time out to point me towards Mingle, which is a tool developed by the new Studios division of Thoughtworks, scheduled to release in June. I wanted to discuss Silver Catalyst a bit more with Vivek, but I lost him in the crowd somewhere.

Organisational Culture

There were three sessions that I thought touched on the same topic of culture from different angles. The first was by Savita Kini on Products vs Services in Indian companies. The second was by Satish about whether soft skills training was required. The third was by Shourya on the Bambi code jam initiative at GE.

Savita pointed out a number of challenges and opportunities facing Indian companies. Shourya made a good point in the discussion asking why we think that products are superior to services. Some of the points raised were profit margin and scalability. I'm with Shourya here that I'm not convinced that products are always better than service. Profit margin depends on the product. The XBox for instance is sold at a loss. Mobile phones have very thin profit margins. Scalability is also not a great reason as it all depends on the market. If you put out a product in a small market, there may not be much scope for scalability.

In the end, I think the biggest reason that product companies are not as prevalent is because of the organisational culture. Large companies are by nature risk averse. Since there are a lot of profitable service companies, we tend to follow them and not take the risk of doing something new. One of the cool thinks about Barcamps is that it gets a lot of product startups together.

That ties in with the second talk about soft skills training in IT companies. Soft skills are certainly required. The problem arises when the training is imposed rather than sought. Sukumar made a good point that knowledge can never be given, it can only be taken. I dont think a one day training can build teams for instance.

Satish had a good point which, to me, got to the heart of the matter. Fishermen work in teams because they know that if they don't, all of them will have trouble with dinner. The result of success and failure is right in front of them. They don't need to take a training class to realise that. The problem in large organisations is that there is a disconnect between the work and the outcome. Developers who do the work cannot see the outcome of their work, either in the form of customer satisfaction or bottom line impact. Thus they associate with the closest outcome that they can see - the salary - and start working for the money instead of the company.

A startup culture is like the fisherman team. Everyone is aware of pretty much everything and they know the outcome of their work. The question is can we get a startup like culture in a medium or big company?

Which brings us to the third talk by Shourya on Bambi, a codejam initiative taken in GE. He explained how he got the idea from the Yahoo Hackday in the first Barcamp Bangalore, and implemented it in the form of a codejam at GE. He explained how there was trouble convincing the management about holding it. Finally when it was held, it produced one IP plus a number of other cool, but not so useful projects. The second time around, the management actually asked for it to be held and it was held with some changes in the format.

A codejam, 20% time to work on your own project and other such initiatives are 'cool' initiatives. The problem is that they do not have direct ROI consequences. However, the actual dynamics are a lot more complex. Such initiatives for instance may (or may not) help attract smarter programmers, or reduce attrition, or build up a specific company culture. It may fail if the current programmers are not the type to take part in such events. So the success depends on both the current culture as well as the future culture.

Another problem is that some companies don't really believe in it. Someone was talking about 20% time in their company and how you can work on what you want provided you finish the main work. Since work pretty much takes the whole time, plus a bit more, this is as good as maintaining the status quo. The point of 20% in Google is that you can spend that time even if you are working on something else. They are okay with the fact that the main work will take a bit more time. So that again points to a difference in company culture.

So how can these forces be resolved in managing the current culture or creating a new culture? Thats the big question, but the discussions were interesting.

Proto

There was a discussion on the venue for Proto. A lot of people from Bangalore wanted the next edition of Proto to be held in Bangalore. This was a completely ad-hoc session held under the trees (an ideal unconference session!). [Off-topic digression: When a projector is involved there is a clear speaker/audience divide. Get everyone sitting in a circle and it becomes a discussion with everyone pitching in their views.] Back on-topic, there was a good discussion where it was decided to have the next edition in Chennai with interested people from Bangalore joining the team, and the session after that will be in Bangalore.

Barcamp Bangalore 2 DVDs

Amir from Thoughtworks had recorded a lot of sessions from Barcamp Bangalore 2. It came to 8 DVDs in all after editing. Kesav brought his set of DVDs for us to make a copy. The problem was that it takes a long time to copy all eight. Finally, Kushal volunteered to make copies for us. Thanks Kushal!

Quake deathmatch

A few of us had a Quake deathmatch using OpenQuake on Saturday evening. Jace, Shreyas, myself and a couple of other guys were there. It's been many years since I played Quake so it was great fun. For some inexplicable reason OpenQuake would sometimes stop reading the horizontal axis of the mouse. The mouse would work fine in the menus, but in the game I could only look up and down and couldn't turn left and right. Quiting and rejoining the server fixed the problem, but the frag count went back to zero. It happened thrice in all. Highly frustrating. Absolutely no idea what caused it.

Dinners

A dinner was organised at the end of Saturday. I didn't attend it because I went to meet a few guys at the Forum. At the dinner were ex-thoughtworker and AI hacker :) Ravi Mohan, Bharat Guruprakash, Manoj Govindan, Rajesh Babu and myself. A number of interesting topics were discussed like machine learning, silver catalyst, the ongoing drama at the scrumdevelopment group that has been tragically comical, work at thoughtworks and subex, thoughts on the CSM, agile in India, applying agile to embedded systems, PhD, research, entrepreneurs, dungeons and dragons, board games and so on.

We had to catch our train on Sunday night. Ramesh Babu joined Sukumar and me for the evening. He had hosted Syed, Kiruba and Sukumar on Saturday night. Kiruba and Syed had a dinner appointment so we split up at the station. They returned 5 minutes before the train was scheduled to leave, running and sweating, and then the train left half an hour late :)

Photography

I met Mahesh Shantaram at lunch on Sunday. Mahesh is a documentary photographer based in Bangalore. He has some very nice photographs that you can see online here. Amogh had a session on conservation with stories based on his photographs. He goes into the forest every weekend to take photographs. We later caught up with him at Cafe Coffee Day after the event was over to have a discussion about the Shoot event thats coming up and also if we could join up with him on a trip sometime.

Sessions

A few quick words about the sessions that I attended.

Motvik showed a demo of their WWIGO product. They showed how to use a mobile phone as a webcam and transmit data via bluetooth to the laptop where it was streamed over skype to another person. Inactiv explained their Activ Mobs service, a group SMS service for groups of friends. There was a presentation about Bigswerve by Raj Bala. What they do is to go through the comments at various websites and generate a network based on comment patterns. Comment patterns an example of implicit networks where the network is not formally defined and a comment automatically implies a level of engagement with the site. A few thoughtworkers gave a presentation of Continuous Integration and Cruisecontrol.rb. Sowmya Karmali had a session explaining the Mifos project. Marek Tuszynski had an event on How to organise an open event. Marek was the organiser for AsiaSource and a few other events. I think it started early or I messed up the timing because I really wanted to attend but when I went there the session was just wrapping up. There was a nice session on usability by Hari and Ram.

Bangalore Barcamp 3

I'm off to Bangalore this evening to attend the third barcamp at bangalore. I'm hoping for some good discussion and meet up with interesting people. I'll post a roundup of the event when I get back on Monday.

Upcoming conferences

There are a lot of conferences (and unconferences) coming up in the next few months. The calendar is pretty packed. Here are some that I'm keeping track of, in order of the dates:

• wikicamp.in (25 Feb): For a start, wikicamp.in is happening this Sunday. It looks to be very interesting, with almost 300 participants signed up including the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. Also check out the Speaker list, and add your name if you are interested in giving a talk. And don't forget to join the mailing list for announcements.
• FOSS @ NIT Calicut (2-4 Mar): There is a FOSS conference coming up at NIT Calicut on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of March. More information on the FCI Wikia
• ChennaiPy workshop (17 Mar): The next gathering of the ChennaiPy group will be a workshop on the more advanced Python concepts. It will be in Chennai on the 17th of March (Sunday). Take a look at the ChennaiPy wiki to attend or give a talk. I'll be giving an introduction to decorators, and will be touching on my blog post, “Using Python decorators to implement guards.” If you are interested in Python and are in Chennai, do drop by. If you would like to talk about something in Python, go ahead and add the topic to the wiki.
• Bangalore Barcamp 3 (tentatively Mar): Planning has started for the third edition of the Bangalore Barcamp. If you are interested in organising or attending, I suggest joining the bangalore_barcamp mailing list. Take a look at the call for organisers here.
• Python Conference (tentatively April): There are plans for a first Python conference in India. Again, join the BangPypers list to keep track of this. If you would like to help out in organising, reply to this thread.
• Agile India 2007 (tentatively July): If you are interested in agile software development, then look out for Agile India 2007. Planning has started, check out the call for organisers on the mailing list.

Bangalore Barcamp 2 Roundup

Here is a roundup of some of the events during the barcamp. There was so much stuff going on that there were quite a few times when I wanted to be in two or three places at the same time, and ended up missing some interesting stuff.

The first presentation was by Sandeep Singhal from Sequoia Capital. He talked about what they look for in the companies in which they invest, and proceeded to give ten points that they look for — addressing large markets, good team DNA, clarity of purpose, rich customers, insane customer focus, they are pain killers, think differently, agility, frugality and they disrupt the market.

It seems to me that VCs are pretty interested in investing. On the second day, Kiruba had a session on Proto.in. I had mentioned Proto.in previously in my blog, and its coming up next month in Chennai. It's a chance for entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas to a group of VCs in ten minutes by showing a demo/prototype.

There were a couple of talks on social entrepreneurship as well. These were based on Dr.C.K.Prahalad's book, "The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid". Harinath Pudipeddi discussed social entrepreneurship in the healthcare industry, while Siva Prasad spoke about microfinance.

By the way, there is a business plan competition for social entrepreneurship called Genesis which is being conducted by IIT Madras, MIT and a few others. The contest takes place through Jan and Feb. The schedule is available on the website.

Jonathan Boutelle had an interesting session on how they scaled Slideshare. Slideshare is a place where you can upload presentations and they share them, embed them in blogs and so on. It's positioned as YouTube for Powerpoint, and the whole thing was done using Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3.

It was done with just a few people (less than 10) in Delhi in six months. Another cool thing is that they serve the flash content directly from S3. This means that if there is a huge spike in viewing presentations, all that traffic is handled by Amazon. In fact, even if the slideshare site goes down, you can still view presentations embedded in blogs, because they come straight from Amazon.

A theme that I noticed was that there were quite a few companies using Amazon services. It was something that I didn't expect. Apparently, a number of photo sharing sites use the S3 service to store their data. I met Manish from Picsquare and he said that they stored all their high-res photos on S3. He also mentioned that some other companies kept their data backups on S3! I had no idea that Amazon services were so popular.

Aditya Mishra from TCS had a session on innovation in large IT services company, where he made an interesting point about what innovation means for a services company. After all, someone else gives the requirements, and you deliver for those requirements, so what does it mean to be innovative? He gave a number of examples where TCS has been innovative with business models and development processes. He made a point that the entire outsourcing industry is a result of TCS innovation in succeeding with outsourcing in the 1970s when no one believed that such a thing could be done.

There were a couple of discussions that I had about Agile. Marco Janson from Thoughtworks had an introductory session on Agile, but I also had some interesting coversations with a lot of people from thoughtworks, as well as Sowmya from Aditi. There were some more sessions on agile, mostly by various people from thoughtworks.

There were a few Python related sessions. I attended one by Anand Chitipothu on web.py. One of the interesting things was that Anand is doing a rewrite of Infogami. web.py was initially written by Aaron Swartz for Infogami.

Aashish Solanki had a session on his new site YBangalore.com, which is a site to have user generated content about Bangalore. There were a number of other sessions on other sites that have been developed or are in beta. I didn't attend many sessions on Day 2, as I was in the corridor discussions that were taking place. As a result I missed many sessions.

Another session from Day 1 was Jay Fichialos talking about how they implemented HackDay at Sabre. Sabre is the company that owns travelocity and a number of travel and hotel related sites. Jay got the idea for HackDay after talking to Chad Dickerson at the first Bangalore Barcamp. Chad had just finished the HackDay for Yahoo at that point. Jay then implemented HackDay at Sabre and it was a huge success.

Taylor Cowan, also from Sabre had a session on an experiment he is doing with Sabre Labs. Sabre has huge databases of information on hotels availability, car rentals, airports, flights and so on. The idea is to make all this data available via an open REST API. Once the API is released, developers will be able to take this data and create their own mashups. This is very exciting. The whole thing will launch at opencontenttravel.com sometime in mid-Jan.

Another interesting discussion was with Jace, Shreyas, Amit Pande and Harish about Bangalore culture and sociology.

Shreyas also had a presentation on RadioVerve, a site that presents streaming music of independent indian music. You should check it out.

I also met Manoj Govindan and Ravi Mohan in a discussion on cellphones, dungeons and dragons, and wargaming. I last met Ravi back at Agile India 2005.

Finally, I gave a presentation on the stuff that I'm currently working on. I'll elaborate more on this in the next post.

A big thanks to the organisers and sponsors who did an awesome job in setting up this barcamp!

Back from barcamp

Returned from Bangalore today. I was there over the weekend to attend the second Bangalore Barcamp (my first). It was really cool. Lots of interesting sessions, lots of interesting people. Expanded post coming up tomorrow.

Bangalore Python meetup

I attended the third Bangalore Python meetup. It was my first time there, having learnt about this group only recently. The meeting was great. Around 19 people attended the meetup. After the initial introductions, I started out with a talk on Beautiful Soup. Beautiful Soup is a Python module that is just perfect for screen scraping applications. The website has more on this module. After that we had a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session to discuss a Perl CPAN like module for Python. Anand has posted the minutes of the meeting, and Swaroop has another overview, along with some pictures.

BangPypers

BangPypers is a Yahoo group of Python programmers in Bangalore. It was created only recenlty, and provides a good forum for discussing Python If you are in Bangalore (or even if you aren't), and are interested in the Python programming language, then think about joining it. One warning: The group is sometimes spammed with job postings for python programmers, so you may not want to join with your favourite email address. Use a rarely used email address instead.

Back from Agile India

I was out attending Agile India 2005 this weekend. In short, it was awesome. Got to attend some good sessions, and more importantly, meet lots of interesting people. I got to put out a work of thanks to the organisers who did a pretty awesome job of running everything smoothly. Usually something or the other goes wrong, but not this time.

I need a few days to collect and summarise my notes and then I'll post a more detailed account of the conference.

Agile India 2005

Agile India 2005 is being held in Bangalore next week. This is a conference you don't want to miss if you are in Bangalore. Registration is only Rs.500 per person for a pretty impressive speaker list. Normally these types of conferences cost many thousands of rupees. Don't miss it.

Back in Banngalore

Back in Bangalore. Will most likely be here till the first week of September.