Event report for DebUtsav Delhi 2019
Posted on Sat 20 April 2019 in Meetup
The Debian India Community in Delhi along with Mozilla Delhi/NCR community organized DebUtsav Delhi 2019 on 9 and 10 March, 2019.
For those who are unware, DebUtsav is an Indian style version of a typical Mini Debian Conference.
This was the first Debian related conference to be organized in the Northern region of India. We have had Mini Debian conferences previously in Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and in different cities of state of Kerala. But this was the very first one in the Northern Region.
DebUtsav was made possible with the help from our sponsors
- Hamara Linux
- National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
- The travel costs of some of our speakers were generously covered by Debian.
The event took place at National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), Delhi.
The event schedule was divided into two tracks.
- Debian Track and FOSS Track. The Debian Track was specific for the talks or workshops related to Debian.
- The FOSS track included talks/workshops ranging from General Free Software, Gender Diversity a Digital Security and privacy. The full schedule is present on the website DebUtsav.in
On the first day of DebUtsav
Debian Track
Although you can check the talks happened at the talks in the link to schedule. Some of the notable talks were Pirate Praveen on Debian Packaging in times of Docker and Flatpak. Abhijit Introduced us to the Debian LTS project. While Raju Devidas talked on "How to become a Debian Developer?" There were also workshops by Utkarsh Gupta and Sagar Ippalpalli on Packaging of Ruby Gems and Node Modules.
FOSS Track
Ashutosh Singh, also known as Juggernaut, talked on getting started into Open
Source and Debian. The other talks in FOSS track included, a talk on
Cryptography & Cryptanalysis by Ishan Malik. While Mohit Phulera talked about
Setting up and using Google Vision API's. Thing to note here that both were
first time speakers. DebUtsav got them started. We also had a Rust 101 workshop by Swarnim Arun. Karmanya Talked about Building Data Apps with Grames. The last talk for the day in FOSS track was by Himanshu, it had a funky name to it,
SELinux: For the Asgardians
Second Day of DebUtsav
Debian Track
The first talk of the day was on an Introduction to the Hamara Linux project by Shivani Bharadwaj and Raju Devidas. They introduced the Hamara Project to the one's present as well as talked about there upcoming release of Hamara codenamed Svastik.
Later in the Debian track, we had the first ever Bug Squashing Party BSP in India. For the BSP we had 2 DD's and 2 DM's and many other active Debian contributors present. They helped people present to go through the Debian bug tracking system BTS and find bugs that they can help solve. Although we did not manage to get any bugsolved during the duration of BSP, we did managed to get some people get familiar with Debian's bug tracking eco-system, introduced them to the various teams within Debian in which they can co-ordinate to get started for solving bugs as well as contributing to Debian in general. The BSP proved to be a good starting point for Utkarsh Gupta. Within two-three weeks after the BSP he has already solved many bugs including 15 RC bugs.
FOSS track
The first talk in the FOSS track was on Digital Security and Privacy by Shashikanth.
In the second talk our DM Sruthi Chandran raised the question on How gender diverse and inclusinve is the Free Software Community?. She
co-ordinated the sicussion very well and made sure that the people present
during the session got involved.
Later in the Day we had talks by Pirate Praveen on Take back our data and Freedoms. Vipul Gupta talked about digging
Opportunities in Open Source. Last talk which was scheduled for the foss track
did not take place because of the un-availability of the speaker Ranjith Raj
Vasam. Everyone got involved into the Debian BSP instead.
On the sidelines of the schedule of the second day, the podcast team of Decompiled was also present. With the efforts of the team, Raju Devidas interviewed Pirate Praveen. In the interview they talked about work done by Praveen over the years as well as his journey in Debian project.
Some statistics from DebUtsav
- For both the days combined, around 120 people registered for attending DebUtsav, out of them around 95 attended the conference.
- Around 10-15, unregistered attendees/on spot registrations were also present.
- We had a total of 14 Women Attendees.
DebUtsav Delhi was lucky to have the presence of - 2 Debian Developers Pirate Praveen & Abhijith PA. - 2 Debian Maintainers Sruthi Chandran and Sagar Ippalpalli.
It is during the conversations that happened at the conference that we realized that there are a lot of first's happening in the Debian India Community.
- Sruthi Chandran is the first Women Debian Maintainer from India, also soon to be the first women Debian Developer from India.
- Presence of DD's proved useful for Utkarsh Gupta as he got his initial requirements for a DM fulfilled with his keys signed by the DD's present at DebUtsav. He is at the time of writing this event report, the youngest DM from India.
- Currently Sruthi Chandran and Raju Devidas have there DD applications in process. If they get approved, we will be crossing the Double Digits of DD's from India for the first time. They are 9 now and with two more we will get to 11.
- This was the first Debian related conference in Delhi or anywhere in Northern India.
DebUtsav Delhi proved very productive in introducing many new people to Debian project and to free software in general. Also it provided an opportunity for the Debian contributors from Delhi to meet the Debian Developers.
The conference was made possible by the continuous efforts of people from the communities of Mozilla Delhi NCR and Indian Linux User's Group Delhi. Some of the people involved in the effort could be seen on the Team section of debutsav.in
Thanks a lot to everyone for puting up there efforts for DebUtsav Delhi. We are looking forward to having another Debian event in Delhi and more events around India.