Asia's largest conference on Open Source starts with a bang!

Team OSSCube could not feel prouder than what we felt at the sight of the thorngs and hordes assembled right on time for registrations to start. So much so that in the initial enthusiasm to register and participate at the conference, all FOSS evangelists created huge queues and pools near the registration desk. The patience and the enthusiasm shared by the community was immense (We love you!). The conference started with a slight delay of the schedule as the team channelised the masses inside the halls and prepared the show for the inauguration.

The Minister-in-Charge, Department of IT (Govt of West Bengal) - Dr. Debesh Das, inaugrated the conference with a speech on the FOSS scenario in India and the relevance of open source to all its stakeholders and how new inroads are eing made by the community and the academia and how the ecosystem is evolving in India. Post-inauguration, the conference sessions started, broadly divided in tracks.

Hall A focussed on the FOSS for Everyone track, that dealt with the relevance of FOSS for all stakeholders of the Indian Society - Community, Industry, Government, and Academia. The sessions started with a panel discussion on FOSS Powered India. The objective of the session was to focus on empowering citizens of the country by deploying Open Source in government processes and intitatives. A key highlight of the session was the discussion led by Dr. Debesh Das and Sushant Majumdar on how the government of West Bengal is using FOSS in their citizen initiatives. Next up was the plenary session by Eben Moglen on 'Freedom and the Web'. Eben focussed on the evolution of the web and how it has made the world into one social community; and how FOSS is relevant in protecting the freedom of speech and ensuring the freedom of interaction between idividuals over the social web.

What followed was one of the most interesting sessions in Hall A, which was enthusiastically attended by the community, on Job Opportunities in Open Source in India. The panelists focussed a lot on the skillsets required in the open source domain and what are the kinds of opportunities available to the developers. Vivek Viswanathan emphasised on the growing market in the embedded space and how is that creating huge opportunities for the developers, while Sreekanth emphasised on the evolving web applications and social web domain. Shubham Nagar was of the opinion that to have an opportunity in the open source domain, two kinds of skill sets are very important - Hardcore development profiles and the Open Source advocacy/evangelism profiles. Mishi Choudhary piped in with insights on how the legal industry is moving towards FOSS and how is that creating newer opportunities.

Hall B was focussed on PHP sessions. The day started with Bastian Feder leading a session on PHPUnit and how it can be successfuly used for better test cycle; he also demonstrated some key features of PHPUnit during the session. Bastian's session was followed by a session on Ingres 10 Features by John Smedley. John emphasised on the new additions to the Ingres database which makes it more suitable for applications requiring high transactional & concurrent users. John also focussed on the new security and deployment features of Ingres 10. Next was Jakub Vrana, who demonstrated his Adminer Editor project, which is a direct phpMyAdmin competitor. Jakub walked the participants thriugh the features and benefits of the compact architecture of Adminer over phpMyAdmin and demoed the practical security and the MySQL management capabilities of Adminer to the participants.

Hall C was the Drupal track for the day and it saw the most enthusiastic set of community over the other sessions. The day in Hall C started with a session on Building Powerful Search in Drupal by Prajwala Manchikatla and focussed on how Apache Solr can be integrated with Drupal to build strong search capabilities inside Drupal. In the next session, Markus Franz discussed how Drupal can be the best platform for Citizen Journalism and how it can be a driver of the platform. The best part of Markus's session was two case studies he shared on how media companies migrated to Drupal and created opportunities for a better Drupal deployment.

Sonali Minocha led a workshop on MySQL during the day focussing on achieving efficiency and effectiveness with Replication and Clusters. She will be taking another workshop on High Availablity tutorial on Day Two and lead a hands-on session on how to setup and manage a MySQL High Availability. With the wrapping of this session, the conference broke for lunch and networking. More details of day one will follow in a later blog post. Pictures and Videos coming soon.

The hardwork we did around building content and bringing together the various domains has really worked well as participants are only asking for more! Team OSSCube is really having the time of its life at OSI Days 2010. If you are around, do join us at our stall at Expo Booth 24 and 25 and give us an opportunity to know you better and show glimpses of the work we are doing in and around open source.