IndiaFOSS 3.0 - My Experience and Afterthoughts
Act I - calm b4 the (brain)storm
HOME, 26.11.2023, 13:??
“Man, I can’t believe it’s been almost a month already since I was in Bangalore-“
“Wait a sec, I WAS SUPPOSED TO WRITE A BLOG ABOUT IT OMG”
hops on PC
As you might have guessed from the title of this post, today I’ll be talking about my experience @ IndiaFOSS 3.0 (formerly IndiaOS), which was organised this year at the NIMHANS Convention Centre. Now some of you might be wondering, what did I, an average Joe from some suburb in West Bengal, have anything to do with a Convention on “FOSS”1?
Well, clears throat allow me to introduce to you…
drum rolls
OpenStreetMap!
Act II - A few words on OpenStreetMap, the Community and my involvement
For the uninitiated, OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the whole world that is being built by volunteers largely from scratch and released with an open-content license.2
Steve Coast founded OpenStreetMap in 2004, initially focusing on mapping the United Kingdom. In the UK and elsewhere, government-run and tax-funded projects like the Ordnance Survey created huge data sets, but failed to freely and widely distribute them. On August 22nd 2006, the OpenStreetMap Foundation was established to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and provide geospatial data for anybody to use and share.3
Now I know what you might think -
“Okay, that’s cool and all, but why not just use Google Maps/Apple Maps/(insert your go-to proprietary solution)?”
And you’re not wrong. Why even bother creating a map from scratch rather than, I don’t know, using already existing solutions? I can keep talking about it for paragraphs after paragraphs, but today’s not the day. I’ll be more than happy to explain it to you in my future posts (Hint: Control). Onto the Community part now.
With over 10 Million contributors all over the world, the OpenStreetMap Project has a very active community. In India though, that’s about a thousand recurring contributors and less than 500 active contributors. I happen to be one of them.
I have been mapping in and around my hometown for the past 6 months (or so). I have also been a part of the OpenStreetMap India Community for more or less the entire time I have been on OSM.
Act III - The Blueprint: OSM India getting involved in IndiaFOSS
It was probably the 9th or 10th of October, when one of the guys from OSM India mentioned about IndiaFOSS 3.0 and asked us if he should apply on behalf of us to be a Community Partner (which granted us some cool perks like a couple of extra tickets). Eyeing the opportunity to preach OSM, we said yes and quite surprisingly got approved ASAP. After that, we sorted out who will do what in a series of two or three meetings. Fortunately, I managed to get one of the free tickets, along with Adhavan, aka the guy who created SafeYelli, which is a citizen centric tool to report harassment, assault and other crimes on the streets in Bengaluru (he’s a really cool guy btw).
Coming to the travel and accomodation, I would like to thank to two individuals from OSM India (who requested to stay anonymous), whose help ensured my attendance to the event and meet with the rest of the squad.
Act IV - D-uhhh Weekend???
GATE 2, IXB, 27.10.2023, 08:4?
“yawns Boy, I sure do hope nothing can go wrong today…”
“on the intercom; e-mail & robocall This is to inform you that JiceSpet flight SG### from Bagdogra to Bangalore has been del-“
“chuckles this is fine.”
A flight (delayed by 3 hour from its scheduled time) and a 1-and-a-half hour bus ride later, I arrived at the hotel, checked in and barged into what would be my home for the next 3 nights. After being knocked out in bed for a while, my dad suggested to step outside the hotel and explore the venue (which was ~500 metres from the hotel) and to eat and savour some South Indian food. Me being me (and hungry, sort of), I jumped out of the bed for the latter and got ready right away, and we walked to the event venue.
Now coming from a place which is “barely” a city (if anything, I’d call it a village with medium-density residential and commercial buildings), as well virtually nonexistent public transit, what really shocked me was how Bengaluru has quite a vast network of state-operated buses, with frequencies that would put all STCs in West Bengal to shame. Even though Kolkata has quite a lot of buses, it’s privately-owned and operated, and the buses are beaten up Tata 1510/12s, which are modified beyond recognition and held together by thoughts and prayers (and a crapload of blue and maroon paint). Another thing which also shocked me was that there were actually sidewalks which you can walk on! I know it’s not perfect, nor entirely accessible, but for someone who has to play dodgeball with traffic to walk from point A to point B, it was pretty much heavenly.
BACK TO THE VENUE THOUGH, I was surprised to see that we weren’t stopped by any of the guards, but we went ahead anyway. I immediately fell in love with the building, especially the curved glass walls and the dome-shaped skylight above. Going in, I was met by a person who asked me if I was looking for someone there. To which, I replied Vishal (who was the only person I knew at the foundation). Guess what happened? The person who asked me that was Vishal himself. I felt such an embarassment, but we went ahead just getting a quick tour of the entire venue, as well as the place where our booth would be.
After that somewhat weird, but positive interaction, we went to this vegetarian restaurant serving local cuisine (regionally known as Udupi, or Udupi Hotel) called “Vijay Sagar”4, where we ordered quite a lot of stuff. I went for a Rava Dosa and Idlis, while my dad went for the usual Masala Dosa, and we both washed it down with a generous amount of filter coffee. I was sweating a bit after that, worrying about the bill, only to see it was amazingly cheap. I don’t remember the exact amount, but it was somewhere ~₹250 to ₹300, which is still ₹150 per individual.
Walking back to the hotel, we also discovered a Bengali Hotel and restaurant just a couple of buildings away from the convention centre, which came as a bit of a shock to me. After digging a bit, I found out that Bengaluru has a massive Bengali community, especially around neighbourhoods like RT Nagar, which, surprise, surpise, is an abbreviation for Rabindranath Tagore!
Day 1 @ IndiaFOSS , BLR, 28.10.2023, 08:??
“wakes up Ah man, yesterday was quite the chaos, I better get going to avoid any hassles today. What time is it anyway?”
“checks clock 8:45?!?!??! F#$!%NG HELL I NEED TO GTFO 10 MINUTES AGO AAAAA I’LL KILL MYS-“
After a rather calm moment after waking up and freshening up for the day, my dad went outside the hotel to a tea stall right next to it, calling me to come there. When I went, I was a bit infuriated with the delay (given check-ins were supposed to start at 9), but then he passed me a cup of tea, AND OH GREAT HEAVENS! Even though I thought I came from a region with some of the best tea it has to offer, and yet here I was proven wrong. Not to mention the Nandini milk5 had a much richer, creamier texture than what I usually get from milk here. Crapping on my mediocre home region aside, we half-trotted our way to the venue, checked in, and got ourselves these nametag stickers which they were offering on the desks beside the check-in. After that, we headed inside towards the banquet hall, where we had breakfast. The Thatte Idli was just on point, with the drizzle of ghee on top really elevating the experience. The Vada was perfectly crisp on the outside, plus the texture and “crunch” from (what I assume is Semolina) is something I go crazy for, and of course I can’t forget about coffee, the top 1 beverage of all time. My partially sleep deprived arse went for 3 cups in one go.
After that, we went to the booth, and met up with the rest of the folks. I was just as much thrilled as them to see them in-person, and then we set up our table ASAP, picking a select few projects to showcase OSM in various tabs, ready to be shown in cycles.
Just about when breakfast finally closed, a massive wave of people came pouring in towards the three auditoriums on the ground floor for the talks and panel discussions, and two rooms on the first floor for the workshops. At the same time, people were also booth-hopping, and going back and forth between the booths and the talks and workshops. Since there were about 6 to 8 of us, we decided to take turns in managing the booth, while the rest of the folks would go and explore the rest of the conference. Initially, I decided to put some effort and explain about OSM to the attendees. Oh boy, was it worth it! While most of the conversations were just me explaining what OSM is, how does it work, why does it matter, that was only ~2/3rds of it. A lot of people who came to our booths also used OSM to some extent in their projects, hackathon builds, or because their workplace used it as one of the many sources of geodata, or simply as a basemap. All of them thanked us a bunch of times for keeping up with these efforts voluntarily, and some of them further wanted to dig in and even contribute back to the project. For all of them, I was more than happy to explain the whole process in a nutshell, guide them on how to create an account on the OSM Website, and get started with stuff, and pointing them to the Indian OSM Community channels for further help if needed.
After roughly about 2-ish hours of yapping about, time came for lunch, and we all went to the banquet hall for lunch again. While I forgot what exact food items were there, but it was all vegetarian, some even being vegan, and they were quite amazing! Though I do remember having Gulab Jamun with a healthy serving of ice cream on the side, which is a combo which I keep falling for, even though I’m not a fan of the former (ROSOGOLLA FTW). Food aside, it was also great meeting up with people and engaging in conversations on how things were in the academic sphere, how tech policies are being shaped in India, and so on.
Post-lunch, there was a workshop by Kashish (alias contrapunctus) on how to contribute to OSM using smartphones, were I sticked around as a “volunteer” of sort (transl.: just sitting around and waiting for the mapping party). Even though my dad was not really bothered by any of the “techie” stuff we were upto the whole conference, and keeping to himself most of the time, writing up articles for news back at home like he always does, occassionally taking pictures of our booths and activities, seemingly invested in our ways of managing the booth.
We had a fairly good number of people attending the workshop, following through the instructions, getting to use OSM for navigation, as well as contributing hands-on with the mapping party that followed right after the workshop. Since we were inside the NIMHANS Campus, we went ahead and mapped features around the entrance, including the emergency entrance, receptions, parts of the staff/admin complex of the campus. We had a fun time overall on the first day, ending it with Kailash Nadh checking out our booth. While the event wrapped for the day at about 17:30, we packed up and left the venue around 18:30, after which I just went back to the hotel, changed up, and really just unwind for a while and catch up on some sleep.
Day 2 @ IndiaFOSS , BLR, 29.10.2023, 09:??
“wakes up Man my habit of oversleeping has taken a toll on me, you know what? No more of this today! I’ll just get out of bed and…”
“checks clock 9:00?!!!?!?? deep breath alright, let me just- points an imaginary revolver towards self”
Footnotes:
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FOSS: Acronym for “Free & Open-Source Software” ↩
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At the time of completing this blog (~2 and a half years from the initial start), this place seems to have shut down, and is under a new owner and name, now called “Udupi Upahar”. You can see get a rough idea of the change through the history of the shop node on OSM. ↩