It was an exhilirating experience working towards OSEF 2008 and Community 2008, and accomplishing the goals of promoting the Open Source vision.

Maruthi, Namita, Alolita, Nilayan, Uma and Saurabh had done an amazing amount of groundwork thinking through, involving the right set of people and executing it.

Poorna Shashank, Sumanth Krishna, O V L Kiran Kumar, Ramesh Rajamani and E. Sivakrishna of Synovel, were supportive of the event and volunteered for assistance. A big thanks to all. You guys rock !

The event started with Ms. Namita Iyer, President of the Society, talking about Open Source and how it helps boot strap product companies that can go on to build market leading products and nurture a community as well.

Ms. Alolita Sharma, Director of Open Source Initiative (OSI) and CEO, Technetra, started the session by asking the attendees a simple question - "what are three words that come to our mind, when we think of Open Source". The question really set a buzz among the members and make the people really interactive.

For the first time it has been possible in the IT industry that corporates can access "fairly" and "openly" world class software developed by world class developers.

Sharing between competitors provides them a level playing ground to compete in developing innovative applications over Open Source platform.

According to Alolita, "The competition is in innovation and providing services. It is a key enabler of change for prosperity".

The talk by Mr. D D Ganguly, founder and CEO of DimDim was awesome and as candid as ever.

He shared his startup experience and how he acquired seed capital and further funding from VCs. He talked about how to play the mating game with VCs in order for them to find your venture attractive enough to fund. VCs fund in millions, hence will never do seed funding. For seed funding, entrepreneurs should find someone who loves them and will fund them for being them. Last but not the least, he emphasized that the primary motive of entrepreneurs should be to create wealth for themselves and for their stake holders. The audience thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity for a heart-to-heart talk with a successful open source entrepreneur - who actually got big VCs to fund his venture.

Mr. D D Ganguly from DimDim, Mr. Suren Poruri from Polaris, Mr. Pramod and Mr. Sivakumar from AppLabs, folks from CA, Mr. Sivakrishna from Synovel, budding entrepreneurs from Genpact, NIC, Satyam and many startup companies actively participated in the session. Mr. Saurabh Bhatia, of SafewLabs shared his journey as an entrepreneur with the audience.

Mr. Sivakrishna, CEO of Synovel, presented an overview of Spicebird at the event. In his words, Collaboration is much beyond e-mail communication – it's a process where individuals work together to achieve a common goal. Apart from having e-mail, instant messaging and group calendaring, an ideal collaboration system should make 'working together' possible – like creating a proposal, launching a new product, developing software, managing group knowledge and publishing websites even while working from different continents. Spicebird - the collaboration suite developed by us, creates a platform to do precisely that. In addition, Spicebird makes customization easy and ensures that the software can be adapted to your business collaboration needs.

Ms. Kavita Vemuri of Innovation Lab, and Dr. Vikram Pudi of Open Source research at IIIT Hyderabad, were very supportive of the event from the word go. Kavita also teaches Product Management at IIIT to the students and is also involved with academia to industry transfer initiatives.

In the future, we look forward to interacting very closely with students and faculty at IIIT, Hyderabad on Open Source activities and also conduct course on Open Source software licensing and legal issues. At Twincling Society, we invested a lot of time in working through Open Source licensing, Copyright and Trademark issues. This is critical as we are focussed on infrastructure software products development and want to create the largest ecosystem in the world ! more on that later.

To keep the participants energised and vigorously participate in the discussions, lip smacking Samosas, Paneer Pakoda and delectable Kala Jam from Tiwari Sweets (one of Hyderabad's best sweet shops) was laid out for all the attendees to savor.

We wanted to make sure that the best people, the best speakers, the best food and the best arrangments are made for such a special and first of its kind event ! At all Twincling events, the focus is on the quality of interaction, discussion and genuine interest.

The best part is that Hyderabad has that kind of people with energy to engage in discussions.

If that sounds incredible, then you should remember that OSEF 2008 came to an end at 4:15pm and Community 2008 started at Applabs GEC at 5pm. The GEC is located atleast 10 km from IIIT and a lot of the attendees of OSEF turned up for this event as well.

Sreeram Kaviliga, AVP and Arun D. Rao, VP, my close friends at AppLabs, were the hosts for Community 2008 at 3XL Conference, AppLabs GEC. Arun, spoke on the occassion, sharing his vision about Open Source and how he sees close synergy between AppLabs goals and Twincling Society.

Sai Chintala, VP, and Rajesh Patil, Architect, made a presentation on Open Source initiatives at AppLabs, TEMA product and also shared their experiences.

Alolita who is a Director on the Board of Open Source Initiative, spoke on "How to build an Open Source Community".

The importance of nurturing an Open Source community with the right elements and Community leads cannot be over emphasised.

At Twincling, we have cultivated a "user" community with an excellent mix of professionals and students in the last 4 years. The experience that we have gained is immensely valuable and positions us uniquely.

Now, as we move to the GLOBAL orbit of developing world-class Open Source products (licensed under Apache License 2.0), we need to mentor and cultivate a "developer" community.

A "developer" community will create a better quality IT workforce in Hyderabad and provide Andhra Pradesh a competitive advantage.

How are we going to do that ? Well, i'll talk about that in the next blog.

Coming back after the event, we had a long day and all of us were physically tired and yet we had a 5-hour long Strategy meeting to chalk out the go-GLOBAL plan.

Special thanks to our dear friends Pratima and Ajay at Cybermedia who helped with the subscription form and May 2008 issues of the DARE magazine. It is an amazing magazine, 'DARE - Because entrepreneurs do'. Guys, we still have a few magazines available to give out to folks. So, if you are interested, please drop in a line to info@twincling.org and collect it at the next Saturday meet.

Thats not all :-) To further discussions on entrepreneurship, we have WiTi (What I Think Is) list. Consider joining it at, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/witi

See you all at, TWINCLING Open Source Summit 2008 on Saturday, December 13, 2008.

TWINCLING Society is a "not-for-profit" society, incorporated in Hyderabad, India, under the Andhra Pradesh Societies Registration Act, 2001. (10th December, 2001, vide G.O.Ms.No. 742, Revenue (R&M), dt. 10.12.2001).

The charter of TWINCLING Society is to Promote and Develop Open Source software.

The Society conducts Technical Events on Open Source technologies on 2nd Saturday of every month. Technical Workshops are conducted to demonstrate live scenarios to organizations and community. As part of the student outreach programme, the Society volunteers have conducted numerous technical sessions at more than fifty colleges in Andhra Pradesh and Western Maharashtra.

Open Source RoundUp is an annual Open Source event conducted by TWINCLING Society that brings together the Open Source community, to discuss trends, core issues, opportunities and challenges in the Open Source arena. This event is conducted in Hyderabad in the second week of December every year.

Open Source Entrepreneurship Forum (OSEF) is an initiative of the Society to assist entrepreneurs in building their Open Source businesses and create a platform that brings together experienced professionals, angel investors together and facilitates exchange of ideas and networking opportunities.

The Society is led by a strong professional and technically experienced Team that takes pride in execution. The Society activities are managed by a seven member Board and governed by the Society bye-laws. Ms. Namita Iyer is the President, Mr. Satish Vellanki is the Vice President,Mr. Sumit Upadhyay is the General Secretary and Mr. Narender Rao is the Joint Secretary of the Society. The board executes ideas and strategies jointly evolved with the senior and experienced professionals of the Advisory Board and the Community Leads, who map them to community activities.

The Society operates a bank account at ICICI Bank, Nagarjuna Hills branch. The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Society is held in December every year. The AGM consolidates the suggestions from peer international societies, legal counsel and auditors, to define the strategy and plan of action, for the next year.

The Society has more than 2,600 members with a significant reach out initiative in Andhra Pradesh. The society has assisted organizations and educational institutions in migrating to Open Source technologies. Society volunteers have received numerous appreciation shields and letters from the beneficiaries.

To support a vibrant Open Source community, the society activities are organized around Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that focus on

• Open Source technologies
• Storage Technologies
• Entrepreneurship
• Ethical Hacking

IRC Channel
#twincling on freenode.net

Contact Us
To know more about our Open Source vision and participate in community activities, please write to info@twincling.org or call the society helpline at +91-98492 53753TWINCLING Society info@twincling.org freedom of innovation http://www.twincling.org/ ]]> http://twincling.blogspot.com/2008/03/install-fest-linux-bsd.html Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:52:00 +0000 http://twincling.blogspot.com/2008/03/install-fest-linux-bsd.html
A great way to get started with Linux/BSD is to actually try to install and configure it !

You are welcome to bring along your laptops to try out the stuff. There will be some laptops and 2-3 systems available to try the distros live and also in VM environments.

Some of the distros you get to play with are:
. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD
. Sabayon Linux
. Gentoo
. Ubuntu
. Mandriva
. Fedora
. BOSS Linux
. Knoppix

Thanks to Saurabh Bhatia and Community Leads Uma and Sumanth, there will be multiple demos on installations, configuration and troubleshooting.

There will also be discussion on 'ODF' or Open Document Format (thanks to Nikhil).

All the geeks, entrepreneurs and techies are invited to join in and be part of the fun filled yet insightful evening that it is going to be on Saturday, March 29 at 5pm.

Venue details are available at [www.twincling.org]

All Open Source enthusiasts are cordially invited !TWINCLING Society info@twincling.org freedom of innovation http://www.twincling.org/ ]]> http://twincling.blogspot.com/2008/03/sumanth-to-conduct-rubyror-workshop-on.html Tue, 4 Mar 2008 05:23:00 +0000 http://twincling.blogspot.com/2008/03/sumanth-to-conduct-rubyror-workshop-on.html

Sumanth Krishna a Senior Developer at Google Engineering, Hyderabad will be conducting a Ruby, Ruby on Rails workshop on Saturday, 8th March from 5pm - 8pm.

This is the best time to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR) given the industry momentum towards building feature rich web applications leveraged on productivity.

The focus of the workshop will be to help the participants to setup, configure the environment, design and develop the application and deploy the solution. So, if you got a laptop, you are welcome to bring in and plug in. Software will be available for download from a local repository accessible over 802.11a/b/g aka WiFi.

In Sumanth's own words, "Always looking out or creating oppurtunities to spread whatever little bit I know and to learn all that I don't know. My interests include browsing, blogging(TechSavvy) guiding, teaching, most important learning new things".

Sumanth started his career as PHP developer and part of many customization and implementations of php based products like moodle, mantis, wordpress, drupal, joomla, Expression Engine, sugar CRM. In his words, "Got kick with Web technologies, so my love with RoR still continuing".

Sumath holds a Master's degree from Sri Sathya Sai Institue of Higher Learning and in the past has worked as Software Engineer at Compassites a product based company in Bangalore.

Sumanth is a well known and active figure in TWINCLING Community and Events. You will see him leading community initiatives and playing a much bigger role in guiding the community towards excellence and growth.

Sumanth blogs at [sumanthtechsavvy.blogspot.com]

If you are still thinking of Ruby or RoR, this is one of the best opportunities to jump start.

Snacks and Goodies will be available at the event. So mark your calendar today !

All Open Source geeks and enthusiasts are welcome !

Venue Information
[www.twincling.org]

Helpline
+91-98482 37656TWINCLING Society info@twincling.org freedom of innovation http://www.twincling.org/ ]]> http://twincling.blogspot.com/2008/01/highlights-photo-gallery-and-future.html Wed, 16 Jan 2008 06:44:00 +0000 http://twincling.blogspot.com/2008/01/highlights-photo-gallery-and-future.html

Dear Friends,

Thank you so much for making the Open Source RoundUp 2007 a wonderful and memorable success.

Key highlights:
. A large number of professionals who interacted with the would be professionals
. An insightful product idea presented by Mr. Ananth, a musician as he discussed the requirements of his profession.
. An excellent community discussion by Mr. Sumanth Krishna on Ruby on Rails and Mr. Abhishek Sinha on Java/Spring framework.
. A pragmatic and straight talk by Mr. Yaser Ansari on Project management in Open Source
. A heart to heart discussion on key issues by Mr. Maruthi Sivakumar Vutla which discussing 'CEO/CTO perspective on Open Source'
. The party was real fun with two cakes being cut and lots of tasty snacks from Gokul chat.
. 180 T-shirts being distributed among the delegates.
. The total event expenditure was about INR 21,380.

The Society would like to thank all the speakers - Mr. Mahesh, Mr. Manish, Mr. Rajesh, Mr. Naveen, Ms. Namita, Mr. Srinivas, Mr. Yaser, Mr. Maruthi, Mr. Srinivas Kavuri and Mr. Sumanth, for taking out their valuable time to interact with the community and share their experience.

The Society also thanks the esteemed delegates for such enthusiastic participation and interaction.

The photo gallery has been updated with the photos and the photos have been classified under various sections to provide a logical feel for the entire event. Please visit [www.twincling.org]

Open Source RoundUp 2008 is scheduled to be held on Saturday, December 13. It will be a full day event at an auditorium. The key focus areas for the year 2008 event are available at [upcoming.yahoo.com]

With the support of the community, we hope to be able to make this year's event a greater success.

Thanks for your patience and understanding !


regards
News & Editorial Team (TSNET)

Ps. we are sorry for the delay in updating the photographs.TWINCLING Society info@twincling.org freedom of innovation http://www.twincling.org/ ]]> http://twincling.blogspot.com/2007/12/open-source-roundup-2007-linux-for-you.html Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:41:00 +0000 http://twincling.blogspot.com/2007/12/open-source-roundup-2007-linux-for-you.html
The Society in association with Linux For You (LFY) magazine has brought out a special subscription offer for the members and Open Source enthusiasts.

Now, you can save upto 50% subscription on LFY magazine, when you subscribe using the form available during Open Source RoundUp 2007.

Subscription amount details are available at
[www.twincling.org]

Attendees can also pay by cheque. You need to add INR 50 for non-Delhi cheque.

You can also win yourself past issue of the LFY magazine. How ? That would be a pleasant surprise.

Linux For You (LFY) is a wonderful and informative magazine that focusses on Open Source software. Please visit the LFY website at [www.lfymag.com]

So friends, please spread the word around about LFY magazine among your friends and colleagues.

thanks
News & Editorial Team.TWINCLING Society info@twincling.org freedom of innovation http://www.twincling.org/ ]]> http://twincling.blogspot.com/2007/12/open-source-roundup-2007-career.html Sun, 9 Dec 2007 00:37:00 +0000 http://twincling.blogspot.com/2007/12/open-source-roundup-2007-career.html

Dear Friends,

The community does well, when its members are also doing well !

Todays student is tomorrow's engineer and todays engineer is tomorrow's decision maker.

If the engineers and the decision makers are developing Open Source software or developing products that use Open Source software, then there are opportunities for growth and contribution for the members of the community.

This thought is central to Career Networking forum and Resume drop box facility that has been organized for Open Source RoundUp 2007.

Many of the speakers and companies have elicited interest in Open Source technology skills.

Please see the focus areas:
. Ajax (jquery, dojo)
. Web 2.0
. PHP
. L.A.M.P.
. C / Device drivers
. C++ / STL
. PERL / system automation
. Ruby / Rails
. JEE / JBoss / EJB
. Servlets / Tomcat
. MySQL

In addition to domain/tech interest/expertise, good problem solving skills are required.

This weekend may be a good time to review your resume and highlight the relevant points. Please feel free to submit a copy of your resume with focus area mentioned on the top, to the Career Forum coordinator.

For any clarfications please call helpline on +91-98482 37656 or +91-98492 53753

Registration is FREE of charge, and so make sure that you register for the conference today at [www.twincling.org]

All the best.

regards
News & Editorial Team.TWINCLING Society info@twincling.org freedom of innovation http://www.twincling.org/ ]]>