Grants:TPS/Harsh4101991/FOSDEM/Report

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Event name: FOSDEM

Description of your participation: There were two talks of mine over there at FOSDEM. Link of my participation is here. I met various member of Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland as well as other community members. I interacted with Erik Moeller, Quim Gil, Andre Klapper, Roan Kattouw, Siebrand Mazeland, Marc-André Pelletier from WMF and also from other communities like Fedora, Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, Cent OS, Python etc.

What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events? FOSDEM is being a renowned conference in the Free and Open Source field which was held at Brussels, Belgium this year 1st and 2nd February. More than 5000+ developers across the world came there and it was an awesome learning process by interacting with those people. But the basic thing that I learned was that never rely on an Internet connection anytime. One never knows when one can get into trouble and so, it is better to open all the necessary links into your browser or have your project ready on localhost to show them live.

The organization of the conference was damn awesome. On the very beginning of conference, they provided us with one handbook that contained all the lectures detail, speaker details, venue information with charts and maps. So this thing was very useful for everyone.

Moreover, after completion of Devrooms, organizers of Devrooms are responsible to bring back/wind up all the materials that was provided by conference organizers like laptops, video cameras etc. They used collaboration concept in developed open source softwares into this. This was very unique concept I have ever seen and due to the large amount of participation it was very useful.


What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

My 1st talk was on my GSoC project - Language Coverage Matrix Dashboard. In that, I explained everything about my project in front of developers from Wikis and other communities. I received great amount of insights from them to modify my project and other ideas that I can implement into this project in the future so that it would be more useful and informative. They suggested me to add some more information about different tools and functionality plus adding project link so that people from different community can get some more information and probably they can use that thing. Moreover they also suggested me to add various links. For example link of input method, link of fonts etc. Again this thing would be very useful for others who use internationalization and localization. Some designing tips that would make UI eye catching for others. They also encouraged me for good work.

2nd talk was on Essential and Necessary MediaWiki gadgets. In that, I showed various gadgets and people found them too much useful for editing and reading. After my presentation, many people came to me and I explained them some of Gadget technology so that they can build gadgets for their own needs. For my talk, some other community members were also present who used MediaWiki as a software. It was very useful for them to use these gadgets in their own wiki.

Detail of expenditures:

  • Flight Ticket : USD 142.61 + USD 1,044.53 = USD 1187.14 (Booked by Wikimedia Foundation)
  • Visa (Visa + Insurance) : INR 9900
  • Hotel : Euro 180.25


Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency):