Sat, 07 Apr 2007

Convincing students

I have a somewhat unusual challenge ahead of me next week: I have to convince a conference full of students that they should participate in and pursue open source. This will strike many readers as somewhat strange since an enormous number of the people contributing to the global free software phenomenon today are students. But from my many trips to India over the last few years I have come to understand that the university system there does not promote the sort of individual initiative that involvement in open source requires — but there are people trying to do something about it.

One such is the Linux User Group at the MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India. They run an annual conference about open source, called “Mukthi”. This is a fascinating group of people. For one thing, they run their own in-house Linux conference! For another, they manage to convince the entire computing faculty to cancel classes that week so that students can attend the conference. This is exceedingly cool.

I’ve been invited to open this year’s conference. This will be great fun; there are few things I like more than standing in front of a crowd encouraging them to go wild about open source.

But that in and of itself is not exactly a topic, of course. One of the things I try to do with speaking engagements is to get a sense from the organization of what sort of impression they want me to leave. “Is there a message you want conveyed to the audience? A tone that you want me to set for the rest of the event?” That sort of thing. (I will, of course, do whatever it is I want anyway, but it’s always nice to at least try to make your hosts happy)

This one will not be easy, though. When I talked back and forth with the organizers about what they wanted to hear, they said that what it really boiled down to was that they were all exasperated about one thing: “We’ve always got people telling is how great open source is. But what good is it, really?” That made us laugh, so, I turned that around and made trying to answer that the title of my talk.

An audience of really talented young computer scientists and engineers, all about to enter the workforce: tough crowd. The conventional proprietary path is well trodden and a safe bet in most local IT industries. But it is a global marketplace and the traditional route is about getting work out of you, not about empowering you to succeed. The key to their professional future will be their ability to succeed as individuals in the global economy. The magic of the open continuum is that it changes the game: the only barrier to entry is contribution, and for those willing to risk it, there is the chance to really make a difference, and in so doing not only do they lift themselves up, but too their companies, their communities and their nation.

AfC

mukthi-2007-what-good-really, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/conferences/india at 07:11, 07 Apr 2007.

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