It was a simple function presided over by our dear H.O.D, Prof. M.B. Chandak. At the start he announced that Jay Mahadeokar is the Sun Campus Ambassador and I (Vasusen Patil) would be the president of the SRKNEC - Sun Club.
Shift Happens + Open Source:
Firstly Jay explained - Shift Happens (some of slides were taken from presentation by Karl Fisch). This took the students by surprise and set the tone for things to come...
Next, Jay explained why we need to change our outlook and also consider giving importance to things that are outside the curriculum (OpenSource being the 'it' thing!!) The significance of the Participation Age was also highlighted.
Then the opensource model was explained, and various open source technologies from Sun were introduced namely : Netbeans, Opensolaris, Java, SunSPOT, GlassFish, MySQL, OpenSparc, OpenOffice...
Students were asked questions and were rewarded with chocolates, CDs and DVDs for correct answers!
Introduction to SAI and plans of Sun Club:
I then took over and introduced the SAI(Sun Academic Initiative), its benefits and also discussed some of the plans for the SRKNEC Sun Club. Later, I also gave a short talk on Software Freedom Day and our plans to make it a grand event.
Conclusion:
Students seemed really interested and though only about a 10th of the total college population was present, I think, it was a good start!!
The important thing is that we have begun!