Software Freedom Day concluded on the 15th with several events happening around Sri Lanka and the world ofcourse.
The Excel World event, which I helped organize, turned out pretty well. It could ofcourse, have been a lot better if not for the matches that kept people @ home. But hey, who's complaining? Not me!
We had a lot of fun setting up the place. No one was in any particular hurry and we took our time. I got up about 8:30am or so and took another hour to get ready. Then grabbed a bunch of stuff like power strips, wireless dongles, power cords, mice, keyboard -- basically what ever I could lay my eyes on, and stuffed it in a luggage bag. I also picked up my desktop, my x-monitor (now dad's), and the mac mini (which I forgot to take) and headed off to TLC to pick up the APITT guys.
By the time we got to Excel it was close to 11AM. We then went to APITT to pick up rest of the stuff and it was probably around 12PM we actually started to set the place up. But help was on the way, as more friends showed up. The rest as they say it was history. The event went well in to the night and finished just minutes away from midnight.
Ofcourse, I am leaving out some of the drama we had to face @ Excel World, except to say it all worked out for the better in the end and that freedom shouldn't be taken for granted - "Even on SFD, you still have to fight for your Freedom, to have an event the way you want to have it". If some of you might remember we had a really bad experience last year.
me putting on the organizer hat:
All in all I felt that this year's SFD was bigger and a lot better as a whole. This couldn't have been possible if not for the FOSS community that came in at the right time and (magically) made things happen!
Special thanks to all the sponsors, Hardware Partner Digital House (Pvt) for giving out good looking machines that traveled around the country, Suntel for sponsoring the WiFi (with upgraded bandwidth mind you!) and doing too many radio spots in soo many channels :). Other thanks go out to ICTA for encouraging and supporting us, Excel World for a gr8 venue and support, APITT for giving us storage to store all the items and anyone else I might have forgotten because I drank too much coffee. Yes I'm sure it was coffee!
Enjoy the pics
- My SFD pics @ Excel
- Nazly's SFD pics @ Excel
- Kandy SFD pics
- Mifan's SFD pics from Kandy
- Suchetha's SFD pics from many SFD locations
- Gayal's SFD pics from APITT
- Waruna's SFD pics from Ruwanpura
Anyone other pics I'm missing? Leave a comment with link and I'll add it.