[Mailinglist] February 2008 Meeting Details

[Sameer Thahir]

Warm Greetings To The FOSS Community,

                   The meeting for the month of February  was successfully conducted on 24/02/2008. The meeting was attended by over 22 people which was a pretty good turnout giving way to great interactive discussions. Here are some brief details about the meeting.
 
 
 Date: 24-02-2008
 Time: 2pm - 5.45pm
 Venue: Internet Club, IInd Floor, AMI Trust Building, Broadway Enclave, Broadway, Ernakulam

   The meeting started at 2.15 pm with the discussions on the Agenda " FOSS in Education".  The moderator started with an Introduction to Free Software and the GNU Movement, Open Source and Licenses. The initial part of discussion dealt with discussing about the need for Free Software in Schools with many people sharing their experiences.

The discussions moved on to talk extensively about the importance of the IT Curriculum. Further the Implementation of FOSS at Schools was discussed, where the attendees expressed their opinion about the drawbacks in the present educational system.

The roles that parents and teachers need to play for spreading awareness was discussed. One important aspect that was discussed was the need for neighborhood groups.

The opinion that there was a lack of  trained human resources for implementation was shared by everyone.

The agenda concluded with the message that everyone needs to contribute to spreading FOSS at the education level, atleast by starting with neighborhood groups.



The first technical presentation for the day was Openoffice Basics by Venkat.
The speaker started by giving an introduction to Openoffice and then moving onto explain some basic features of OpenOffice Writer. The coming meetings would discuss other Openoffice components.

The second technical presentation was "Introduction to Gambas" . Since many people from the audience were familiar with Visual Basic, the presentation discussed the similarities and differences between the two. The speaker demonstrated how flawlessly one could switch over to Gambas by demonstrating with 2 sample programs. The IDE of Gambas was also explained in brief. 


The meeting concluded with each one of the attendees telling what they would be doing after the meeting. A few people who had come for the previous meeting, briefed about how they had accomplished their previous tasks. Most of the people left with a desire to try Gambas and Openoffice.

The meeting was wound up by 5.30 pm.

We thank all the attendees for coming and hope the next meeting is bigger and better.

Thank You

Regards
Sameer Mohamed Thahir
Co-ordinator (Indian Linux Users Group - Cochin / Kochi Chapter(ILUG-Cochin))
sameerthahir at yahoo.com

Website : www.ilug-cochin.org
IRC  : #ilugkochi on irc.freenode.net
ML   : mailinglist at ilug-cochin.org



Sameer Mohamed Thahir
(sameerthahir at yahoo.com)
       
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