openSUSE & India

Well recently we had a huge discussions at the conference about how openSUSE was faring in India and it seemed that India was not faring well. I must say it seemed. So I think I must reput everything what we have done from last December so that we all know that we are doind saw g well despite of the huge geographical differences we have in India itself.

FOSS.in
This was the first time I met a lot of other openSUSE people like Bharath Acharya, Akhil Ladha, Vibha Yadav, Punit Jain, Suresh Jayaram ( we met agian at oSC 11 and we did not recognize each other while at oSC 11) and saw a very vibrant community of openSUSE.

KDE Conf
Here also the amazing team from Bangalore did an excellent job. Will came down to India  and did an excellent job. Here we found Akash who was already doing an excellent job in promoting openSUSE and sadly we did not know about him.

GNOME Asia
This was the time when I had the chance to meet Vincent and Sankar P. Both of whom I wanted to meet for a long time specially Sankar at that time who has helped me a lot while in openSUSE. Yes the rest of the crew, Bharath, Akhil who were organizing the whole event along with Punit, Sridhar and Vibha and if I guess correctly srags ( his irc nick ) were there too. A whole new number of faces like our star from KDE Conf Akash and also Vikash who helped a lot at the openSUSE booth were present during the conference. We distributed a whole bunch of gnome and openSUSE dvds and at the end of the day we had to do with SLES since we had no more of openSUSE. It was great. Forgetting Max , oh how could I do that.. He had come all the way down from Taiwan to India to attend the conference.

PyCON India
Well, Saurabh Sood he is one of the best friends I have found in the community. He studies at the same place where I do. He could not get into GSoC sadly his application was rejected but he continued to work on the project he applied for. This goes on to show how in our community passion and people matter such a lot. He went for it and he got a lightning talk about developing osc plugins without even applying for it at PyCON India

Manipal
Yeah, this is the place where I live and I think this deserves a bit of attention. We have come up with excellent contributors from this place like Prashanth and Saurabh who work tremendously hard to make the openSUSE Project a big success. They really understand the value of people and what makes a community in real.

Gujarat
Jigish Sir, the one man army he is been working a lot with openSUSE Edu-L-i-f-e and is one of the major contributors to the education project uses openSUSE at a lot of places like in schools and universities. Also he is very active on the opensuse-india google group where I believe he is the one of the very few people who provide support to it.

Assam
Neel Kamal Kalita, is a professor at Guwahati ( I dont remember the university sorry Neel ) but has regularly distributed DVDs among his students for a long time. He is aone great guy who I had a chance to meet in person.

Hong Kong
I know it is not in India but still I must mention Koushik Kumar Nundy who is becoming the local ambassador there after he moved to HK from India and is doing a great job there too. Its a lot more difficult for him as he is the only ambassador in Hong Kong

Unknowns
I believe since such a lot was going on in India and no one really had an idea I can presume a bit more of stuff going in other parts of India too.

Thats all folks, I guess by the time I finish it I must add up to say we are not that inactive but we do not like lime light or let others know what we are doing. Pleasemake sure to add a comment to praise these hardworking ambassadors in India.