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Wrapping up at foss.in@2008

With the start of 5th day, starts the end of a journey. A journey of talks, presentations, discussions, BoFs and of course the workouts at foss.in accompanied by a nice not-too-hot-not-too-cold rainy climate in Bangalore, negated by the depressed concerns about the terrible happenings back in Mumbai.

About the event, my personal highlights have been the talks, workouts and BoFs around Indic computing. It is interesting how the language computing forms a significant part of almost any foss event in India. The collation workout, Indic BoF, talks on text-to-speech, speech recognition, machine translations all went fine along with my own talk about language i18n support accompanied by Pravin on very first day. On other notes, the Nokia stall very well showcased maemo and N810, with the talks inline with the applications it runs.

The workout on collation helped update the status of all the Indic sorting and proceed with the remaining ones like Malayalam. Bengali still remains uncertain. It was nice to see how OLPC's 'sugar' attempts at going away from the traditional metaphors of files and folders, just something I had mentioned a day before in my presentation where I talked about the metaphoric localization. Apart from some formative steps in Indic Computing, what we could found is the students eager to contribute and the Tibetan community of developers in India.

Although the Talk was cheap this time, my feeling was that except for few, workouts were mostly dried up. I am not sure how much real code it produced but what I really missed there is the drive to attract more contributors. The talks probably did it better. May be next time they need to revise the concept.

Overall things have been good, not as huge as last year, but that could be intentional.

Have to return by today evening, means I'll miss the party!

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