Philosophical Fortnight Meetup at Pondicherry University (6/3/2019)

The third public gathering of the year 2019 was a real philosophical outreach of free software after consecutive technical and awareness sessions.  

The Pre- gathering events:

Naming the organization discussion happened online, Many suggestions from various perspectives were suggested. Consecutively, based on inputs from steering committee the agenda for the meeting on 6/3/2019 was prepared.

Event organization:

It all Started with the questions prepared and  poster designed by Noordine based on the agenda of the committee.  

Posters were pasted at each department and hostels. Every Pillar of cafeteria and all the public gathering spots around the premises of Pondicherry University held the posters. Thanks to the great efforts taken by Prabha and Noordine.  

SOTC had invited speakers from FSHM to deliver the talk on the agenda.  

Prasanna Vengadesh - Need for Free software, transparency

Kamalavelan             - Commons and its Impact

On the Evening:

Pondicherry University has been place of awesome green vegetation. The meeting was planned on DDE lawn which has been the hood for various revolutionary events. It is a spectacular green blanket and public attention grabbing spot.  

A total of about 30 members participated in the meeting. Most of them where students of PG From Pondicherry University. The meeting started at 4:40 preceded  by Noordine.

Kamal Gave an introduction about the Free software organizations and its role along with the Briefing about FSHM and club.  

Prasanna on privacy: How privacy is being exploited through all the gadgets which we use in our day to day life and how free software mitigates it. He also came up with the black box and the white box(glass box) analogy to demonstrate the transparency in the code and the need of the open code to ensure that no hidden bugs may be present to exploit us.  

He also shared the Hard copy of the document "public money public code " from fsfe

Book is under creative commons license and can be downloaded at :

https://flossbcn.org/sites/default/files/2019-01/PMPC-Modernising-with-Free-Software.pdf

We, the public fund public institutions with our taxes but the research and the intellectual amenities created by such universities are again being inaccessible by the public themselves.

Charan from Law Department added a brief about the CMRL which acts as a private entity instead of being a public entity and the parking fare price fixation problems behind it. He concluded that, one had to enter that private space by accepting its T&C and people have been pushed to accept whatever T&C they levy on us.

The Cradle of Commons:

Kamal spoke on commons and how free software was built: One of the world’s best collaborative free project is Linux with contributors from all around the globe.

Collaborative projects - case analysis

Kamal also gave an introduction to the Collaborative work of the survey on Free software adoption by Noordine .

A discussion to demonstrate such public projects started with the question

How could one fabricate a questionnaire with public participation ?

Various answers was got from the gathering

Praba  : Gather a group of volunteers and collect from them
Arun   : Give back credit for who have contributed by which we can make them interested to contribute
Ajith and Vignesh : Make populous to contribute by incentivizing them

Ganesh stated that Questionnaire being made with public participation gives intellectual incentive to everyone. Collaborating in such open projects will inherently provide the knowledge of other phases too for its participants.

Social philosophy in tech includes affordability availability and accessibility

 
Affordability   -  Making the software free such that everyone can use and tweak it.

Availability    - collaborating such that people at other place could also see and contribute

Accessibility - using open Access curbs the transferring rights of a paper to the publisher with all the work a researcher has done. By which the inventions are made public and all the people could access it and improve the livelihood of humanity

Even though the meeting was beyond the time fixed many enthusiastic volunteers were present.

Bits of Bitcoin

The discussion continued with the question by Baghya about bitcoin

The peer to peer payment nature of the bitcoin was explained in brief. Along with the questions: is bit coin Affordable, sustainable and ethical.

The bitcoin is being only minable by a person who has the capacity to afford for the infrastructure that can mine it.

Bit coin is prohibited to be used in India. The discussion also covered the Energy being invested in mining the currency. We deplete the energy and try to mine the bit coin.

The last cup of talk

Kamal spoke on the Intellectual property rights , the software patents and some rights reserved

Some rights reserved - https://creativecommons.org/tag/some-rights-reserved/

He added that software could be not patented in India and also gave the different licensing mechanisms in creative commons.

Creative commons licenses

We go to various places and capture spectacular scenarios. Without just dumping it in our hard drives we can share the ecstasy and joy with the world such that the whole world could enjoy it and make use of it.  

Some of the wiki media contributions by noordine on pondicherry university vegetation

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pondicherry_university_vegetation_04.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pondicherry_university_vegetation_02.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pondicherry_university_vegetation_01.jpg

some other uploads on Pondicherry

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Podicherry_port_04.JPG

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Podicherry_port_03.JPG

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Podicherry_port_01.JPG

You too can contribute by uploading your clicks to :

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The meeting concluded around 7:00 PM

It was an collaborative effort by all the organizers, speakers and the audience who spent their valuable time in delivering and understanding the technology exploitation we suffer. These awareness must propagate into the public only by which we can progress towards the ideal society of breathing humanity and peace.

The first curiosity of a child is to break something and see what is inside it. If we start practicing some phenomenon which trims such habit on its blossoming stage what would the next generation tweak on