I'm really lazy about writing anything, (that includes coding, strangely enough) and generally want to avoid such hardship. Anyways, today I'm going to talk about this program I am a part of, called "Sun Campus Ambassador". As might be apparent from the name itself, my task is to a technology evangelist for Sun Microsystems on my campus, Delhi University. Since most of Sun's products are open-source, it'd be appropriate to post about those here. And yes, I am succeeding the immensely talented and helpful Agraj Mangal on this job. You can have a look at his blog here.
Sun is the largest corporate contributor to the Open Source movement with reference to the number of lines of code contributed. I think that's the most obvious criteria, since measuring man-hours contributed would be non-trivial. If memory serves me right, IBM also claimed the same in a session I attended but what there criteria is, I am unaware.
One of the tasks I have to do as a Campus Ambassador is to deliver talks in my department on topics related to open-source software and/or Sun. In order to start off, I chose the easiest topic I could think of, "Open Source : How we already use it". (Remember how I can be lazy even about writing code? Well, I can get away with it because of Open Source Software obviously) The reason I chose this topic is that the target audience consisted of first years, all of whom did not know what open-source software is. Also, the "How we already use it" part would help me demonstrate the use of open-source software that is already taking place. I also tried to build in basics like what is a database, how the Internet works. In very simple terms ,of course.
I started off taking Orkut as an example. I know, I know, it's written in ASPX. No marks for pointing that out. But it fit the bill perfectly. Indian Internet users log on to social networking sites extensively. I could talk about databases (think personal info), servers and stuff in an obvious and intuitive manner. Also, Google has open-sourced a part of Orkut, and it was the first to do so. And if that is not enough, just think of how people forgive the "sins" of Apple and Google just because of the fantastic user experience they provide, and use that as an excuse here :D
I also tried to tie in how things are done at our department with all of this. We use Java and C++ as the primary programming languages, and both GCC and Java are of course Open Source. Then come the projects and assignments which usually involve stuff like MySQL, JSP, Tomcat, Glassfish, and Netbeans. A couple of projects also had Solaris, and J2ME. All in all, I didn't have to work hard on that part.
I also introduced the Java User Group for Delhi University and the Sun Club for the same. The Sun club was initiated by me, and isn't that active yet, but I'm sure it'll grow with time. I also tried to get a democratic approach to the sessions, but I'll blog about that some other time. (Effect from reading the book Maverick! during that time). Well, the first result of that was that my next session changed from Netbeans to an OpenSolaris session.
Well, there were pens distributed, and some refreshments were served. And yeah, the refreshments got late, so I talked about the Sun Academic Initiative and Certification impromptu. :D I had an audience of around 100. According to what I gathered, they were with me for the most part. Except maybe the institute projects part. Well, many of them were first years, so can't blame them.
Some points to improve upon:
It was pretty short. I generally tend to speak only 60% of what I intend to when I prepare for a presentation.
My speech can do without the “aaaahh”s I tend to use as for when I'm thinking of a word... Well, I'm not that good yet...
The impromptu part could've come without Agraj prompting me :D
I should've presented the various business methods behind Open Source Software
Overall it went well enough.
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