FOSS Young Professional Meet 2013 @ Technopark

Trivandrum, September 8, 2013: In order to expose young professionals to the opportunities in Free and Open Source Software and related technology areas, the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) is organizing “The Foss Young Professional Meet 2013 (FYPM 2013)” in Technopark from 27-29 September 2013. This programme aims to introduce young professional community to emerging FOSS-based tools, technologies and trends.

“Kerala has an abundance of young professionals in Information Technology, including students, young graduates, start-up companies, and students who are in the process of completing their academic programs out of college. Besides their energy and vibrancy, this group is also a significant source of innovation in technology domains, which is a much-needed input for the future development of the country.” Said Satish Babu, Director, ICFOSS.

“The larger objective of the programme is to highlight the opportunities in the FOSS domain to young professionals and enable them to acquire information, skills and competencies. For those interested, the forum also provides inputs on how to join international FOSS communities and start contributing code.” He added.

The lead theme of FYPM 2013 is “Open Source Hardware”, which is a sector that is growing explosively. Open Source Hardware and related domains such as Open Source Robotics offer significant new opportunities to startups. A Project Contest on Open Hardware based solutions is scheduled for 27^th September, which has entries from students, freelancers and startups. The winners of this project contest shall be awarded attractive new generation gadgets and also an opportunity to demonstrate their solutions to FYPM delegates. The two other technology themes at FYPM are the Mozilla Developer Network—which will be largely about the forthcoming Firefox OS for Smart Phones and CMS Programming with Drupal, a workshop which is designed and run by the members of Drupal Community. The event will also have several invited presentations on topics such as “Big Data”, “Multilingual Computing”, “Javascript Frameworks”, and “Context-aware Frameworks”.

A Community theme track on “FOSS Project Incubation” will provide inputs to the participants on how to join world-class Open Source community programmes and start contributing to FOSS projects, through initiatives such as Google Summer of Code, RailsGirls and the Gnome Outreach Program for Women—the last of which are exclusively for women professionals. This is to further build on the ICFOSS-Apache mentoring programme launched in June 2013, which is now proceeding well.

The event is supported by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE GOLD of IEEE Kerala Section.

For registration please visit http://programs.icfoss.org/HYPERLINK “http://programs.icfoss.org/fypm2013/”fypm2013/