Weekend Aantel’s Blog

It was 9:10 PM, we were ready to leave office. I wanted nothing more than a cup of hot tea and a quiet smoke, before going home. My interns being with me the following conversation ensued:

Me : Guys… wanna have tea?

Arindam : (looks at Sawgnik and asks)… How about you?

Sawgnik : (looks undecided, and more inclined to go home for dinner)… ummmmm?

Me : Well… will you or not?

Arindam : (body language says he wants too, but looks for strength in numbers, and mumbles) Sawgnik…. ?

Me : (pretty disgusted with the undecidedness) Fine… you guys decide, while I go and have my tea!

Arindam : (looks at the rest)… Sir, I’ll have a cup too!

Sawgnik : (looks at Arindam) Me too! (looking decided at me) Sir lets go!

(Arindam looks happy)

Me : Look guys! If you want do something, just go for it! There is no point in thinking too much if others (in your group) will support you or not! Especially if doing it is important to you.

Me : Because, if you are unsure, you will negatively bias the ones who are even less sure than you. And they in turn would make you feel even more unsure, OTOH, if you are positively focused its likely that others would react positively as well and support you in your goal!

The morale of the story isn’t that we all had tea that evening. I wouldn’t realise effect what this discussion would have on my interns for some more time yet. Not until I conducted the exit interview of our first batch of fast-track FOSS interns on the 31st of July.

——————-

All over the country, I find various attempts to mentor / nurture / guide students into the culture of FOSS and its indigenous development. Somehow, there seems to be a dissonance somewhere. The RoI on the effort expended doesn’t yet justify itself. Somehow, somewhere there seems to be a lack of communication in many of these extremely well-intentioned and even well-planned efforts.

When the 4 boys from BCREC, came to me for the internship in early July 2007, two of them were clearly not yet FOSS enthusiasts. Interested they were, but only to a casual degree and definitely not in any academic or professional sense. Simply put, they were not sure why they were there, what was expected of them, and what they would take back aside from a certificate, except that they would in it with their friends and hence….

There was even a hint of objections from their seniors at DGPLUG, that these guys weren’t committed enough, so what’s the point in tagging them along? Nevertheless, I explained to the boys that the internship would run like a bootcamp and they would need to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. No one objected, even though all were a bit unsure, apparently this wasn’t an approach they were habituated to.

However, with about 7 - 10 days into the programme, these guys had gone from being pushed and prodded state to one where their were self-motivated and goal-oriented. The exit interviews threw up some interesting issues. Here are some of those:

1) Apart from Subhodip and Soumya Kanti, the others were not too keen on working with FOSS. It was just another option, perhaps a bit exotic, and which they didn’t understand much.

2) These other two weren’t involved in local FOSS activities at DGPLUG because, they didn’t exactly know what to do and what would be the logic and benefits of doing something that was being perceived as a less-popular alternative. Freedom, choice, opportunities at learning, self-skilling weren’t understood concepts.

3) There was no notion of “Release Early! Release Often“. They were hardly to blame, this approach is evident how much of Indian academic/govt research / efforts go, even in the area of FOSS. People look towards publishing the finished product. So no one actively blogs, maintains wikis, moderates mailing lists, in other words, there is not effort to build a community or traction around a project’s activities. This leads to the loss of user/early adopter feedback, possible collaborators, and restricts the activities largely to a very limited scope and often limited vision. Inherently preventing useful contribs the chance of getting into the mainline distributions, being one of the side-effects.

4) Little clue about using search engines and other online FOSS resources effectively (eg. IRC). Extremely weak in their search techniques, will little clarity about the power of keywords and boolean operators. Partly the reason was restricted Internet access and lack of interaction with FOSS peer groups and SIG. Little opportunity to learn by watching others. Therefore, frustrated in their initial attempts they would let their interest go the traditional “mainstream” proprietary way.

5) That the 21-days of uninterrupted working space with a DIY focus was something that was totally unexpected. They never expected to be allowed to open up systems at will and tinker inside with hardware options and see the resultant effects. So far, they had be accustomed to an atmosphere where too many permissions had to be taken. Plus, in very few cases, such permissions if at all given would often not be bestowed on an entire group, rather few specific “trusted” students.

6) That working inside a regular office environment, with a 2 Mbps leased link which translated into unlimited and fast internet access, and with other office folks not paying any attention to them (read: looking over their shoulders to keep an eye on them), wasn’t at all expected by them and allowed them to boost their productivity.

7) The flexi-time strategy - you work as long as you want, then you go home, provided you manage to finish your work within it’s delivery schedule, worked remarkably well. They were not asked to leave so that others could work or because it was lunch-time/closing time/weekend. This allowed the momentum of work at any point to generally keep up a scorching pace.

Subhodip informed me that between themselves for the last 7 - 8 days of their internship, the project, the work and its possibilities was the principal item of discussion at night before they went to sleep at their rented lodgings.

Arindam and Sawgnik added that, now for the first time they actually understood “Why FOSS?“. Both of them are now keenly interested in actively engaging in the local FOSS activities at Durgapur and within their college. Arindam adding “Now that I know that all the things I did on Windows are possible on Linux, I’m shifting to single boot once I go back”

Now, for those who are wondering why I wrote about the “CCU tea-party” above, it is because of a casual comment from Arindam as we wound up the interview. I had asked him “What is the lesson that you’ll be taking back from here?” He replied “sir… what you told about tea the other day applies here as well“… he paused and added “That’s what i need to do from now!”

I sat alone in my cubicle thinking about what he had said. Arindam was the guy in that group who was least interested in the internship in the beginning, had no commitment and was not sure whether he wanted to do the internship… thinking like the boy in the Eureka Forbes ad “Ush se kya hoga?“

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 1:14 pm and is filed under FOSS, L2C2, WBUT, FOSS in Academia, ILUG-CAL.ORG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.