My Technical Blog
Posts tagged Free Software
iCommunity FOSS 09
Feb 8th
I mentioned many times before that I was planning to make a workshop about Free Open Source Software (FOSS) in Damascus, and thankfully I did 
The Idea
The idea was to spread the culture of FOSS between the interested people here in Damascus.
What I noticed was that almost 99% of computer science students didn’t know what Free Software is and what Open Source software is!
The Process
So I started contacting engineers and people who I know that they’re capable of teaching this culture to our faculty students, and I managed to make 3 people agree on lecturing in the workshop.
After a while I realized that I can’t make the workshop as I thought, I won’t be able to make lectures inside the faculty because of some freaky stupid bureaucracy.
So the solution came with the idea of iCommunity, and thankfully it solve the problem.
iCommunity
iCommunity is a committee inside SCS – Syrian Computer Society, which is responsible of connecting the youth
computer science interested people with the SCS and other governmental offices.
It has the power that SCS gave to it, which is to think and prepare for projects that young people want to do and they can’t.
By having iCommunity we can achieve almost what we want with some powerful support from SCS.
And I’m one of the 6 managers of iCommunity, together we decieded that we will make this FOSS Workshop a reality.
The Workshop
The workshop took place in Damascus, Tishreen Park, SCS Center. From February 3rd to February 5th.
Everyday had lectures, coffee break and installation festival.
The First Day 03/Feb/2009
We had 3 lectures:
- What is Free Software? What is Open Source Software? and Why? Eng. Firas Kassem & Eng. Humam Hawasly.
- What are the licenses of Free and Open Source Software? Eng. Nada Al Benni.
- What is Creative Commons? Eng. Zyiad Maraqa from Jordan.
The Second Day 04/Feb/2009
We had 2 lectures:
- Arabic Free Open Source projects, and managing them. Php-ar as an example. Eng. Khaled Al Shamaa.
- Linux is a great choice for an operating system. Eng. Emad Mahayni.
The Third Day 05/Feb/2009
We had 3 lectures:
- Building unified communication using IP-Telephoney by open source projects. Eng. Ahmad Osman.
- Practical experiment with using Free Open Source Software in a daily life. Eng. Hani Al Safadi.
- Finding Free Open Source alternatives to proprietary software. Abd Allah Diab.
The Installation Festivals
We told people to bring their laptops so we can teach them how to install Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on it.
There were many interested people so the festival was great.
My friends in the college helped us in the festival, I can’t find any way to thank them.
We also played this video, that describes what would have happened if The Matrix was real and ran on Windows
DVDs
We distributed two DVD’s to the audience, the first one was Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition DVD i386, and the other was an Open DVD which included a debian repository and free open source software for both operating systems Linux and Windows.
Media Coverage and Articles
Creative Commons website wrote about Zyiad’s lecture in the worksop:
Ziad Maraqa, co-Project Lead from CC Jordan, spoke yesterday in Damascus at the iCommunity FOSS Workshop, a notable gathering for the Syrian Free Software community.
Al Watan Newspaper in Syria wrote about the workshop daily (Arabic):
http://www.alwatan.sy/dindex.php?idn=50788
http://www.alwatan.sy/dindex.php?idn=50843
eSyria, Syria blog website wrote about the workshop daily in its Damascus website (Arabic):
http://www.edamascus.sy/_activities.php?filename=200902021845011
http://www.edamascus.sy/_business.php?filename=200902031620011
http://www.edamascus.sy/_news.php?filename=200902041650013
http://www.edamascus.sy/_news.php?filename=200902060300011
Photos
This is a photo of the iCommunity Managers:
This is a photo of the installation team, 4 iCommunity managers, and some students:
I’m the one with the gray suit and glasses in the middle 
And this one is from above of more students, 5 iCommunity Managers (the 6th is the one behind the camera) and the installation team
We had wonderful time, and we got great feedback of people attended the workshop.
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Loading ...FOSS Workshop
Dec 28th
Hello, if you don’t know already, I’m a Computer Science student from Damascus University Syria.
My friends and I are working on an Open Source Free Software workshop here at the faculty of Computer Science, the workshop will take place on February 2009, but we are gathering some resources and information from now.
The workshop will have lectures about Open Source, Free Software, Licenses, Open Source Free alternative for Commercial Proprietary software, and of course Linux OS.
The workshop will also contain an Installation Festival where we are going to install Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex for students on their devices and teach them how to use it.
I’m gonna put some questions here and I’ll ask you to answer it, whether you own an Open Source company or you work for one.
I’m neither a journalist nor an analyst seeker, but I want some answers from you to introduce you the way you want to students, please don’t waste this message because I’m not a journalist, we want to spread the culture of Free Open Source Software here between students and contributing to the workshop would be very kind of you.
Please allow me to ask you to answer the following questions:
1. When did you start your company and who started it?
2. How did you start your company?
3. Why Free Open Source Software? What was the base idea of your company? Did you consider that offering Free Open Source Software might not give you much money? Or money wasn’t your concern at first?
4. What problems did you have to go through till the first line of code was written?
5. Most people ask; where and how do you make money? This question needs to be fully described because in my humble opinion it is the most question people and especially students would care about.
6. Starting a company needs a hard working faithful staff, how did you start collecting your staff? How did you convinced people to work with you knowing that you offer Free Open Source Software?
7. After you finished your first prototype, how did you advertise it?
8. What was the reaction of people who tested the first software of yours?
9. How many people contributed to the first version of your product? And how many downloaded it and used it?
10. You must have received thousands of feedback messages after your first product; do you remember the approximate count?
11. Competition with know software is indeed hard, how did you manage to make your path between your competitors?
12. What are the phases that your company had been in till now? What difficulties and problems did you face?
13. How many people contributed to the second version of your product?
14. How many people contributed to the last version of your product?
15. How many people did you count using your software?
16. Do you advice students to start their companies and follow your path, or do you advice them to look for jobs in companies like yours?
17. What must the student of Computer Science study to be able to work for you? What techniques? Programming Languages? Tools? What do you seek in your workers to have and know?
18. If by any means you had the chance to talk to our students and give them a message, what would it be?
You can of course answer as much as you want of the questions above, but I hope you answer all of them for the sake of Free Open Source Software and knowledge.
Thank you from all my heart, and on behalf of my friends and colleagues I thank you, we appreciate your efforts and your contributions.
Abd Allah Diab
Computer Science Faculty
Damascus University
Syria
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