Story
Getting Started is Half the Journey: FOSS Lessons from ASIET
What I learnt from FOSS and eventually starting a TinkerHub chapter at my college
It all started as just another excuse to hang out with my friends from college. Some of them were really into Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and I decided to go with them to FOSSMEET, a meet-up for FOSS enthusiasts at NIT Calicut.
FOSS wasn’t something I was enthusiastic about. Back then I was totally comfortable using proprietary software and I didn’t really see the point in switching to FOSS. Nevertheless, I’m glad that I decided to go with them to Calicut.
Everything free and open source
We met a lot of other developers like us at the meet-up and we were very happy to be in the company of ‘geeks’ like us. At the meet-up, we learned a lot about how FOSS is developed and why switching to FOSS is beneficial.
FOSSMEET was my initiation into the world of FOSS and I realized why it was so amazing. FOSS is not built by a bunch of people sitting together in an office. It’s built by many developers from across the world who contribute their time and collaborate with total strangers to create something that can be beneficial to a lot of people. How they manage to keep the community of contributors together is something I still can’t comprehend. And that’s how I became a FOSS enthusiast and an advocate for everything free and open source. It’s not just software, the same principles can be applied to education too.
TinkerHub ASIET
I’m passionate about learning as well as teaching new things, and I’ve found that peer-to-peer learning is one of the best methods to learn and teach new things. I came to know of an organization called TinkerHub, who shared my faith in peer-to-peer learning. At a meet-up called Campus Community Connect, a few of the leaders at TinkerHub — Gopikrishnan Sasikumar, Mehar MP, Niyaz Ashraf, and Avinash, showed us how TinkerHub started and how they could help us create a community for learning on our campuses. They inspired me to start a TinkerHub chapter at my college, TinkerHub ASIET.
In order to introduce TinkerHub to the students in my college, a few of my friends and I decided to organize a workshop on FOSS, which would be followed by an expert talk by a FOSS contributor Balasankar C. We prepared ourselves to teach people how to get started on developing FOSS using Git, GitHub, and GitLab. Generally, workshops have one mentor, usually someone with professional experience, teaching a large number of participants.
However, this workshop did not take place in that manner. To promote peer-to-peer learning, we split the class of 40 participants to groups of 8. My friends and I taught one group each. Such teaching methods are very effective. It’s easier for the mentor to teach a small group of participants than the whole class. Since both the mentors and participants were students, the participants found it easier to approach the mentors whenever they had doubts.
Hence, we were successful in teaching the participants what is Git, how to use it, and how to work collaboratively using GitHub or GitLab. All the participants made a contribution to the documentation of a FOSS project of their choice. By the end of the workshop, all of us had become FOSS contributors.
Balasankar C, an alumnus of our college was the best choice for giving a talk to the participants, as he was able to connect with them easily after sharing his experiences as a student at Adi Shankara. He shared his experiences on being a FOSS contributor when he was still a student and how that benefited him during the placement interviews in his final year at college. Some of the participants told me they loved his talk and were looking forward to attending one of his workshops. They also requested me to arrange such a workshop at the college.
The best thing I got from the workshop was the opportunity to meet a group of students who were eager to gain more skills. A few students asked me if I could teach them some other skills like web development. They were willing to stay back in college after regular classes to learn. So, I immediately made arrangements to teach them the basics of web design. Fortunately, we got a place at the Business Hub at my college. It was managed by a professor at my college, Ajay Varghese. When I told him about my plans, Ajay sir immediately agreed to let me use a part of the Business Hub for my classes.
In a matter of a few weeks, the students learned a lot about web design and started working on projects. I was surprised by how fast they were learning and picking up new concepts on their own. During those few weeks, I was also able to get close to them and now they have become good friends of mine. We have a lot of things in common, including our thirst for knowledge.
Impact of the workshops
Talking about impact; I’ll tell you Mareena’s story. The first time I met her, she admitted that she didn’t have a lot of technical skills and she wasn’t really interested in programming. However, later on, she attended the workshop I conducted on Git, GitHub, and GitLab.
“I wasn’t good at developing programs or applications, in the beginning. And I definitely didn’t know a thing about FOSS. To be honest, I joined the workshop to skip classes. After attending the workshop, I got a good idea about FOSS and how it’s so awesome. I loved the way they organized the class. My mentor was my own classmate to whom I could ask any question, no matter how stupid it was. I highly recommend attending such workshops to those who want to be productive in the future.”
~ Mareena Kunjachan
After the workshop and the expert talk, she was one of the students who asked me to arrange a workshop by Balasankar. She also picked up web designing very fast and never failed to impress me with not just what she built but also by the level of sophistication in the doubts that she asked me. I was very proud of her when I found out that she got the opportunity to intern at Pehia Foundation, which is an organization run by some incredibly talented women. Mareena also took part in GHCI 19 Codeathon for Women Students. She worked with other women students who she hadn’t met before and was able to win a prize for being one of the 5 most collaborative teams in the Codeathon.
After all these experiences, I developed an absolute faith in the idea of peer-to-peer learning. The current education system in most technology institutions restricts the amount of time our teachers get to interact with the students. This makes it harder for the students to approach their teachers and adds more friction to the learning process.
Peer-to-peer learning, on the other hand, is mostly frictionless. When students teach other students, the ones who are learning are more comfortable at approaching their trainers. It’s also an opportunity for the students to find others who have the same learning objectives so that they can learn new concepts and keep their skills updated together.
It takes an organization like TinkerHub to nurture such communities that brings together students who are willing to share their knowledge and the students who want to develop new skills. The folks at TinkerHub have prior experience in developing such communities at their colleges. It was really great of them to guide and support students who wanted to start such communities at our colleges. They were able to guide us on how to get started and how to grow the community.
The community I helped build at Adi Shankara is a small one with a few but significant achievements to boast about. I plan on helping it grow further. We plan on including more students from all departments and inspire more leaders to rise up and help their classmates gain new skills. I also hope that one day the TinkerHub ASIET community grows to include the faculty as well so that they also get to interact with their students outside the classrooms and probably even learn from them.
I’m sure there are many people who are confused about what they should do after finishing school or graduating from college. But many of them fail to try learning something new. They’re either intimidated by the complexity of the topic, they doubt that they might be wasting their time, or they doubt that they might not be good at it.
No one can never know for sure unless they try. Getting started with learning something new is probably the only thing that takes to find your way in life. It certainly did for me when I started learning about FOSS.
That’s all, folks! Hope you liked reading about Jagannath’s journey :) Don’t forget to clap and share!
If you have a story that you’d like to share with us and the rest of the learning community, write to us at hello@tinkerhub.org.
