We had organized and conducted our second seminar in an Engineering College today - at Mar Baselios College of Engineering, Trivandrum. The first one was the GLUG meet at Barton Hill. All the arrangements for the meeting including the permissions were done by Rajiv R. Nair and Manuel Jose of MBCET. Other members of the group including myself had to just walk in to the college and give our talks. I was pretty happy with the Barton Hill talk and was even more satisfied with the MBCET talk.

When I walked in to the campus, I was impressed by the kind of infrastructure that these guys had. On further enquiry I found that they had a heck of a lot of land around the Engineering College and that the management runs several institutions in the super campus. They even have a 4 lane expressway leading to the college from the main road.

We were taken to a large seminar hall with a seating capacity of at least 500 people. The hall had good ventilation, good natural lighting, good air circulation and to top it all - an LCD projector and good audio systems. I was a bit apprehensive about how the turn out would be for the meet. It would have been awful if there were too few students in that big hall.

The talk was divided into two parts - the first part was our usual stuff - a set of talks on a) Software Freedom - by Aashik S, b) Career Options in Free Software - by None other than myself :), c) Usability perspective from a common man by Chandrettan. In between Manuel and Rajiv had a go at showing off the graphical prowess of compiz.

I am really passionate about pushing the economic and career perspectives of free software and I gave a 10 minute long impromptu talk straight from my heart. I was very happy with my talk, I don't know about the audience though :). I saw some glitter in some of their eyes but I am yet to hear from any of the audience.

The second was a talk on FEL(Fedora Electronics Lab) by David John. The first session was open to all students and the second part was open only to Electronics students. Students showed interest and attention to both sessions and we(ilug-tvm) are confident that we have sowed the seeds of Thoughts on Free Software and we hope to reap our harvest in the coming months.

The EC HOD was impressed by the talk and there was a general suggestion put forward to conduct a longer program one or two days on FEL. Email addresses of the interested students were collected so as to send invitations to ilug-tvm.