Sanjeev Gopinath V: OSUM Pizza Party

Hey there,

I'm sorry to come up with a blog post this late. I had to settle a lot of issues with my previous post about my visit to Goa. I was also engaged in a few other stuffs which I'll be blogging about sooner or later.

Coming to the topic of discussion...

OSUM is a social networking website which offers a lot of features exclusively for students who belong to a technical university. It allows one to create forums and discuss about various technologies related to open source and Sun Microsystems.

A few of SASTRA students belonging to GLOSS, the open source community of SASTRA, are a part of this website. According to a recently declared contest, colleges that make more than 100 registrations in the OSUM website will get a free pizza party. And we were more than 200 before the last date of the contest. After long time then, we planned for the pizza party and Dwarak, the Sun Campus Ambassador of SU arranged one for GLOSS members at Krishna Canteen. Since pizza was not available at our campus, we had to go with sandwiches and samosas. It was completely organized right from the beginning to the end by Dwarak. Myself and Anurag voluanteered for distributing the sandwiches and stuff to all. Almost 90 of them attended OSUM party and were happy to the zenith. We gave chocolate cakes, samosas, mango drink, sandwich and much more. Everyone just loved it. We took a lot of pics and had a group photo too.

At this happy occassion, I felt a little sad too. I found members of GLOSS standing in their own gangs, for instance, the first year folks, second year ICT students, Hindi speaking students, third year girls and third year boys. They were all upto there own stories and chit chats. Good to see that, but these days since there is no proper unity, GLOSS is getting smaller and smaller day-by-day. People have started losing their interest in technologies of tomorrow. Also most of the important members of GLOSS have started moving towards various other activities and clubs. A few give reasons and blame their internals and other exams but the main reason being lethargic.

GLOSS is a great platform for learning and it has a very good base and is well structured too. The open source lab is also a great gift which makes GLOSS, a real technical community, far ahead and different from others. GLOSS is nothing but the outcome of sheer hardwork and sufferings of Kumar Abhisek who is presently the Student Co-ordinator of Sun Microsystems. Also Dwarakanath, Sun Ambassador of SU, has taken GLOSS to a great height by helping the developers at GLOSS, get projects to work on. He also made a lot of other contributions. He helped people to get involved in international contests organised by Sun, like the CodeJavafx, Code for freedom, etc. But sadly, not many of them are making use of GLOSS to a good extent. Even the number of mails in the mailing alias has gone down drastically. If this is the case today, tomorrow the situation might even get worst. And so, a few of us have decided to come up with a series of measures and events for GLOSS next year. Hope that would not let it vanish in the mid air even without the participation of main members of GLOSS.