Idukki: As part of a women's empowerment initiative, the Government Engineering College, Idukki, organised an exclusive hackathon for girl students. It was organised in association with the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS).
The event is mainly aimed at addressing the gender gap in the free and open source software community. It also had for its goal bridging the technology-learning gap among male and female engineering students.
On the first day, experts made an introduction on topics like the free software movement, freedom of user in computing, debian installation, GNU/ LINUX operating system, familiarisation of BIOS and UEFI, and hard disk partitioning etc.
(Debian is a Unix-like operating system based on free software.)
The Open Data Day was marked on the second day, March 2 . It was observed at around 6 spots across Kerala. It is in fact held by the open source software community globally every year on this day. The events held on the Day showcases the benefits of open data and thus encourage the adoption of open data policies by governments, business and civil society.
Mapathon also was a highlight of second day. Events were held to familiarise students with terminals, essential commands and other related subjects.
On the last day an awesome session on GitHub, a web-based hosting service, was held.
The whole program was conducted and coordinated by Ratheesh T K (faculty in charge), student coordinators Farhan K T, Mubash M, Varsha DJ, Sreelakshmi.
ICFOSS members Kannan V M, Ambady Anand S, Renjith Siji, Keerthana Ashok, Sandhini S were also behind the operations.
College principal Dr P Vijayan inaugurated the event. The heads of all different departments attended along with hackathon participants.
The FOSS Cell of the college held the hackathon from March 1 to and 3. A P J Abdul Kalam Technological University, Thiruvananthapuram, also lend support to the programme.
A hackathon is a gathering of computer programmers and other related software programmers to deal with a project.