FOSSASIA 2015 Highlights noticed by me

This blog i am writing specifically to point out some good points i noticed during the fossasia 2015 conference. Feel free to add missing in comments section :)

1. Awesome location Singapore !! I am sure no one will object :)
2. On the first day Tweets were displayed in the hall. Fossasia is not one who started it. But this was the my first conference where i saw it. It is good thing where audience can share what going in there mind w.r.t. ongoing talk  with other audience. It was also motivating audience to tweets, so good trick to make audience active ;)
3. It was good first day with no parallel talks. I liked the approach, starting parallel tracks from day first sometime start splitting audience. Talks on first day were more generic. People also got a chance to know, how many people around and started planning hacking activity for coming days.
4. Talk from Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, Minister of Singapore was well taken by audience. Very few such ministers around who understand technology so well.  

   Happy got a chance to listen Dr. Vivian Balkrishnan @ #fossasia Wish get more ministers in world thinking for foss.
   — Pravin Satpute (@prravins) March 13, 2015

5. All food vessels at the lunch counter got empty in some time. It proves how tasty the food was. :)
6. Second day started with 5 parallel tracks. OpenTech, Web Technologies, Python, Mozilla and DevOps. I attended almost all talks in OpenTech Track. Even though there was 5 tracks each track got sufficient audience. 
7. Before lunch we took group photo. It was fun, whenever we were thinking all are in now, one new batch of people were joining and then again trying to accommodate all frame. Thanks to Michael Cannon for photo.
   
8. One of the good points was almost all domains people were present. Even we had some talks related to Open Source in Healthcare AutistConnect, LifeNectar and OpenMRS.
9. Lightening talks generally does not get scheduled but in fossasia those were scheduled. I will say it as a good move. First it gave speakers recognition and also might have given them chance to get funding for conference. Second since it was scheduled it happened in well planned manner. Some audience missed few talks due to minor schedule change in lightening talks. Still i will say lightening talks made good impact. Specifically it worked like person introduced his topic and requested audience to join breakout session for further discussions.
10. Plenty of rooms were available for breakout sessions.
    
11. Each day was followed by some social event. Going to remember social event at Labrador park seaside Singapore BBQ definitely for some more time. Did not attended other days social event since some other plans.

    had one of the best dinner from #fossasia @ labrador seaside BBQ, hats off for organizers for an arrangement !!
    — Pravin Satpute (@prravins) March 13, 2015

12. I think due to huge success of fossasia2015 organizers decided to choose same location for next year fossasia as well.
13. Number of booths were available, Dron demonstration was also interesting. Mozilla, MySql, 3D printer, Red Hat.

I had almost dropped my plan to attend conference, thanks to Harish. He gave opportunity to attend conference the conference. I am going to write one more blog on my activities at fossasia, it will be bit bigger than this, Stay tuned :)