Grants:TPS/Rahul21/FOSSASIA/Report

Event Name:
FOSSASIA 2014

Description of your participation:
I was a speaker at FOSSASIA 2014 where I delivered a talk on MediaWiki extension - "Pronunciation Recording Tool". It was great to meet people from other Open Source Communities like Fedora, Mozilla, etc. Sharing my ideas with them and also participating in their talks helped me learn something new. I also met Cat Allman (Open Source Programs Office at Google) and Stephanie Taylor (Program Manager, Google). It was an awesome learning experience interacting with different people from different areas.

What lessons where learnt that could help others in similar events?
FOSSASIA was a very well organized event with multiple sessions running simultaneously. I learnt several basic presentation skills like "How to make an effective and appealing presentation", something surely that I plan to improve in the future.
Also something that I would like to emphasize on, always prepare points of your session before hand, it becomes very easy to present it and also give handouts at the end.
Always ask the program organizer about the facilities that they will be providing you for your presentation.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?
My talk was based on the extension I created "Pronunciation Recording Tool". My talk was graced by a few Google Developers, who gave their valuable suggestions and feedback. Some suggestions from the overall audience included incorporating "Accents from different countries". I also managed to go to an institution Ganpat Global Educorp – an arm of Ganpat University, India where I taught students how to get started contributing to Wikimedia Foundation by giving them simple tasks of editing Wikipedia articles, making MediaWiki extensions, etc.

Details of Expenditure:
Air tickets: 34389 INR ( Since I booked it from India, I am mentioning the cost in INR )
Visa Cost: 20 USD
Accomodation: 35 *4 nights : 140 USD
Travel from hotel to airport ( Taxi- Both Ways ): 24 USD/3 = 8 USD
Food : 16.75 USD
8 tuk tuk trips : 8 * 2 USD = 16 USD( 2 USD per trip )