Hardware Freedom Day
Article by: Hima Bindu
Hardware Freedom Day is an awareness creating program about freedom of using hardware that is OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE and is celebrated across the world . Being a community which works for and on FREE SOFTWARE it is of immense pleasure for EERF to celebrate the day . But we wanted to present something out of the box and for that we had to switch on to lateral thinking.Initially we prepared a schedule for a 2 day event but later had to sum it up for 1 day.
We planned our activity in this order:
1. Presentation about EERF & its activities.
2. A talk on “ NSA Surveillance” by Siddharth Malempati ( General Secretary of Swecha) .
3. A role- play by Vijay Babu, Bhanu Prakash, Rohith S, Bharadwaj, Rajashree on how our education system is destroyed(2+2=5).
4. A play about how giant companies dominate us without our knowledge(Economic Hitman) by Aditya, Adarsh, Akhil P, Akhil B, Tejaswini,Sandhya,Rohith, Rishitha,Bindu.
5. A play on “NSA Surveillance” by Hima Bindu,Sarvani, Rishitha.
5. A session on “Freedom Box” by Bhuvan Chandra( General Secretary of Swecha).
5. Vote of thanks.
6. A meet up of all glug members with Siddharth Malempati ( General Secretary of Swecha).
After preparing the schedule, we started our work with the invitations and the spectacular presentation of EERF. Hima Bindu prepared the content while Bhanu and Karthik worked on the slides. All the others worked on the acts. Rajashree, Vijay, Akhil, Akarsh, Adarsh were the main characters of the play “2+2=5”.
Economic hitmen included almost everyone. It was a mix of everything that was and is happening in the world. Bhanu and Rishitha were beyond our expectations, it was great watching them.
Sarvani and Hima Bindu acted in the play regarding NSA surveillance, Edward Snowden VS the Govt. court trial. We were a little late in getting our script done but finally had it done . Now after the preparations it was the time for the real deal.
The day has come,
Siddharth Malempati, one of the honourable guests talked about NSA surveillance, its cons and how it works and how freedom can help us to be safe from being watched. Then Yashwanth introduced EERF to the people who attended. He talked about its origin, its activities, its association with Swecha.
It was really good listening to their sessions, each with a passion.
After lunch we acted out our plays and then Bhuvan Krishna( General Secretary of Swecha) took a special session on FREEDOM BOX. He demonstrated how it works and enlightened everyone with its importance.
Then we concluded with a vote of thanks. We talked to bhuvan anna after the event and put forth our doubts and thoughts regarding FREEDOM BOX.
Ranjith Raj( Activity leader @ Swecha), Viswanath ( Activity leader @ Swecha) and some others from swecha attended the event. After the conclusion we all met and had a talk. It was nice hearing from them that the day went really well. At the end of the day, all of us were content with how the event turned out.
We had a meetup with all members of EERF & Ranjith Raj & Viswanath ( Activity leaders of Swecha). We discussed about satellite events of Techdays3.0 & 3d printing technologies. Also about RaspberryPi & Freedom Box specially.
Our aim is to deploy Freedom Box in our college and showcase that free software is the future & nothing is impossible with free software.
Volunteers involved:
Achyuth
Aditya
Akarsh Reddy
Akhil Bantu
Akhil Ponnam
Bhanu Prakash
Bharadwaj
Bhavya
Dhanya Himaja Shukla
Gnanadeep
Hima Bindhu
Joel Vinay Kumar
Karthik Reddy
Kumari
Meghana
Nidhish
Pratyusha
Rajashree
Ravi
Rishitha
Sandhya
Sarvani
Sri Ram
Tejaswini
Vijay Babu
Yashwanth Reddy