We, SJIT GLUG members hereby say with pride that we were part of the great occasion – The General Council Meeting and National camp. It took place in Yuvakshetra Institute of Management Studies, Palakkad organized by DAKF under guidance of Free Software Movement of India (FSMI). We were grateful to have invited by Free Software Foundation TamilNadu(FSFTN). It was an amazing experience.
The three day camp was organised well with conferences, workshops, discussions, fun-activities as well as delicious Food.
The first day had two sessions. Mr. Prabir Purkayastha, Founder Editor of Newsclick.com started the day with his wisdomic style of speech about unfair rise of tech-giants like Facebook and Google. He clearly stated how the rise of tech-companies differ from giant financial and material industries. The next session was about Shared Economy and Platform monopolies by Mr.Kiran. It further explained the effect of Monopolies in the Economy and the purpose to combat them through Platform cooperatives. The day ended with fantastic classical dances such as Bharathanatyam, Kuchipudi, Mogini Attam, etc.
For the first session of second day, Mr.Prashanth delivered a motivating speech explaining the aim and objective of the Freedom Movement in India and the structure of the organisation and its member state-organisation. Mr.Sidharth from Swecha gave a lecture about The Political Education in the Organisation. It was a brief step-by-step to motivate volunteers to work for the auspicious goal. The day ended with the event ‘Campfire’ and many fun games.
Final day also had two sessions. The first session was about the “Impact of Social Media in Elections” by Mr.Bhuvan. Further session by Mr.Praveen explained what as a free software movement we can do to protect democracy. We decided to post about Fake news and collected Data using an app called Kobo Collect. At the end of the session, We decided to focus on the awareness campaign to inform the people about the unfair use of technology which would destroy democracy in the coming days.
All in actuality, the entire camp was very informative and also motivating us to take a step-up in responsibility to work against serious issues happening in the technology. Overall, the camp came out much better than we expected.