Grants:TPS/Andisrado/FOSScamp Syros 2017/Report

Event name

FOSSCamp Syros 2017

Participant connections

I lead two workshops during Fosscamp "How to make great photos with your smartphone for Wikimedia Commmons" and "Ermoupoli: 360 and Panoramic photos for Wikimedia Commons & Mozilla Web VR project".There were 12 people attending my workshops. They were really interesting people from different projects and we had the chance to exchange experiences with the participants from various floss projects.

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience: What is one way you shared something from your experience with your community (either locally or globally), after the event?

Add a link here to a blog post or newsletter you wrote about your participation afterwards, or to a meet-up you organized to share your experience with your local community.

It's been some years now since I first participated in the events organized by the local community of Open Labs Hackerspace in the city of Tirana. I've been their photographer some years now and I feel very lucky to have had the chance to work with people who work and collaborate together with the common goal of sharing knowledge. During these years where I've helped them document many of the events that Open Labs has organized, I have uploaded most of them in Wikimedia Commons so that they can be used by the public.

This year, I was very happy to have a bit more different summer, some sort of a geeky one! I was part of FOSScamp Syros 2017, an event all dedicated to open source software. when I first heard of this event it seemd very nice and challenging and I was already looking for doing something different this year, not the typical stay off all day vacation. So I decided to apply to be part of this adventure, altogether with a group of 13 people. Since I was going to be part of this, I deceded to be a lot more active this year and I took this very seriosly so I applied with 2 workshops with WIkimedia for this event.

The first workshop I organized was "How to make great photos with your smartphone for Wikimedia Commmons". I shared some tips with the group, about lightening, the way they should hold the camera, some suggestions on how to get the best view etc. Everyone seemed very interrested and thanked me for the tips. Of course after that we got our hands on, we separeted in smaller groups and spread around in different areas of the city in order to take pictures of different monuments, institions and other points of the city. It was a very interesting workshop and some sort of funny one since people had to go around in order to reach their objectives for the pictures that needed to be taken. Of course I was also around and took many pictures with my camera for a better quality and you can see here some of them: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wiki_Loves_Maps_-_FOSScamp_Syros

The second workshop I organized was "Ermoupoli: 360 and Panoramic photos for Wikimedia Commons & Mozilla Web VR project". Unfortunatly we had an accident with the camera in the second part of the day, and we werent able to finish everything we planned, but we managed to get a some 360 pictues of some important parts of the island.

I was very active everyday during the camp by taking pictures of the events organized there, you can take a look at some of them here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:FOSScamp_Syros

In general this was a very nice and productive event. I also got a lot of context about other open source projects such as Debian, which had many people involved with it who attended the event, but also LibreOffice, Mozilla etc.

The sunny days in the beautiful Greek island of course made this FOSScamp even nicier, and I would totally reccomend more people to join such evets for some a bit more different summer days.

Finances

• The total amount which I spend is up to 398 € which was my approved grant. I spend 45 € (round trip with bus from Tirana to Athens and Athens to Tirana), 110 € for accommodation, 40 € participating fee, 63 € (round trip with ferry from Pireaus to Syros and Syros to Pireaus) and 124.5 € for 7 days in food and drinks.