Bring your own bag to WordCamp Pune, but make sure it’s empty

Sipper

We have already mentioned the cool reusable sippers from Bluehost.

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T-shirt

How about a cool t-shirt made of 100% combed cotton, 180gsm, sourced from the best manufacturers in the knitwear capital of India? Some of the world’s largest retailers including C&A, Switcher SA, Walmart, Primark, Oviesse, Switcher, Polo Ralph Lauren, Diesel, Tommy Hilfiger, M&S, FILA, H&M, Reebok import textiles and clothing from Tirupur. This ensured great quality at a fraction of the market cost.

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The momento

Next on the list is this pretty little mug. Every time you’ll look at this minimal design, it’ll remind you of WordCamp Pune without saying much! We just let the logo be and even took out the Pune WordCamp 2015 text to make sure it becomes more about your experience with the Pune community as a whole, not just this WordCamp.

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More Swag

There’s a lot of awesome swag that you a lucky few can get at the sponsors’ stalls. We have spied some aweome things like t-shirts, playing cards, cute little diaries, keychains, stickers, tattoo sleeves, more t-shirts and other stuff in the sponsors’ swag list. Here’s a secret preview of just one of them. Shh…

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Bring your own bag

The only thing we aren’t providing is a bag. So make sure you bring an empty bag to stuff with all these goodies! However, if you want, eCoexist will be selling eco-friendly cloth bags that empower a section of underprivileged women and families (including families of farmers that lose their crops to the drought) through their initiative.

Maybe you could support the cause by buying a beautiful bag from them!

Pune monument bags

Well, the wait is almost over. With just 3 days left, we’re literally going to see you soon!

WordCamp Pune for the community!

Our sponsors, notably JetPack, WP All Import, ZNetLive, SaniSoft and BlogBrandz have asked us to donate all their free tickets to someone who deserved and could use it better. Others have given away at least some of their tickets and some haven’t claimed them yet. These would also go in the charity pool.

In addition, speakers like Mahangu, Andy, Jeremy and Jitesh have given away their tickets, choosing to buy one instead. In total, we have about 25 tickets. We decided to add another 25 to it and give away 50 free tickets to youth who come from economically disadvantaged families.

We got in touch with ‘Swa’–Roop Wardhinee which is one of the leading non-governmental, non-profit organisations working with underprivileged college students, children and women and help them with their education, self-help and skills and vocation based training.

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We’re glad to announce that thanks to our sponsors for funding us well and everyone who gave away their tickets so that students from ‘Swa’–Roop Wardhini can get introduced to the world of Blogging and Open Source in general and WordPress, specifically. It could have been just a little difficult for them to spend the ticket cost of WordCamp Pune 2015!

The next time, we’ll make this 10% share larger than it is. Promise!

Drinking Responsibly, the most precious drink on earth

At an event like this, hundreds of people drink water from disposable plastic bottles or plastic/ paper tumblers raising the environmental cost of such a simple social event.

Which is why, at WordCamp Pune, we have tried to do away with it without losing any practical convenience.

The culture of reuse

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We have procured packaged drinking water in large reusable containers, that’ll be placed all over the venue along with reusable dispensers.

The containers go back to the bottling plant where they are sterilised and water is refilled for distribution. This means we do away with small prepackaged water bottles that could end up anywhere since we don’t have enough control on that.

If each of us has a bottle that they can refill whenever they want to, we do away with the plastic/ paper tumblers.

Courtesy of our WordCamp Superb Bluehost, we’ll each have a re-usable metal sipper/bottle that’s about 500ml in capacity. Metallic with plastic cap and straw, we feel these are quite good looking and handy. Now, we’ll be able to reuse almost everything and produce almost zero garbage from the act of drinking water.

It’s also swag!

Here, have a look. And, thanks Bluehost!

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The menu at WordCamp Pune 2015

TLDR

  • Breakfast: Vada Pav
  • Lunch: Club sandwich, Bombay Masala sandwich and Ukadiche Modak from Chitale Bandhu
  • High tea: Shrewsbury Biscuits (Cookies) from Kayani Bakery, Bhakarwadi from Chitale Bandhu
  • All day chai-coffee

Breakfast

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The quintenssial Maharashtrian street food. It is essentially a piece of bread, slit and stuffed with a pattie filled with mashed boiled potatoes with just a little bit of spices and condiments, and fried with a coating of chickpea flour (besan). Had with different types of sauces and powders (heard of something called the gun powder) or even salted and fried green chillies, if you like it spicy, these are the perfect companion to a rainy or cold Sunday morning!

Best had when they’re piping hot, we are going to explore a lot of Badi-badi baatein, when we wada pav khate! (It’s a pop phrase, which has layers and layers of meaning; ask any WordCamper from Maharashtra about the Vada Pav as well as this phrase. Translation: Talks big but has vada pav)

Chai–Coffee

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Any time during the day, have piping hot cups of adrak-wali chai (ginger tea) or coffee in kulhads (porous clay cups). These kulhads have been made by hand by a potter family from the Kumbharwada in Mundhwa, Pune. Made from the earth, dried in the sun and baked in a kiln, these cups will dissolve back into earth in no time, leaving us guilt free from consuming them!

Lunch

We want you to meet people while having lunch, not worried whether that dal will spill out. We want you make friends while having lunch, not worried about eating things that can quickly get messy. We want you to take in all the knowledge on offer and every experience available at WordCamp Pune, not dozing off in a corner seat.

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So, we opted for simple, filling but non-stuffy lunch. The Indian take on the ever popular sandwich will keep you light and satisfied. The great chutney will trigger gastric juices to digest things in a jiffy. The cheese and butter will gloss your food pipe and the veggies within will fill your proteins, fibres and carbohydrate quotas.

plates

Lunch will be served on plates made out of hard pressed areca (supari) palm leaves. These handy plates are made with machine without the use of chemicals (unlike paper and plastic) and will go back to nourish the trees that they came from in no time!

Top it up with a ripe banana that will also be available during lunch for a healthy, well-rounded lunch.

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Dessert

A deliciously sweet mixture of coconut, jaggery and dry fruits, stuffed inside a rice dumpling, steamed to perfection, this light dessert is a perfect companion to your luch. The favourite sweet of the sweet-toothed, elephant headed god Ganesha, modaks are a fixture of all Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations.

modak

Sourced from the best known makers of Ukadiche Modak (trans. Steamed Modak) in Pune, Chitale Bandhu, we know we’re going to be in trouble because no one would want just one!

High Tea

We sourced the most famous biscuits of Pune, the Shrewsbury biscuits from Kayani Bakery, these crisp, buttery and melt in the mouth contraptions, are going to boot your mind for fresh ideas.

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The famous bhakarwadis from Chitale Bandhu in Pune, will balance the taste with its sweet and spicy taste and sooth your tongue with its crunchiness.

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And the tea and coffee will go on till the event goes on.

If you wish to avoid eating this spread for any reason and would like to eat outside, a friendly custom map has all the eateries, pubs and cafes geolocated for you.

The After Party is going to rock at WordCamp Pune

After a hard day of fun and networking and intense learning, all we need is good music, a drink or two and the company of friends to relax and chill out!

Performances

The after party starts at 7:00 pm and will go on till the venue shuts down. We have live performances by the in house DJ and a retro music performance by inhouse artist WIlly Russo.

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In addition, the friendly folks at the Classic Rock Coffee Co have invited the Sufi Band, Malang for some soulful performance only for us!

Venue

The Classic Rock Coffee Co, is in Kalyani Nagar and is a massive place that can accomodate about 800 people. With an amphitheater, cafetaria and plenty of open space, it is the ideal location to mingle and have discussions, just chillout or shake a leg to the awesome music that’ll be playing all the time. It’s rated high on Zomato. See their Facebook page.

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The Offer

Free Welcome Drink: Flash your WordCamp Pune name badge to get one free drink (any domestic beer, IMFL, coffee, etc). The only things not included are mocktails and imported beer and liquor.

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15-20% Off: Depending on the number of WordCamp Pune Attendees at the venue, we get 15% off on all food and drinks (if we are 200 of us) or 20% off (if we are 300). In short, the more, the merrier.

Getting there

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Use the autowale.in offer or any other cab service. It is about half an hour away from the venue.

Venue: Classic Rock Coffee Co., Kalyani Nagar
Timings: 7 pm onwards
Get: Your WordCamp Pune name badge and your friends

Meet the WordCamp Pune Volunteers

Get ready to meet the first batch of volunteers at WordCamp Pune. Be sure to say “Hi!” when you bump into them and any time you need any help, you know who to get hold of.

Read more about them on our Volunteer’s page.

Sangram Tukaram Chavan

Raj Shah

Harsh Amitbhai Shah

Umesh Dattatray Nevase

Ranjitha Panaganti

Utkarsh Sharma

Rahul Gupta

Aniruddh Agarwal

Ajay Maurya

Vachan Kudmule

WordCamp Pune Impact: Two organisations fully embrace GPL, one trademark violation averted

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Themechilly is now 100% GPL!

When ZNetLive, one of the leading hosting providers in India approached to sponsor us, we were more than happy to have them on board. However, we later realised that ThemeChilly, a sister concern of ZNetLive, used a restrictive license incompatible with GPL.

Instead of recanting their sponsorship, the great folks at ZNetLive engaged in a fruitful discussion with Aditya Kane  (WordCamp Deputy and mentor to WordCamp Pune) and myself and switched to 100% GPL Licensing!

This is what Dakshesh Verma, Marketing head –ZNetTechnologies (the parent company of ZNetLive and ThemeChilly has to say about it:

Initially at ThemeChilly, we had a relatively restrictive usage license for our themes and plugins, as we were slightly apprehensive about the possible ‘piracy’ GPL might’ve entailed on our WordPress products; a misconception we had, due to, frankly, our misunderstanding, or rather limited understanding, of GPL and its implications.

Having come to fully grasp how perfectly GPL captures, and passes on the essence and liberty of WordPress to everyone – the developers and users alike, it made good sense for us to have all our products GPL’d.

Being a part of WordPress community, we want our end users to have and benefit from the same level of freedom that WordPress as a platform has provided to us. 🙂

Slidervilla updates its licensing to become 100% GPL!

SliderVilla, another sponsor of ours was GPL in principle since the licensing said that their code was 100% GPL. However, their terms of purchase conflicted with the license and had very restrictive terms. Alexander Gounder (a WordCamp Deputee) pointed this out to us, since we just happened to see the license and not the other terms.

When contacted, SliderVilla agreed and updated their terms within 10 minutes! Sanjeev Mishra the CEO of SliderVilla says

GPL helps in building a strong community around a product or software, and WordPress itself is one of the best examples. It compels us to work together and build upon the original work and put best foot forward.

SliderVilla started because its founders got so much help from the WordPress community in their early days. And releasing our products under GPL license is one way to say thanks and giving it back to the same community.

WordPress in the TLD

One of our sponsors who wouldn’t like to be named (and we respect that!) had purchased a TLD with the word WordPress in it. Unaware that it violated the WordPress trademark, they immediately took it down when informed about the copyright and trademark infringement. Another day and another disaster averted.

High five, community! Make sure you are there at WordCamp Pune to meet them and other champions of open source! Get your ticket now!

Register for the Blogger Gym to be in the Lucky Ten

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The blogger gym is an awesome workshop for bloggers and writers to take their skills to the next level. Conducted by the ace expert Ramya Pandyan, you can be sure you’ll go back home a far more confident and better writer than before the WordCamp. However, there’s a slight catch.

The Lucky Ten

Writing is intensive; anyone can testify to that. It’d be impossible to work with everyone participating and give them feedback, etc. So, instead, we are going to have 10 live participants, whose posts will be used as the work in progress material and will actively participate under direct supervision of Ramya.

Others will still participate and interact but won’t work under direct supervision. If you wish to be one of the lucky ten, register now (before the 31st)! If you still haven’t bought your ticket, do so now!

The not-so-lucky rest needn’t worry

Oh, and don’t hit the blues if you aren’t one of the ten (but you can feel bad, you poor thing, you!). We have a whole day of activities at the Word Lounge by Alphabet Sambar for writers and bloggers. In a way, those will supplement the workshop!

Register for the Blogger Gym | Get your WordCamp Pune Ticket

Harish Iyer is the speaker we are the most proud of and he’s here to help your cause

Harish is the person who speaks up against every kind of injustice without fear. He makes sure his voice is heard and every cause that he stands up with can find the ears they’ve been looking for. At WordCamp Pune, he’s going to talk about the best possible use of WordPress and technology in Tell It Loud : Getting NGOs up to scale with technology.

Our short bio format can’t contain what Harish has done for this society, so head over to Wikipedia or his about.me page. Here’s an intro from there:

Harish Iyer (aka Harrish Iyer aka Aham aka @hiyer) is an icon for the common people. An Equal Rights Activist, he is best known for his quirky campaigns for the rights of Homosexuals, Women, Children and Animals. His life and experiences have been the subject of a book and two movies.

WordCamp Pune 2015 is over. Check out the next edition!