Arena in FISL 9!

this year was the first time I went to fisl (Forum Internacional de Software Livre) to participate in the organization of the Arena Contest, that was promoted by INdT together with Forum Nokia, the Gobolinux community and the fisl organizing committee.

the arena itself was a closed glass room (like an aquarium) in the middle of the event area. it seemed like a "big brother" show, everybody stopped and starred through the windows to see what was going on inside :)
while coding the participants were given "red bull" and pizza to keep their energy high and it worked since none of them left before the last minute!










the first phase "qualifying" of this competition was a series of tasks of python for series 60. these tasks were hidden in the calendar of the N95, like a "treasure hunt". 8 teams of 4 people participated and the teams that earned the most points by solving the tasks advanced to final round: the "insanifying".

in the final round was proposed a real project of developing an ODF viewer for the Maemo platform. from the 5 teams that participated in the final round (1 resigned), 4 functional applications were coded in 24 hours, great job from the participants!

we hope they continue to develop the applications (as they promised) and start a joint project at garage.

more photos from the Arena can be found here.

all this Arena event was filmed by a great professional team of film producers from Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre. they will produce a video that will show off better what we are trying to describe here.

besides the great experience of organizing the Arena, it was also great to meet the guys from trolltech and kde and see the challenges of the UI design in Andreas talk! in INdT, we are doing a lot of work in common with these guys and we talked about the opportunities of working together.

summarizing, as artur said, it was an amazing event for INdT!