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Hackathon – a 3 day residential workshop on free software for engineering students from all over Kerala- was conducted in association with ICFOSS at the ICFOSS office, Trivandrum from 2 nd -4 th, September. The event was designed to find ambassadors/ from various engineering colleges to work with and also promote the ideas of free software at their respective colleges and other places of work.

The first Women Hackathon for the new academic year was conducted at College Of Engineering , Munnar on 19,20 and 21 of August,2016. The partcipants were around 16, second and final year girl students, from the college spanning different departments like Computer Science , Electronics and Communication and Electrical Engineering.

The workshop started on 19 th with an introductory session on free software. The idea of freedom in software as a form of knowledge was discussed in an interactive manner. The students were familiarized with the various freedoms users get to enjoy with a free software and the concept of copyleft.An initial skeptical audience soon found it comfortable with the software freedom as a way of sharing and multiplying the knowledge. After a break for lunch, a game was conducted to challenge students in building opinion on an idea independently, expressing the opinion and changing them if needed. A session on GNU/Linux followed, with a step-by- step procedure to install a Linux based operating system (Debian).

The Deshabhimani newspaper of July 3 rd 2016 carried an article on empowering Adivasi youth to document their own language, history and culture and share them with the world by building a website, which is to be launched next month. This is part of a project funded by SBI Life at MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), where Adivasi youth in the 18-35 age group are trained in web designing by SPACE.

Day Two started with a hands-on session on machine learning led by Arun Joseph. He introduced some of the available machine learning library such as OpenCV and scikit learn. Using Python-OpenCV, participants attempted to create a digit classifier.

A Machine Learning workshop, a joint venture of SPACE and ICFOSS, began today, with 22 students from all over Kerala participating. The workshop chiefly comprises 4 sessions, out of which two were completed today. The morning session was taken by Arun M, who provided an introduction to Machine Learning in the perspective of free software. The afternoon session was led by Sachin, who spoke about the principles behind machine learning.