After a year of work put into the project and lots of ups and downs during the development, RTFTR has finally won second prize in the "Open Source Competition Nepal" organized jointly by D2HawkEye services and Pulchowk Engineering Campus.

The environment during the event was quite entertaining and exciting. Everyone in the d2provided TShirts were already hacking into their softwares for the final day demo.

The event venue was Shanker Hotel. I had previously never been into this hotel and after being there, I can say it is GRAND!

There were altogether 10 finalists going into the last round. Each of the projects had total of 25 minutes divided into 8 minutes of presentation, 8 minutes of demonstration and 6 minutes of QnA session and remaining 3 minutes for backup. The judges were also familier faces including Shashidhar Ram Joshi, the Department Head of Institute of Engineering, Pulchowk Campus, SSP from Police Department, our very own Subir Dai from FOSS Nepal, some one from D2HawkEye and finally Ms. Timila Yami from IOE again. A dynamic panel non the less.

First Project: LIVE Event Broadcasting using peer to peer by Sumit Shrestha
This was quite unique! hats off to Sumit for his wonderful research work. On a bandwidth constrained network like ours, I am sure the software will have tremendous potential.

Second Project: Real Time Face Tracking and recognition by Abhishek Dutta, Anjan Nepal, Bibek Shrestha (me) and Lakesh Kansakar.

Third Project: Java API for Grid Computing by Manoj Kumar Shakya, Akash Deep Shakya, Saurabh Man Manandhar
Their project was also nice. They are trying to develop a simple API for programmers to work on Grid Environment. My best wishes for them as well.

First Project in Designer: iGallery by Buddha Bir Lama won in the designing section.

The remaining projects were also good. All the softwares are located at http://d2labs.org/oscn/

And we were presented with the Certificates and Medals by Madan Krishna and Hari Bansa. They were humorous as always.

This year is the first year of the event. It is just an initiation. Next year I assume the participation would be bigger and competition even tougher. The best part of the competition is, it is finally allowing Open Source developers based in Nepal to come forward and participate in the FOSS movement, host their code and try to get new people into their project and embrace the Open Source culture.

With OSCN we're taking another step ahead to fight four our rights and educate people about FOSS movement in Nepal.

Check out more pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/adutta.np/OpenSourceChallengeNepalOSCN2009Gr....