The Ref Contest

As a strategy to propagate OSUM, the co-ordination committee of the S.O.U.R.C.E Team decided to host a competition for the students of the Computer Science Department of Osmania University.

After giving in a lot of thought, we came up with the name "The Ref Contest". The rules of the contest were pretty simple. They had to

• Educate their friends about OSUM and FOSS
• Ask them to join the S.O.U.R.C.E group of OSUM

For every person who enters, the participant was awarded with a referral point. Finally at the end of the contest, the participant with the most number of referral points wins!

The prizes for the competition were decided as

• The top three participants would get a 4 GB pen drive each
• Every participant who makes 25 referrals gets a T-Shirt. This was on "First perform, First win" basis

We decided to maintain transparency in the competition and finally concluded that the Discussion Forum at our S.O.U.R.C.E group was the best place to track the referral points. The referral points were calculated regularly and the positions were updated to keep up the competitive spirit.

The participants were also supplied with information about FOSS, OSUM, Sun Microsystems Inc and S.O.U.R.C.E, so that they can propagate OSUM effectively and efficiently.

We had great enthusiasm from the participants. They started spreading out the word to their friends and started the chain reaction. Within no time I could see the members in my OSUM growing by leaps and bounds.

The competition lasted for about a month, and is finally nearing an end. The results of the competition will be announced soon at http://osum.sun.com/group/osmaniauniversityosumsource/