In an interview with the English Press Club, Vihang Shah, the coordinator of the Department of Visual Media (DVM) for BOSM 2017, shed light on his department’s perspective of the events that led to them exiting the fest.

Among other things, DVM’s work for BOSM involves making the registration software – the RegSoft, the fest’s official app, and its website. During the BOSM Review Committee (BRC) meeting, the department was criticised on all these aspects.

One of the allegations against DVM was that they had failed to incorporate some of the changes suggested by the CoSSAc into the RegSoft, and that this had caused several issues. Vihang responded saying that his department had met with Controls, Rec ‘N Acc, PCr, and Firewallz on multiple occasions to fine tune the software. The changes had been incorporated to the satisfaction of the CoSSAc. ‘After all this, on the day the fest was scheduled to start, at 6am, the CoSSAc called up a junior and asked for more changes to be made to the RegSoft. One cannot expect such changes on such a short notice because there is no time to test the software after changing it. Considering all this, it is not justifiable for them to bring up the same issue during BRC.’

The official BOSM app was another bone of contention between DVM and the CoSSAc. This year, both DVM and Coding Club were competing to make the app, but there was no unbiased jury to decide which one was better – BOSM Controls’ word was final. ‘BOSM Controls was in favour of Coding Club’s app. However, in one of the meets, I pointed out several issues with their app which they did not even know about that were not present in ours. I would have accepted their decision if they had brought in some unbiased third party to judge, even if the decision had been in favour of Coding Club. We were never told proper reasons for their decision to go with Coding Club’s app’.

Towards the end of that meet, DVM was claimed to not be serious about their work, and the argument became heated. In response to this, DVM brought down the BOSM website for a few hours. ‘This was one of the harshest decisions we made, and it was done to show how serious we actually are about our work. The website was down from midnight to 5am. We brought the site back up just because we did not want to jeopardise the fest.’ Since this happened very close to the fest, the CoSSAc tried to resolve the issue and agreed to let DVM’s app be the official one.

However, after all this, DVM’s app crashed during the fest. ‘The app crashed because of an issue with the backend. The backend was given to Controls to update the schedule and the details of matches. But they forgot to fill in some of the details and left a lot of fields empty. These missed fields caused things to mess up in the backend, and that was why the app crashed. We met with Controls on two separate occasions to test out the app, and we clearly explained to them how the app was supposed to be used.’

According to Vihang, there were a lot of issues that contributed to their exiting BOSM. On each of the aspects – the RegSoft, the app, and the site – they felt they were unjustifiably blamed. ‘Leaving BOSM was not a decision made lightly. The CoSSAc has always brought up a lot of minor issues with our work over the last few years. The same people who make the RegSoft and the website for BOSM also make them for Oasis.’ He said that the fact that similar software was developed for the two fests by the same people but produced differing results implied that it was more likely to be a user error than a designing one. ‘During BRC, our review lasted for more two hours, but reviews of major departments like BOSM Controls, PCr, Rec ‘N Acc, and BOSM Sponz did not happen. Was that coincidental? We did not want to leave BOSM, but neither did we want to stay in a culture which forced us to deal with people rather than focusing on our work.’