FOSSASIA and Openclipart Launch Internet of Things T-shirt Design Contest

Special prizes await international designers, students and artists who join the competition and create T-shirt designs for Asia’s premier Open Technology event taking place from March 18-20 at the Science Centre Singapore.

FOSSASIA and Openclipart are launching a contest for International students, artists and designers to design a T-shirt graphic representing “The Internet of Things for Me.” 1st place winner of the contest will win a FiftyThree Pencil and final design placement on the official FOSSASIA 2016 T-shirt. Second and third place winners’ graphics will be used as design elements at the conference main party on the second day of the event.

FOSSASIA Openclipart

“FOSSASIA 2016’s theme is about the Internet of Things for Me,” said chair of FOSSASIA, Hong Phuc Dang. “What better way to represent this idea visually than to unleash local Singaporean and international designers, artists, professionals and students to make artwork representing their ‘things’ and expression about this topic.”

FOSSASIA 2016 challenges all participants to join the contest at Openclipart, the world’s largest collection of original and free to use clipart. The contest begins February 11, 2016 and runs for two weeks until February 24, 2016 where three judges will select the top three compositions. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners will be selected, awarded, and announced publicly.

“Since 2004, Openclipart has been a dynamic creative community of artists and designers producing more than 89,000 clipart by more than 4,900 artists,” stated Openclipart founder, Jon Phillips. “This competition is to bring creativity to the conference, and use the powerness of Open to create image composition of what the Internet of Things is all about. Even better, all the artwork made in the competition will be released into the public domain using Creative Commons Zero 1.0 license so that anyone may use the images for any reason, even commercially.”

Judges for the competition will be Singapore-based artist and designer Gloria Chiang, chair of FOSSASIA Hong Phuc Dang and technologist and co-organizer Mario Behling. After the two-week competition ends on February 24, 2016, results will be announced March 2, 2016.

“Singapore is a hub of software and cultural innovation,” said Singapore-based artist, Gloria Chiang. “FOSSASIA 2016 is a brilliant place to showcase international innovation trends and work with local artists, designers and students to illustrate these concepts.”

“FOSSASIA 2016 T-shirt design competition participants artwork will be showcased not only on T-shirts and publicly on the web, it will also be used to create an atmosphere for the 2nd night of the FOSSASIA 2016 conference,” said organizer Hong Phuc Dang. “All participants of the FOSSASIA 2016 conference are invited to attend this special event and share the works found at our party with the hashtag #FOSSASIA. With lots of surprises, you will not want to miss FOSSASIA 2016.”

Join the competition at: http://openclipart.org/fossasia2016

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OpenTech and Open Knowledge in the Mekong Delta and throughout Asia

The FOSSASIA organization has been very active and I would love to give you a few updates on our activities. One thing why we love to work in this community is because you get the chance to meet some of the most awesome and friendly tech people of the world. Jonas Smeedegaard from the Debian community is one of our guests who has been visiting us three times already and conducted workshops at our events and even stayed several weeks in Can Tho to train students using and developing Debian.

Jonas Smeedegaard at Workshop: Bringing Asian and International developers together

Meetups and Code Sprints

Of course we could not do all of this alone and we would like to thank some of the most outstanding folks we are working together with including HanoiLUG and Saigonlug in Vietnam, Singapore Hackerspace and the Beijinglug.

Coding Projects

We have recently involved and organized activities with the following projects and are glad to feature the following projects on this blog:

  • Wikipedia
  • OpenWrt
  • Crypto-Stick
  • LXDE
  • MoonOS
  • Android
  • GNOME
  • Debian
  • Fedora
  • Gimp
  • Inkscape
  • Linux conversion libraries
  • OpenStreetMap
  • and many more

FOSSASIA Event in Ho Chi Minh City

Internships

In 2012 we welcomed interns in Can Tho. Fifteen students participated in the program as full time interns in the office of MBM International in the biggest city in the Mekong delta. The program took place for 2 months and a core part of it was to learn how to use collaborative tools liker issue trackers and contribute to OpenStreetMap. Our students also love the Wikipedia sprints and we got a lot of positive vibes as everyone was happy to learn how to set up the Mediawiki software, that empowers the encyclopedia, share their ideas and spread Open Knowledge and Open Data about the Mekong Delta.

Event activities

We also continued to organize the FOSSASIA OpenTechSummit in 2010 and 2011 in Raffles College and Van Lang University in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam. Plus we had a Mini-Debconf in Saigon and organized the event series OpenDesign.Asia Weeks bringing together designers and Open Source developers. We have links to the LXDE project and GNOME community and we have sent developers to the GNOME.Asia Summit 2012 in Hong Kong and supported the TYPO3 conference 2012 in Phnom Penh.

Also globally FOSSASIA starts to receive more attention. We have received the opportunity to introduce Asian projects at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal (2011) and Brussels (2011), at the Linuxtag in Berlin (2012) and many other community events.

Please Join us and Get in Touch

The FOSSASIA organization supports activities and Open Tech development and Open Knowledge projects of the community active in Asia. If you are interested to cooperate for a project, need support for a development sprint or an event, please contact us on the FOSSASIA mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/fossasia

 

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Tom Lechner Libre Graphics Artist and Developer in Vietnam

We invited Tom Lechner, Libre Graphics artist and developer of the desktop publishing software Laidout, to spend the summer vacation with us in Vietnam to work on some Libre Graphics projects together and to work on training materials.

Hong Phuc Dang and Tom Lechner

 

Many designers hesitate to switch to Libre Graphics tools as they have been mainly trained with proprietary tools.

We often hear from designers that for example Gimp does not offer the same features as Photoshop. Well, rather than thinking to exchange an application designers should also think about opening up the way they creatively work. In fact Open Source tools can offer even more possibilities to be creative, but you need to stop thinking in categories of programmes or applications. Open Source programmes can incorporate new features easily by including existing libraries.

In the Linuxworld there are many tools available that can be accessed by command line as well. You could write your own script and change an enourmeous amount of images. Well, those are the few things we are exploring together with Tom this summer.

 

Vietnam Impressions by Libre Graphics Artist Tom Lechner

Links:

* Tom Flickr Stream for Vietnam: flickr.com/photos/tomlechner/sets/72157630879789412/with/7865406572/

* Website: tomlechner.com

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OpenDesign.Asia Weeks

The OpenDesign Weeks Asia took place throughout South Vietnam in 2011 and 2012. The idea of the row of events was to bring together participants under the motto “All About Sharing” of graphic designs, Libre Graphics, Open Source Software, open content and Free Culture Practices, FashionTec and the maker community. We were proud to welcome hundreds of people talking to designers from Asia, Europe and the US.

Events during the design weeks include workshops, design camps to share expertise in an unconference, company meet ups to establish international cooperations, presentations in Universities and training workshops.

Special thanks go to the Open Source Publishing Group (OSP), who have formed a group of 8 people to come over to participate in the events.

 

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Open Design Weeks 2011 Saigon

The Open Design Weeks Asia take place in Hochi Minh City and Cantho (Vietnam) from April 2-16, 2011. The program has been announced. There will be an Open Design Camp in Saigon and intensive workshops in Cantho.

The focus of the Open Design Weeks are on design, Free, Libre and Open Source software, open content and Free Culture practices. Events during the design weeks include workshops, design camps to share expertise an unconference, company meet ups to establish international cooperations, presentations in Universities and training workshops. The intensive workshops with local designers, software developers and typographers focus on collaborative font design, mapping and publication.

This will be a great chance to get involved in some new and exciting projects

Open Design Weeks: http://opendesign.asia

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Libre Graphics Meeting – How to Attract Asian Developers

The talk of my video is online thanks to Rivervalley TV. Thank you! In my presentation I talk about the situation of Open Source in Asia and how to attract new contributors. Many people still do not know about Free and Open Source in Asia, but we need more people to support each other and help new users und developers. We need more developers in Vietnam to adapt existing solutions for Vietnamese and Asian users. We need people to organize events, where we can meet face to face. We need mentors, who developers and contributors can turn to. We need business people who understand business models and opportunities around Free and Open Source.

Slides: http://de.slideshare.net/hpdang/libre-graphics-meeting-2010-brussels-presentation-by-hong-phuc-dang

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How to get contributors from Asia for your Open Source project – Talk at Libre Graphics Meeting Brussels

I had the chance to talk about the topic of how to get contributors for Free/Libre/Open Source projects from Vietnam and Asia at the Libre Graphics Meeting Brussels. It was a a fantastic experience to meet developers and contributors from all over the world and I hope to support projects with the insights of this talk.

The situation in 2010 in Asia is, that many people still do not know about Free and Open Source. We need more people to support each other and help new users und developers. We need more developers in Vietnam to adapt existing solutions for Vietnamese and Asian users. We need people to organize events, where we can meet face to face. We need mentors, who developers and contributors can turn to. We need business people who understand business models and opportunities around Free and Open Source. We need you! FOSS can be a sustainable model for Vietnam as it is for other countries. Please join us in our effort for education, spreading knowledge, developement of better, faster and energy-saving software, designing easy to use interfaces and promoting opportunities for everyone with Free and Open Source.

Links

* Libre Graphics Meeting 2010: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2010

* LGM: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org

 

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