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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FOSSASIA 2010: Bridge to Asia

FOSSASIA 2010 took place at the Raffles College campus in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam from November 12th to 14th. This inaugural event brought together over 350 international and local developers and users in 62 presentations and panels. An amazing crowd of 90 enthusiastic volunteers supported participants. FOSSASIA attendees came from 30 countries including Cambodia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, India, Taiwan, Malaysia, Germany, France, England, Australia, and the US.

The goal of FOSSASIA is to provide knowledge of free and open source software and to offer the community a place to meet and share ideas. The annual conference brings together members of the Asian FOSS community along with the international community, thus fostering cooperation across projects and across borders.

Special Tracks: Women in IT and Lightweight Computing

The 2010 event offered 5 tracks including the two special theme tracks “Women in IT” and “Lightweight Computing”.

Hong Phuc Dang from MBM Vietnam said of the Women in IT panel:

“It is fascinating to see so many girls participating. I am very happy that we have chosen ‘Women in IT’ as a theme as it attracted many students to join us.”

Other participants of the women panel were Lilly Nguyen (UCLA, US), Van Thi Bich Ty (PCWorld, Vietnam), Mary Agnes James (Seacem), Lita Cheng (Community Cambodia) and Kounila Keo (ICT4D Cambodia).

The heated debate during the panel definitely portrayed some of the issues and challenges young female developers face. I hope that it made many of the younger women more interested in participating in the community. I am excited to see more involvement of women in IT in Asia in the near future” said Lilly Nguyen from the US.

The “Lightweight Computing” track also generated a lot of interest. Lubuntu, the lightweight version of Ubuntu, attracted the attention of local developers. Additionally, mobile solutions such as Android and Xpad/Xpud were covered in several presentations by Ping-Hsun Chen (Taiwan), Pham Huu Ngon (Vietnam) and Tan Quang Sang (Vietnam).

OpenOffice.org Asia Meet Up

FOSSASIA was particularly happy to welcome the OpenOffice.org community who sponsored the event. As head of the Vietnamese OOo localization team, Vu Do Quynh from Hanoilug presented on the various ways that people could contribute to the OOo community while Yutaka Niibe and Yukiharu Yabuki presented on OOo’s use by the Japenese government in the Osaka Prefecture.

Mini-Debconf, Fedora Release Party and Mozilla

FOSSASIA 2010 was also an opportunity for the Debian community to organize a Mini-Debconf. Debian developers present included among others Jonas Smedegaard (Denmark), Paul Wise (Australia) and Thomas Goirand (France/China).

To celebrate the release of Fedora 14, Ambassador Anh Tuan Truong (Vietnam) and Pierros Papadeas (Greece) hosted the world’s largest release party. The even took place at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Pedagogy. Pierros–an active Mozilla contributor—had  this to say about the release event:

“It was AWESOME. At first I thought most of them were there due to their teachers, but  when we started a Q&A session I realized I was so wrong… they were  asking about PAE kernels, broadcom drivers, dual boot and LVM etc! By the end of the party we gave out T-shirts, LiveCDs and stickers to everyone, all 134 people where there! I believe that sets a new fedora record! The local Vietnamese community was introduced and many people are already starting to send emails wanting to start translating.”

The FOSS Bridge to Asia

Projects also used the event as an opportunity to showcase new tools and devices like the Freedombox project of the Freifunk community and the latest version of the Crypto-Stick. Jan Suhr (Germany/Singapore) showed the device as a combination of both open hardware and open software.

In the web track, Colin Charles (Malaysia) presented the newest improvements of MariaDB. In addition, Michael Howden (New Zealand) conducted a workshop for Sahan Eden, a platform to provide support in the case of disasters. The workshop gave students a chance understand the information needs of disaster scenarios and they were able to contribute to the localization of the software.

Several web content management systems set-up information booths at the event. These included: TYPO3 with a booth organized by Dominik Stankowski from Web Essentials Cambodia and Drupal (Virak Hor, Cambodia and Quang Thong Tran, Vietnam). The event also introduced other tools such as Zabbix, a monitoring software (Walter Heck, Netherlands). One more hot topic was the enterprise p2p search engine YaCy.net of Michael Christen (Germany). A number of more established projects had the opportunity to share their news at the event including the desktop environments KDE with a presentation about Qt (Gregory Schlomoff, France), GNOME (Kien Truc Le, Vietnam), and LXDE (Duy Hung Tran, Vietnam).

Unconference

Taking a cue from previous barcamps and ‘unconferences,’ many attendees presented lightning talks. Preetam Rai, an Android App inventor, shared photos and tales about other barcamps throughout Southeast Asia. Mary Agnes James from Seacem spoke about todays chances to connect and share with e-media and social networks. Seacem also graciously sponsored this event.

Libre Graphics and Open Design

During the final day of the event, FOSSASIA held it’s first Libre Graphics Day. Arne Goetje (Germany/Taiwan) introduced his new approach for a pan-Asian fonts library. Jon Philips (US) from Status.net and Dave Crossland (UK) from the Google Fonts project conducted an Open Design Workshop. The workshops brought curious crowds and has ultimately seeded plans for the Open Design Weeks 2011.

See you in Vietnam

Thanks again to the amazing crowd at FOSSASIA – developers, translators, event organizers, bloggers, teachers, students, designers and lost but not least our enthusiastic volunteers! See you all in 2011!

* FOSSASIA 2011 will take place in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) on November 11-12
* The Open Design Weeks 2011 will be celebrated from April 2-15 in Ho Chi Minh City and Can Tho in the Mekong Delta.

Links:

* FOSSASIA http://fossasia.org
* Open Design Weeks Asia, http://opendesign.asia

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FOSSASIA 2010 press coverage

Our FOSSASIA event 2010 was covered in quite a few online media.

Press Articles

  • http://www.laodong.com.vn/Tin-Tuc/35-dien-gia-du-Hoi-nghi-phan-mem-ma-nguon-mo-Chau-A-tai-TPHCM/20121
  • http://vovnews.vn/Home/Ngay-1211-se-dien-ra-Hoi-nghi-FOSSASIA-nam-2010/201011/160026.vov
  • http://www.vietnamplus.vn/Home/Sap-dien-ra-Hoi-nghi-FOSSASIA-nam-2010-tai-TPHCM/201011/67336.vnplus
  • http://thethaovanhoa.vn/350N20101110003346856T0/sap-dien-ra-hoi-nghi-fossasia-nam-2010-tai-tphcm.htm
  • http://www.khoahocphothong.com.vn/news/detail/6626/hoi-nghi-cong-nghe-phan-mem-ma-nguon-mo-dien-ra-tu-12-14-11.html
  • http://e-info.com.vn/vn/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43558&Itemid=99
  • http://www.baoangiang.com.vn/newsdetails.aspx?newsid=25553
  • http://www.thongtindoingoai.vn/c1006n20101110083153890/sap-dien-ra-hoi-nghi-fossasia-nam-2010-tai-tpho-chi-minh.htm
  • http://mic.gov.vn/tintucsukien/tintonghop/Trang/S%E1%BA%AFpdi%E1%BB%85nraH%E1%BB%99ingh%E1%BB%8BFOSSASIAn%C4%83m2010t%E1%BA%A1iTPHCM.aspx
  • http://www.baomoi.com/Info/1211-Khai-mac-Hoi-nghi-FOSSASIA-2010/76/5173201.epi
  • http://webtinhoc.vn/home/showthread.php?t=39953
  • http://news.ndthuan.com/viet-nam/ngay-1211-se-dien-ra-hoi-nghi-fossasia-nam-2010-275480/

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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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GNOME.Asia Vietnam Wrap Up

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GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 was a big success as one of the one of the very first Open Source conferences in South East Asia. The event took place on Nov 20 – 22, 2009 at Quang Trung Software Park in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Quang Trung Software Park is a home of more than 200 tech-companies (including local start-ups, multi-nationals, and state-owned companies such as FDI).

The conference was organized by the GNOME.Asia community in cooperation with the organization team in Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh City government supported the event through the Department of Information and Communications Technology.

Numbers and facts
* 1000+ attendees
* 79 speakers
* 138 volunteers
* 5 keynotes
* 109 presentations
* 25 lightning talks
* 17 workshops

Main Tracks
Six tracks were organized in parallel during the 3-day conference. The focus was only on GNOME technologies and desktop deployments based on GNOME  but also a variety of topics including:

* GNOME 3.0
* GNOME library and application development
* Localization & Internationalization
* Mobile platforms and thin clients
* Desktop deployments
* School software

Inside the keynote track
Inside the keynote track

In addition to the majority of software presentations, hardware talks such as ‘How to build an Open Source printer’ by Frederic Muller gathered a big interest.

Workshops
A focus of the workshops were applications for thin clients, localization and translation for Asian users. In parallel, there was also Linux course for beginners, map party, installation fest, and Ubuntu release party which was organized by the Vietnamese Ubuntu user group.

Linux Course for beginners Q&A
Linux Course for beginners Q&A

Women in IT Panel
Unlike many tech-conferences around the world, more than 50% of GNOME.Asia 2009 participants were female. They were young, curious and enthusiastic. Therefore the “Women in IT” Panel was somewhat overwhelmed with tons of questions. Stormy Peters from the US, chair of GNOME.Asia, shared her inspired story of being a mother, a housewife, an employee, an active open source contributor and a chair of the GNOME Foundation.

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Women in IT Panel

Pockey Lam and Emily Chen, two founders of the Beijing linux users group explained how to start, grow and maintain a successful open source community.

Hong Phuc Dang, who brought the first open source conference to Vietnam spoke of how her open source journey was started and encouraged female audience to explore the beauty and value of sharing, openness and collaboration which can be found easily in an open source community.

Mini job fair
A mini job fair was organized at the conference site with 15 companies on board. Every year thousands of computer science fresh-graduates in Vietnam are seeking for job opportunities in the tech field. Less 20% is able to get a right job of his/her major. More than 80% is forced to start their career in a non-tech environment. The idea of the job fair is (1) to provide a platform where tech companies can announce their vacant positions, recruitment process, job requirements, expectation; (2) to organize a meeting place of employers and their potential employees; (3) to foster knowledge sharing community which aims to help students prepare themselves with skill sets that fit the current marketplace.

Vietnam – a great host country
Visitors from oversea could not be happier with the hospitality, warmness, and friendliness of their host country, Vietnam. Volunteers welcomed speakers/visitors at the airport, brought them to the hotel, provided them local SIM cards, showed them around city etc.

Speakers and volunteers
Speakers and volunteers

The event ended by a beautiful tour along the Mekong. It was an unforgettable experience for all of us.

Stormy Peters of GNOME Foundation is getting on the boat tour
Stormy Peters of GNOME Foundation is getting on the boat tour
Andrew super enjoys the tour.
Andrew super enjoys the mekong tour.

Sponsors and Partners
We would like to thank our sponsors: Sun Microsystems, IBM, Google and Intel for their support of GNOME.Asia Summit and thank to our media partner PCWorld, DatVietNews, VietnamInvestmentNews for their coverage of the conference.

Bringing forward Asia’s Open Source Communities
The FOSSASIA team and volunteers will continue to grow the community across Asia and to support Open Technologies with the annual FOSSASIA Summit, regional meetups and developer programs.

Links

GNOME.Asia Wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeAsia/2009
GNOME.Asia: http://gnome.asia
FOSSASIA Events: http://events.fossasia.org

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