New York City Hack Manhattan Hackerspace Meetup

Hackerspaces are community-operated physical spaces, where people can meet and work on their projects. Hackerspaces around the world are listed on the hackerspace wiki. Yesterday I had the chance to visit Hack Manhattan.

Hack Manhattan is operated as a non-profit community hackerspace in New York City. Equipments includes a mini-mill, sewing machines, soldering irons and reflow tools and several 3D printers. Members work on all kinds of projects. Many are in electronics, 3D printing, and software, but we also brew beer, keep bees on the roof, and garden. I was very happy to meet Real John Connor, Stephen Lynch, and Dave Reeves and learn about their work.

I hope we see more hackerspaces in Asia and I would love to support people who are starting them. Let me know on twitter about your hackerspace! http://twitter.com/hpdang

Links

Hack Manhattan: https://hackmanhattan.com

Hackerspaces on the Web: http://hackerspaces.org

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FOSSASIA joining Google Code-In Program for Students Age 13-17

We are proud to announce that FOSSASIA has been chosen as a mentor organization for Google Code-In 2015. FOSSASIA is one of twelve global organizations participating in the program for students from the 13-17 years old.

Google Code-In is a global, online contest for 13-17 year old pre-university students interested in learning more about Open Source development. Students work on bite-sized tasks for real-world open source projects in a variety of categories.

Students can register and take over tasks starting from December 1, 2014 and work on tasks until January 19. All tasks are listed on the website at http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014

Contest Timeline

December 1, 2014, 9:00 AM Pacific Time / 17:00 UTC: Contest opens for entries by student participants

January 18, 2015, 9:00 AM Pacific Time/ 17:00 UTC: No more tasks can be claimed by students after this time

January 19, 2015, 9:00 AM Pacific Time / 17:00 UTC: All work stops, Contest ends

January 26, 2015: Mentoring Organizations submit their grand prize winner nominees to Google Open Source Programs Office

February 2, 2015: Google Open Source Programs Office announces the grand prize winners via blog post

June 2015: Grand Prize trip to Google and northern California

 

Links

* Google Code-In http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014

* FOSSASIA at Google Code-In http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2014/fossasia

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Google Reunion in Silicon Valley with FOSSASIA

Being at the get together of more than 500 mentors and students of over 200 projects from 50 countries at the 10th anniversary of Google Summer of Code and join the celebrations at the Reunion 2014 is an amazing experience. It was the first time that Google brought together such a large number of contributors in Silicon Valley for a fantastic Unconference, a great day out at the “Great America” and a Gala at the San Jose Tech Museum with Linus Torvalds and a catering with an outstanding American Fusion cuisine.

Google Mentor Summit Tshirts

Yes, 10 years! Google Summer of Code is the only program of a company supporting hundreds of Open Source projects for many years and bringing them together with students from around the world. The magnitude of this support shows the real commitment of Google to Free and Open Source Software and I would like to thank everyone involved including Carol Smith, Cat Allman and Stephanie Taylor, and all the other fantastic people at the Open Source office supporting us.

The idea of free sharing and collaboration across borders has always inspired me. And I could not be happier to enter the conference room in San Jose – full of creators, developers, contributors of many amazing Open Source projects such as Mozilla, KDE, Python, Haiku, Blender, GNU, Debian, Inkscape and many more.

Google Reunion 2014 in San Jose with FOSSASIA

In previous years, the program brought together mentors of each active organization, but for this years celebration Google also flew in mentors of former years and even some students of the program. As an organizer of our annual FOSSASIA event I know what a challenge it can be to bring in a few dozen speakers from different parts of the world, but flying in 500 Open Source contributors from around the world is a logistic masterpiece. Organizing this event takes a huge amount effort and resources. Two thumbs up for the organizing team, they did an amazing job. I am grateful to be among the participants.

Great Day Out at the Great America

Every year the Mentor Summit spreads out in two days filled with interesting unconference sessions, lighting talks, and plenty of spaces for group discussing and code sprints. This time Carol and the team went an extra mile to surprise participants with an additional day-out at the Great America Theme Park (exclusively for us!). Believe it or not the majority of my lovely geek friends apparently have never been to an amusement park in their lives. We had such a great morning and afternoon there. I am sure some of us will never forget that very first roller coaster ride. It is great that Google makes this experience possible for mentors and appreciates their contributions.

Google Reunion 2014 in San Jose / Mentor Summit USA

Gala at the Tech Museum San Jose with Linus Torvalds

Another of the highlights of this year was the Gala at the Tech Museum in San Jose. Everyone dressed up in beautiful garments. It was fun to see all the developers who kind of always wear black shirts suddenly dressed up. And, on top of organizing everything the team also arranged a meetup with a star of the Free and Open Source community: Linus Torvalds joined us as a special guest. Of course Linus was everyones hero. And I was thrilled to meet him and Dirk Hohndel just before their talk. Sincerely thanks to Cat Allman for introducing him. I took the chance to invite them to our next FOSSASIA in Singapore, which will take place from March 13-15, 2015.

Linus Torvalds FOSSASIA Meetup at Google Reunion with Hong Phuc Dang, Dirk Hohndel, Mario Behling

After the interesting talks about the history of Linux, Open Source at Google and future projects, we experienced the interactive exhibits at the Tech Museum and enjoyed more of the yummy food. Coming from Asia, experiencing the food in the US is always very special for me. Especially in Silicon Valley and San Francisco I love the Fusion food, the blend of Western food and Asian cuisine. On the night of the party, the Google team really did arrange a fantastic catering with very friendly caterers, who knew a lot about all the different ingredients. I learned from Stephanie that this was one of the best catering companies and that they came all the way from San Francisco. It was truly special indeed.

Participants at the Reunion

Personally I was so excited to meet with the developer team of Processing at the Google Reunion. Processing is one of my favorite software applications. One team member – Andres Colubri from Argentina – told me he finally met his friend and co-developer whom he worked together with during the last 7 years but never got a chance to meet.

Some voices of participants of this years summit: Doris Lee, a first year GSoC from Taiwan said: ”The program is a great way to practice and apply what I have learned in programming. I took computer science at UC Berkeley but I never had the feeling I get the right assignments to work on. I enjoyed so much to work with GSoC program which gives me a chance to improve my coding skill, to learn how to use Git, Python and much more.”

Google Mentor Summit FOSSASIA, Hong Phuc Dang, Doris Lee

Adnan Zahid – 2nd year GSoC student also commented: “It is good that Google created the program for public benefits and I wish this program can be extended not only during summer but throughout the entire year. My suggestion is to create cooperation between Open Source projects and universities so that the schools constantly receive assignments and then distribute them to students”

Hamish Bowman from OSGeo said: “We are participating at GSoC for many years and I am happy to see new and old faces at the Reunion. For me the mentor summit is a chance to meet developers from projects, that we are using and working together with. Many of them, we would not be able to meet some anywhere else. After a long time, I had the chance to talk again with Mario Behling who is working with lots of projects and founded Lubuntu. It was great to see Mario’s excitement when I showed him our OSGeo Live distro which we build on top of Lubuntu.”

Google Reunion Hamish Bowman and Mario Behling Lubuntu Founder

I also spoke with one of the most senior mentors – Kevin Krammer from KDE, it was Kevin’s 10th time mentoring. He said: “This is a fantastic thing. I appreciate the opportunity to be mentor. I think we had very good students who have helped KDE a lot during the past few years. GSoC gives us the possibility to experiment new things for which we normally do not have enough resources and this is a great training opportunity as well.”

 

The closure Q&A session marked another year of GSoC was over. We are all looking forward to another 10, 20, 30 …years to come. Once again congratulations to GSoC 10th Anniversary!

Links:

FOSSASIA http://fossasia.org

Google Melange http://google-melange.com

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FOSSASIA Summit 2015 Call for Speakers and Projects

FOSSASIA is the leading Free and Open Source technology organization in Asia organizing the annual FOSSASIA OpenTechSummit for developers, startups, and contributors. In 2015 the event takes place from March 13-15 for the first time in Singapore. Talks, workshops and projects at FOSSASIA range from Open Hardware, to design, Libre Graphics, Maker projects and Open Source Software.

For our 2015 feature event we are looking for speakers that share our passion about code and community. We are interested in topics including:

  • Big data and Open data

  • Javascript, Mobile and Mozilla Open Web

  • Geolocation software, maps and mesh ups

  • Lightweight technologies

  • Maker projects, 3D technologies

  • Open design software, open manufacturing, wearables

  • Cloud solutions

  • Dev-Ops

Participants from Asia and the world are expected to join a three day event. FOSSASIA was established in 2009. Previous events took place in Cambodia and Vietnam.

We are looking forward to your proposals. Submission deadline is 23rd December 2014.

Website

FOSSASIA Community: http://fossasia.org

Event Site: http://2015.fossasia.org

Proposals

Please submit your talk and workshop proposals or projects at site at http://2015.fossasia.org/speaker-registration/

Deadline

Submission deadline is: December 23, 2014.

Speakers and Projects will be accepted until January 5, 2015.

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Community Networks and Freifunk: Help to translate

Community networks extend the model of Open Source to networks and enable people to share services and Internet connections locally. I translated a video of the Freifunk community to Vietnamese. Versions in different languages are available. Join us and translate the video! The translation pad is here http://pad.freifunk.net/p/Spot2013

 

Links:

Freifunk: http://blog.freifunk.net

OpenWrt: http://openwrt.org

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Libre Graphics Meeting Leipzig – Dejavu Fonts

Happy to see Ben Laenen and Denis from DejaVu font getting Vietnamese school notebooks for their studies at . Let’s work on getting more cooperations of projects and contributors between Europe and Asia started!

Ben and Dennis from DejaVu fonts

 

Links:

Libre Graphics Meeting: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org

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FOSSASIA 2015 in Singapore from March 13-15

FOSSASIA 2015 Team

The FOSSASIA team is proud to announce that FOSSASIA 2015 will take place in Singapore from March 13-15.

The event core team will again consist of:

  • Hong Phuc Dang, MBM Asia Founder, http://twitter.com/hpdang and
  • Mario Behling, FashionTec Berlin, http://twitter.com/mariobehling

A team of local and international contributors and partners is joining the team:

  • Harish Pillay, RedHat, https://twitter.com/harishpillay
  • Justin Lee, Geekcamp.sg, https://twitter.com/triplez82
  • Walter Heck, Onlindata, https://twitter.com/walterheck
  • Preetam Rai, Barcamp, http://twitter.com/preetamrai
  • Sebastian Deckers, Entrepreneur & Developer, https://twitter.com/pandion
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UNESCO Youth Mobile Workshop in Paris with FOSSASIA

The 1st YouthMobile Experts Meeting took place at the UNESCO headquarters on 19th and 20th March 2014 with participation of FOSSASIA. UNESCO has conducted a global search for the best, existing mobile applications training initiatives with openly-licensed training materials, and invited a selected group of training providers and app development tools makers.

Objectives of the Meeting:
1. Facilitate the sharing of best-practices between the training providers; and
2. Further select the best providers to enter into partnerships for up-scaling and integration into teaching and learning environments.

I had the chance to meet David Ascher and Geoffrey MacDougall from Mozilla and Bobby Richter the developer of Mozilla Appmaker. Andrew F. Mckinney is the manager and developer of MIT App Inventor.

The UNESCO seeks to extensively promote very high-quality, multi-lingual, comprehensive training materials for developing mobile apps. Openly-licensed, the training materials identified will allow for adaptations including translation, localization, and innovations. The YouthMobile experts meeting is part of UNESCO’s contribution to the 2014 celebrations for Open Education Week.

 

Organisations and Presentations

 mlab m:Lab East Africa / eMobilis Kenya Presentation   |      Video
 nairobidevschool-alpha Nairobi Dev School Kenya Presentation
 mash-logo_85h The MASH Project India Presentation
 fossasia_logo_85h FOSSASIA Vietnam Presentation
 Technovation Technovation USA Presentation
 AppsForGood Apps For Good England Presentation
 esprit Esprit Tunisia Presentation
alldevcamp-logo-alpha AllDevCamp Cote d’Ivoire Presentation
appmaker_wordmark_black Mozilla / Appmaker USA Presentation
 orange Orange France Presentation
 appinventor MIT App Inventor Project USA Presentation
 fossfa-logo_85h FOSSFA  France Presentation
 intel Intel Software Academic Program France Presentation
 
UNESCO-logo

UNESCO guest speaker    Irmgarda Kasinskaite

UNESCO guest speaker    Maria Kypriotou

France Presentation

 

Links

UNESCO Youth Mobile Program http://en.unesco.org/youthmobile

Youth Mobile http://www.youthmobile.org

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FOSSASIA 2014 Phnom Penh

FOSSASIA 2014 in Phnom Penh has been an amazing experience.

We had 3 Days of Pure Knowledge Sharing, 71 International Speakers, 15 Presenters from Cambodia, 121 Talks, Workshops and Panels, 8 tracks per day, Hands-on Labs and Hacking practice for everyone.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the event, the organization team, Norton University and our sponsors!

Participants at FOSSASIA 2014

 

Links

Event Site: http://2014.fossasia.org

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