Read more about the article FOSSASIA Summit 2018 Singapore – Call for Speakers
Too big Crowd for only One Photo / One of Many Group Photos by Michael Cannon

FOSSASIA Summit 2018 Singapore – Call for Speakers

The FOSSASIA Open Tech Summit is Asia’s leading Open Technology conference for developers, companies, and IT professionals. The event will take place from Thursday, 22nd – Sunday, 25th March at the Lifelong Learning Institute in Singapore.

During four days developers, technologists, scientists, and entrepreneurs convene to collaborate, share information and learn about the latest in open technologies, including Artificial Intelligence software, DevOps, Cloud Computing, Linux, Science, Hardware and more. The theme of this year’s event is “Towards the Open Conversational Web“.

For our feature event we are looking for speaker submissions about Open Source for the following areas:

  • Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, Search Engines, Cognitive Experts
  • Open Design, Hardware, Imaging
  • Science, Tech and Education
  • Kernel and Platform
  • Database
  • Cloud, Container, DevOps
  • Internet Society and Community
  • Open Event Solutions
  • Security and Privacy
  • Open Source in Business
  • Blockchain

There will be special events celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Open Source Initiative and its impact in Open Source business. An exhibition space is available for company and project stands.

Submission Guidelines

Please propose your session as early as possible and include a description of your session proposal that is as complete as possible. The description is of particular importance for the selection. Once accepted, speakers will receive a code for a speakers ticket. Speakers will receive a free speakers ticket and two standard tickets for their partner or friends. Sessions are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Submission Link: 2018.fossasia.org/speaker-registration

Dates & Deadlines

Please send us your proposal as soon as possible via the FOSSASIA Summit speaker registration.

Deadline for submissions: December 27th, 2017

Late submissions: Later submissions are possible, but early submissions have priority

Notification of acceptance: On an ongoing basis

Schedule Announced: January 20, 2018

FOSSASIA Open Tech Summit: March 22nd – 25th, 2018

Sessions and Tracks

Talks and Workshops

Talk slots are 20 minutes long plus 5-10 minutes for questions and answers. The idea is, that participants will use the sessions to get an idea of the work of others and are able to follow up in more detail in break-out areas, where they discuss more and start to work together. Speakers can also sign up for either a 1-hour long or a 2-hours workshop sessions. Longer sessions are possible in principle. Please tell us the proposed length of your session at the time of submission.

Lightning talks

You have some interesting ideas but do not want to submit a full talk? We suggest you go for a lightning talk which is a 5 minutes slot to present your idea or project. You are welcome to continue the discussion in breakout areas. There are tables and chairs to serve your get-togethers.

Stands and assemblies

We offer spaces in our exhibition area for companies, projects, installations, team gatherings and other fun activities. We are curious to know what you would like to make, bring or show. Please add details in the submission form.

Developer Rooms/Track Hosts

Get in touch early if you plan to organize a developer room at the event. FOSSASIA is also looking for team members who are interested to co-host and moderate tracks. Please sign up to become a host here.

Publication

Audio and video recordings of the lectures will be published in various formats under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This license allows commercial use by media institutions as part of their reporting. If you do not wish for material from your lecture to be published or streamed, please let us know in your submission.

Sponsorship & Contact

If you would like to sponsor FOSSASIA or have any questions, please contact us via office@fossasia.org.

Suggested Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence (SUSI.AI, Algorithms, Cognitive Expert Systems AI on a Chip)
  • Hardware (Architectures, Maker Culture, Small Devices)
  • 20 years Impact of Open Source in Business
  • DevOps (Continuous Delivery, Lean IT, Moving at Cloud-speed)
  • Networking (Software Defined Networking, OpenFlow, Satellite Communication)
  • Security (Coding, Configuration, Testing, Malware)
  • Cloud & Microservices (Containers – Libraries, Runtimes, Composition; Kubernetes; Docker, Distributed Services)
  • Databases (Location-aware and Mapping, Replication and Clustering, Data Warehousing, NoSQL)
  • Science and Applications (Pocket Science Lab, Neurotech, Biohacking, Science Education)
  • Business Development (Open Source Business Models, Startups, Kickstarter Campaigns)
  • Internet of Everything (Smart Home, Medical Systems, Environmental Systems)
  • Internet Society and Culture (Collaborative Development, Community, Advocacy, Government, Governance, Legal)​
  • Kernel Development and Linux On The Desktop (Meilix, Light Linux systems, Custom Linux Generator)
  • Open Design and Libre Art (Open Source Design)
  • Open Event (Event Management systems, Ticketing solutions, Scheduling, Event File Formats)

Links

Speaker Registration and Proposal Submission:
2018.fossasia.org/speaker-registration

FOSSASIA Summit: 2018.fossasia.org

FOSSASIA Summit 2017: Event Wrap-Up

FOSSASIA Photos: flickr.com/photos/fossasia/

FOSSASIA Videos: Youtube FOSSASIA

FOSSASIA on Twitter: twitter.com/fossasia

Continue ReadingFOSSASIA Summit 2018 Singapore – Call for Speakers

DetachedInstanceError: Dealing with Celery, Flask’s app context and SQLAlchemy in the Open Event Server

In the open event server project, we had chosen to go with celery for async background tasks. From the official website,

What is celery?

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing.

What are tasks?

The execution units, called tasks, are executed concurrently on a single or more worker servers using multiprocessing.

After the tasks had been set up, an error constantly came up whenever a task was called

The error was:

DetachedInstanceError: Instance <User at 0x7f358a4e9550> is not bound to a Session; attribute refresh operation cannot proceed

The above error usually occurs when you try to access the session object after it has been closed. It may have been closed by an explicit session.close() call or after committing the session with session.commit().

The celery tasks in question were performing some database operations. So the first thought was that maybe these operations might be causing the error. To test this theory, the celery task was changed to :

@celery.task(name='lorem.ipsum')
def lorem_ipsum():
    pass

But sadly, the error still remained. This proves that the celery task was just fine and the session was being closed whenever the celery task was called. The method in which the celery task was being called was of the following form:

def restore_session(session_id):
    session = DataGetter.get_session(session_id)
    session.deleted_at = None
    lorem_ipsum.delay()
    save_to_db(session, "Session restored from Trash")
    update_version(session.event_id, False, 'sessions_ver')


In our app, the app_context was not being passed whenever a celery task was initiated. Thus, the celery task, whenever called, closed the previous app_context eventually closing the session along with it. The solution to this error would be to follow the pattern as suggested on http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.12/patterns/celery/.

def make_celery(app):
    celery = Celery(app.import_name, broker=app.config['CELERY_BROKER_URL'])
    celery.conf.update(app.config)
    task_base = celery.Task

    class ContextTask(task_base):
        abstract = True

        def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
            if current_app.config['TESTING']:
                with app.test_request_context():
                    return task_base.__call__(self, *args, **kwargs)
            with app.app_context():
                return task_base.__call__(self, *args, **kwargs)

    celery.Task = ContextTask
    return celery

celery = make_celery(current_app)


The __call__ method ensures that celery task is provided with proper app context to work with.

 

Continue ReadingDetachedInstanceError: Dealing with Celery, Flask’s app context and SQLAlchemy in the Open Event Server

How to join the FOSSASIA Community

We often get the question, how can I join the community. There is no official membership form to fill out in order to participate in the Open Tech Community. You simply start to contribute to our projects on GitHub and you are already a member. So, let’s work together to develop to develop social software for everyone!

The FOSSASIA team welcomes contributors and supporters to Free and Open Source Software. Become a developer, a documentation writer, packaging maintainer, tester, user supporter, blogger or organize events and meetups about our projects.

Women in IT discussion in the community

Here are some ideas how we can collaborate

Download our Open Source applications, install them and use them

The first step of joining a project is always to download the software and try it out. The best motivation to support a project is, if the project is useful for yourself. Check out our many projects on github.com/fossasia and our project social media Open Source search engine on github.com/loklak.

Show your support and ★star FOSSASIA projects

Help to motivate existing contributors and show your support of FOSSASIA projects on GitHub. Star projects and fork them. Doing something that people like and that helps people is a great motivation for many.

Learn about best practices

We have formulated best practices for contributing to Open Source to help new contributors to get started. Please read them carefully. Understanding our best practices will help you to collaborate with the community and ensure your code gets merged more quickly.

Subscribe to news

Subscribe to the FOSSASIA Newsletter to stay up to date on new software releases, events and coding programs here on the main page.

Read the blogs and support users on the mailing list

Learn from Open Tech articles on our blog that are written by developers, contributors, volunteers, and staff of companies supporting the FOSSASIA network. Sign up for the FOSSASIA Mailing List and keep reading our blog at blog.fossasia.org.

Follow us on Social Media

Show us you interest in FOSSASIA’s Open Technology and keep up to date on new developments by following us on Twitter and retweeting important updates: twitter.com/fossasia

And, become a member on social networks like Google+ and Facebook and connect with other contributors:
* Facebook www.facebook.com/fossasia/
* Google+ plus.google.com/108920596016838318216

Join and support the FOSSASIA network at community events

Set up a booth or a table about FOSSASIA at Open Source community events! There are many events of the open source community all over the world. The core team of FOSSASIA is simply not able to attend all events. You can support the cause by making the project visible. Register as a member of the FOSSASIA community at events, set up an info point and showcase Free and Open Source projects. Check out for example FOSSASIA event calendar calendar.fossasia.org or our meetup group in Singapore: meetup.com/FOSSASIA-Singapore-Open-Technology-Meetup

Translate our projects and their documentation

Do you speak more than one language? Most Open Tech projects are 100% volunteer translated, which means you can be part of a translation team translating software and documentation thousands of people will use. Start now and check out our GitHub repository.

Mini Debconf Participants in Saigon

Continue ReadingHow to join the FOSSASIA Community

FOSSASIA Open Technology Summit 2015 in Singapore

Singapore, March 8, 2015 – FOSSASIA will take place in Singapore for the first time this year. The conference will feature over 100 talks and workshops covering the latest in Free and Open Source Technology projects, including those focused on the development of Singapore as a smart nation.

The summit is hosted by NUS Enterprise, ACE, Silicon Straits, JFDI and SingTel Innov8 in partnership with IDA, Red Hat, Google, Oracle, MySQL, Mozilla Foundation, Python Foundation, Treasure Data, MBM Asia, Uptime and many more. The event will kick off on Friday at Biopolis and continue on Saturday and Sunday at JTC LaunchPad @ one-north.

The organizers are particularly excited to welcome keynote speakers including Colin Charles from MariaDB running Wikipedia one of the biggest websites in the world, Italo Vignoli – co-founder of LibreOffice, Bunnie Huang – the founder of the Novena laptop project, Stefan Koehler – lead engineer of the City of Munich’s whole-of-government Linux project LiMux, and Georg C. F. Greve – the founder of Free Software Foundation Europe.

Mario Behling, head of Program Planning, said “This year we are welcoming over 120 speakers from 26 countries, making this both the largest and most diverse FOSSASIA speaker roster ever. Of particular interest is the increasing presence of open hardware, which is important for Singapore as the growth in open hardware development combined with proximity to Asian manufacturing capacity and commitment to building a Smart Nation creates a wealth of opportunities for innovation.”

Other topics and activities include: Free and Open Source software, web and mobile development, software for education, map solutions for websites and phones, open knowledge tools, Wikipedia, open data, big data, sensor networks, free wireless networks, graphic design, fashion technology, open source knitting machines, 3D printing, key signing parties to help local developers join the PGP web of trust and the opportunity for participants to obtain their Linux Foundation Certification organised by the Linux Foundation in cooperation with OlinData.

Agenda

Day 1, Fri.13 Mar,  9am – 5pm: Opening Event at Biopolis with IDA, Red Hat, Google, Mozilla

Day 2, Sat.14 Mar, 9am – 5pm: Talks and presentations of developers and designers at LaunchPad @ one-north

Day 3, Sun.15 Mar, 10am – 4.30 pm: Hands-on seminars and workshops at LaunchPad

Links

FOSSASIA: fossasia.org

Summit Site: 2015.fossasia.org

Continue ReadingFOSSASIA Open Technology Summit 2015 in Singapore

Let’s build an Open Textile and Garment Production Line – Talk at the 31c3 Congress Hamburg

Here is my talk at the 31c3 Chaos Communication Congress about FashionTec projects and Open Garment Production Lines. Hope you enjoy it.

Links

Hong Phuc Dang at the 31c3 Chaos Communication Congress

Let’s build our own personalized open textile production line

Continue ReadingLet’s build an Open Textile and Garment Production Line – Talk at the 31c3 Congress Hamburg

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

Continue ReadingCommunity Networks and Freifunk: Help to translate

Hackerspace Singapore Vietnamese Tech Scene Meetup

Thanks to all you folks who came by and Thank you for Preetam on posting some nice comments and photos about the event. And last but not least, thank you to the great hosts from the Hackerspace.sg.

“One point they made strongly was that having a local partner would ease a lot of pain, right from registering your company to collecting market data. Hong Phuc talked about her method of working with local universities and government agencies to gather customer data.”

 

Continue ReadingHackerspace Singapore Vietnamese Tech Scene Meetup

Join us at Hackerspace.sg

Vietnam has one of the fastest growing online population in the region, probably globally too. Vietnam is also seeing growth in IT companies exploring the local market and setting up offshoring centers.

Vietnam-based entrepreneurs and FOSSASIA event organizers Dang Hong Phuc and Mario Behling are visiting Singapore and will be talking about the startup and tech scene in VN and what opportunities there might be for collaboration (tech events, open source, women in IT etc.).

Event Details
When: Thursday 3rd March 2011
Time: 7pm
Where: Hackerspace.sg, 70A Bussorah Lane
Continue ReadingJoin us at Hackerspace.sg

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

Continue ReadingOpen Design Weeks 2011 Saigon

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

Continue ReadingFOSSASIA 2010: Bridge to Asia