FOSSASIA

Google Code-In Success: FOSSASIA Top-Ranked Organization

FOSSASIA's first participation of Google Code-in contest as a mentoring organizations was a great success with 587 tasks completed, most by any organization this year, out of a total of 725 published tasks. The twelve participating organizations included projects like Wikimedia, Sugarlabs, Sahana, Drupal, KDE and OpenMRS.Students from all around the world aged 13-17 years old worked with mentors of FOSSASIA on improving open source software during the 7 weeks the contest is run. They coded programs, designed artworks, tested software and more than anything else had fun.174 students managed to complete at least one task with FOSSASIA and 43 out of them claimed a cool t-shirt from Google by completing 3 or more tasks.Out of the 10 students who completed most number of tasks finalists and grand prize winners were picked collectively by FOSSASIA's 24 mentors. Namanyay Goel and Samarjeet Singh won the grand prize, which is an all expense paid trip to Google HQ in Mountain View, California. Alvis Wong, Amr Ramadan and Tymon Radzik emerged as finalists. Congratulations finalists! Safe travels grand prize winners! We are thankful for your precious contributions and will be delighted see you continue to contribute even after the program.Open source projects ExpEYES, sup, TiddlySpace, p5.js among few others, benefitted from FOSSASIA students' work. More than 150 open source/ open tech projects and communities around asia were connected to FOSSASIA with the help of students. Students also worked together to build a nice website portraying students and mentors.We would like to thank all participated students for the amazing interest they showed in our tasks. Its great to see some of them still hang around to help us. 24 mentors of FOSSASIA worked hard and stood up to the challenge of finding time to work with and help out students while having other obligations. Thank you mentors! Lastly we are grateful to Stephanie Taylor and Co. at the Google OSPO, for organizing the wonderful contest. Wonderful Surprise: Mentors received a Thank You Package from Google Sleeping peacefully - Nephew of Michael Cheng: Mentor's Family Enjoying "Open Source" Thank you packageLinksFOSSASIA GCI: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2014/fossasiaGoogle Blog about GCI: http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2015/02/google-code-in-2014-magic-in-numbers.html

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Google Code-In Experience with FOSSASIA

For the last few weeks I got the opportunity to be involved in the Google Code-In 2014 program as a mentor for FOSSASIA (Thanks Andun Sameera!). It was challenging than I thought specially while doing a full time job. But was a great experience and I learned things myself with the students.FOSSASIA's co-admin Mario Behling initiated an interesting project at the start of the program to give students an opportunity to experience open source development culture. The project was to create a small website to hold FOSSASIA's students' and mentors' details. It came out to be a great success with a cute little website being created and more importantly a nice little community of students created around it. Usually there is a barrier you need to get past as a novice contributor, to get your first commit merged in to an open source project. The administrators would want you to follow annoying coding conventions, to "combine your 5 commits, solving a simple small bug into one big commit" or to "rebase your pull request on top of master". Until you continue contributing for some time and realize the importance of those, and start to appreciate them, they are just some annoyance that you have to deal with, on the way to get your work integrated. We for this project initially made this barrier very very less challenging. We would merge pull requests if they do the job. This so that young student contributors don't feel discouraged and only until they get themselves started. But having being well mentored at Google Summer of Code 2013 I wanted some niceties in our git commits. So I made learning them into a task.Google Code-In Mentor Aruna Herath at workThe task was to learn how to make your local commits look nice before you push them to the repo. To make it more organized and can be evaluated, and hopefully fun, I built up a small set of commits with a interesting bit of a commit history; a story. I added the set of commits to a Github repo that includes wrongly commited commit message and two commits that could look better sqashed into a bigger commit. Students are asked to clone the repo and then using git interactive rebase, make the commit history look better. The story of the commits and a set of instructions are given. Then they have to blog about there experience. They came up with some great write ups! Some focused on the technical aspects and were of a tutorial point of view. Some were explaining the personal experience writers themselves got and were on a lighter, less technical, language. However all were great! I think I got few students to learn something that will be valuable in their future careers and also one student to start blogging! When I saw a set of commits that could be better organized in a pull request for any of FOSSASIA's repositories, from a student who completed this task, I asked them to make them better. Thanks to above…

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Linux Foundation Certification at FOSSASIA 2015 in Singapore

We're happy to bring you good news from the Linux Foundation in cooperation with OlinData: You can take a Linux Foundation exam at FOSSASIA Singapore for a special one-time 33% discount. It is possible to get yourself certified for both the Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) and the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS). We'll have a dedicated room on Saturday March 14, 2015 at Blk71 where you can sit down in all quietness and take the examination so you can walk away with one of the highest quality Linux Certification in the industry.A Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) has the skills to do basic to intermediate system administration from the command-line for systems running Linux. Linux Foundation Certified System Administrators are knowledgeable in the operational support of Linux systems and services. They are responsible for first line troubleshooting and analysis, and decide when to escalate issues to engineering teams. More information here: training.linuxfoundation.org/certification/lfcsIf you want to make sure you are prepared for the LFCS exam we have a great deal for you: By taking a special edition of the online self-paced course for the LFCS certification, you'll be well prepared for the LFCS certification and at the same time supporting FOSSASIA: The Linux Foundation has promised to sponsor 100 USD for each online course sold. Please go here for more information and Sign Up Now.A Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) possesses a wider range and greater depth of skills than the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS). Linux Foundation Certified Engineers are responsible for the design and implementation of system architecture. They provide an escalation path and serve as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for the next generation of system administration professionals. More information here: http://training.linuxfoundation.org/certification/lfcs

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FashionTec, Open Textile and Garment Production at the Chaos Communication Congress

Here is the talk of Hong Phuc Dang at the 31c3 Chaos Communication Congress about FashionTec projects and Open Garment Production Lines. Links Hong Phuc Dang at the 31c3 Chaos Communication Congress Let’s build our own personalized open textile production line Downloads: Open Textile Production Line

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Meetup of Beijing Linux User Group with Dang Hong Phuc from FOSSASIA

Please join our FOSSASIA Bejinglug meetup with Dang Hong Phuc in Bejing, China on December 6, 2015. Hong Phuc will give insights about the FOSSASIA network, the programs of FOSSASIA and the FOSSASIA summit 2015 in Singapore.FOSSASIA runs contributors, Open Source developers and hardware maker programs in cooperations with companies and communities such as Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In (current Code-In program until January 19).For our programs in 2015 we are looking for mentors and students of Open Technology projects who would like to join us and register their groups on the FOSSASIA community network.The FOSSASIA summit will take place from March 13-15 in Singapore. The call for papers is open until December 20. If you are interested to present at the event, please register here: fossasia.org/speaker-registration/Time: 18:00 Date: Saturday, December 6, 2014 Location: Jazz Island Coffee （爵士岛咖啡二楼） Address (Chinese): 东城区东直门内大街东扬威街11号楼(来福士大厦对面北侧) Map: mapbar (via dianping) Subway: Dongzhimen Exit A Phone: 010-8406-1040Links:Beijinglug Announcement: http://beijinglug.org/...FOSSASIA Community Network: http://fossasia.netFOSSASIA Summit Speaker Registration: http://fossasia.org/speaker-registration/FOSSASIA Code-In: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2014/fossasia

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Read more about the article Join the FOSSASIA Community Network

Join the FOSSASIA Community Network

The FOSSASIA.net project is an initiative to bring the Asian Free and Open Source Software and OpenTech community together and foster cooperation. We make it easy to find communities and projects on a map with links to the websites, social media channels, and automatically updated info from community blogs. Communities store their information decentrally anywhere on the web - on their server, a blog, or git service. FOSSASIA.net collects information through a stardardized API file on the web. You can generate the API file with the FOSSASIA API generator on our website. Then you add your community to the FOSSASIA network website. Simply add the link of your API file to our list of communities on github. FAQ How does it work? You need to provide a file for our API and add the file to our communities repository. Then fill in the link to your API on our directory on github. That is it! Where can I store my file? We prefer that you store your file in our github repository of communities: https://github.com/fossasia/fossasia-communities. It is also possible to store it anywhere on the web, where it is publicly available, e.g. in a blog or CMS page as an attachment. However the github repo is the preferred method currently. How about updating my file? If you need to update your links, just upload a new file in the same location. How do I start? To make it easier, we created a FOSSASIA API Generator, where you can simply fill in your data here: http://api.fossasia.org/generator When you are finished copy the info from the form on the top right into an empty file or use the download button. How do I find Geolocation data of my community? You can find this data from OpenStreetmap. OpenStreetmap shows maps using a URL of the form: www.openstreetmap.org/#map=[Zoom Level]/[Latitude]/[Longitude] So go to www.openstreetmap.org and zoom to the area of your community. For example, if you are zoom into Mumbai, you will get the URL http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/19.0715/72.9499 Then 19.0715 will be the latitude and 72.9499 the longitude. What is an API? In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. An API expresses a software component in terms of its operations, inputs, outputs, and underlying types. An API defines functionalities that are independent of their respective implementations (e.g. It does not matter what CMS is used), which allows definitions and implementations to vary without compromising each other. Compare: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface Links * Website http://fossasia.net * Map http://fossasia.net/map/map.html * FOSSASIA Community Network Tweets https://twitter.com/fantwk

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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/hpdangLinksHack Manhattan: https://hackmanhattan.comHackerspaces 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/gci2014Contest TimelineDecember 1, 2014, 9:00 AM Pacific Time / 17:00 UTC: Contest opens for entries by student participantsJanuary 18, 2015, 9:00 AM Pacific Time/ 17:00 UTC: No more tasks can be claimed by students after this timeJanuary 19, 2015, 9:00 AM Pacific Time / 17:00 UTC: All work stops, Contest endsJanuary 26, 2015: Mentoring Organizations submit their grand prize winner nominees to Google Open Source Programs OfficeFebruary 2, 2015: Google Open Source Programs Office announces the grand prize winners via blog postJune 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.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.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 AmericaEvery 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.Gala at the Tech Museum San Jose with Linus TorvaldsAnother 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…

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Read more about the article FOSSASIA Summit 2015 Call for Speakers and Projects

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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