OpenTechSummit

FOSSASIA Summit 2011 Wrap Up

The FOSSASIA OpenTechSummit 2011 was held at Van Lang University in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam from November 11 to 12, 2011. The event attracted 798 participants in 2 days including students, developers, business professionals and government officials. Ninety percent of the participants were local from Vietnam. There were a total of 24 speakers, 60% were local speakers and 40% of them were from other countries, including USA, France, Denmark, Cambodia, Germany, and Singapore. There were 26 talks and many workshops took place over the two days of the event. It has been a great event. Thank you for joining the community at Van Lang University in Ho Chi Minh City 2011!  

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FOSSASIA Speaker Registration

The FOSSASIA Speaker Registration form is online available at http://fossasia.org/speaker-registrationWe are using a simple Google form. So you can also access the form directly here: Speaker Registration FormPlease fill in your information to get a slot! We are looking forward to welcome you at FOSSASIA 2011.

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FOSSASIA Google Summer of Code 2011

FOSSASIA was prominently featured on the Google Open Source Blog. I wrote a short sum up of the student summer projects.FOSSASIA is participating in Google Summer of Code for the first time this summer. The goal of the FOSSASIA network is to bring young Open Source developers together with experienced international developers to join or start new Free and Open Source projects.FOSSASIA’s Google Summer of Code projects focus on open source for social change and communication. All the students are putting in a lot of effort, however their progress is varying as students have different skill levels.The project of “foo-script” (Adam Rakowski) is moving forward most quickly. He expands the uses for the next Crypto-Stick (an USB hardware device with an integrated openGPG smart card firmware) edition and develops plugins for popular applications like Firefox. With the Stick you can easily encrypt your emails and achieve convenient online authentication.Secondly Chanrithy Thim, the MoonOS developer from Cambodia has been improving Appshell, a framework for applications that lets developers easily create application bundles. A single file contains all the data and files needed to run an application, so all a user has to do is to launch it.Google Summer of Code projects will be presented at this year’s FOSSASIA Summit taking place in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) on November 11-13, 2011.Links:* http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/08/whos-new-in-google-summer-of-code-part.html 

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FOSSASIA Summit 2011 in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) from Nov. 11-12

FOSSASIA 2011 was announced officially during the Desktop Summit in Berlin by Chanrithy Thim and Mario Behling from the organization committee. FOSSASIA 2011 will take place from November 11-12 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam with a special focus on "Women in IT" and "Mobile Applications"."We had amazing people gathering at events in previous years, starting with FOSS Bridge in 2007 and 2008, GNOME.Asia in 2009, and FOSSASIA and the Open Design Weeks Asia in 2010. With the fantastic support of people from all over the world FOSSASIA 2011 is a place to meet the community, government officials and open source IT businesses. There are many opportunities to learn about existing projects and to meet people to start new software projects." says Hong Phuc DANG, chair of the event.

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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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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 ComputingThe 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 UpFOSSASIA 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 MozillaFOSSASIA 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…

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FOSSASIA 2010 press coverage

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

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GNOME.Asia Vietnam Wrap Up

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 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. 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. 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…

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