FOSSASIA 2011 in Van Lang University is attracting many developers and interested students. We have a big hall that is filled for most of the talks and some seminar rooms where we have some intense talks, discussions and workshop to get hands on experience.
We had a get together of speakers and participants at the Spotted Cow Bar in the center of Saigon. It is a nice group of people and looks like everyone really enjoyed the first meet up at the FOSSASIA conference.
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.
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
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…