COSCUP / GNOME.Asia Participants, a lot of them use GNOME Desktop!

After Beijing and Ho-Chi-Minh, the third GNOME.Asia Summit, co-organized with COSCUP,  was successfully hosted in Taipei (Taiwan) on August 14th and 15th, 2010. It was a great two-day conference with 69 presentations and speakers coming from all over the world like China, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, India, USA, France, Spain, Germany… That does not include the BOFs and lightning talks which definitely helped to bring the whole conference to a new level. A total of 977 participants, 25 sponsors,  20 news outlets, 10 exhibitors (including communities) and a hundred volunteers supported the event. We also had webcasts which attracted over 700 viewers each day joining the event from their homes!

What amazed me the most was that 95% (from my observation) of the participants were actually using GNOME as their desktop and we even spotted a few local developers using GNOME 3.0. Besides, Taiwanese Free and Open Source Software communities seem to be flourishing and and the conference was a great opportunity to start discussing with several of them to establish a GNOME User Group in Taiwan. Their response has been fantastic and  right now a mailing list  (gnome-tw-list |at| gnome.org and http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-tw-list) and a dedicated IRC channel (#gnome-tw @ Freenode) are already up and running! In fact there are existing GNOME interest groups inside those various communities, and the creation of a GUG will definitely help transform those “little islands of GNOME” into a stronger GNOME representation addressing Taiwanese users and developers needs as well as inviting new comers to the joys of GTK+. I am glad to be part of GNOME.Asia and witnessing more local GNOME communities being built and growing in Asia!

Click here to visualize those great moments that make a conference unforgettable

As a board member of Software Freedom International (and Secretary), it is with great pleasure to announce that Software Freedom Day 2010 registration is now OPEN!

For its 7th inception, the team at Software Freedom Day has finally opened registration for SFD 2010 teams to get free goodies to prepare their event. For those not familiar with SFD, it’s an annual event happening on the third Saturday of September (September 18th this year) which purpose is to reach out to the public to educate, discuss and demonstrate the virtues and benefits of Free Software. With around 800 locally managed events in 2009, SFI (the non-profit organization behind SFD) hopes to reach more than a thousand teams this year and hundreds of thousands of people. Indeed within less than 24 hours, there are already over 100 teams registered!

I personally started to get involved in Software Freedom Day since 2007 when I was the Vice President of Beijing Linux User Group. Organizer and winner of the Best 2007 Event Competition in 2007, I have then been involved in three events in 2008, two in Beijing and one in Qingdao. In 2009, supporting 86 events in China as well as a founding member organization of the SFDChina.org. Since, I have also been helping Software Freedom International to ship all the goodies worldwide, while making funny videos of it. I have to say it’s a great fun to organize and join all those SFD events! So will you also participate and join this passionate community in their world domination effort?

After months of preparation and working with  COSCUP team (a local co-organizer from Taiwan), COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 is going to be hosted next month on August 14th and 15th in Taipei. I would like to share with you a few updates. Firstly, a total of 90 talks were received before June 25th, 2010, thanks a lot for all the speakers who submitted their talks! Due to the limited time slots, only 60 of them could be accepted. Final schedule will be announced in a week from now. Secondly, the online registration opened on July 5th, 2010, and over a thousand participants registered within the first 85 minutes. That is very impressive! I would say it’s a very good start for the joint event! We’re now looking at ways to accept more people or make the event available also to people who couldn’t get a seat at the conference.

Dear GNOME friends,

The GNOME Foundation provides travel sponsorships to individuals who want to attend GNOME.Asia 2010 and need financial assistance.

We are happy to announce the Travel Committee is ready to receive applications for sponsorships to attend to GNOME.Asia 2010. This year, GNOME.Asia is jointly held with COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) in Taipei, Taiwan on August 14 and 15, 2010.

For event detail please visit http://2010.gnome.asia/

For instruction of  the travel assistance application, please visit  http://live.gnome.org/Travel

Deadline: June 25 2010 14:00 UTC postponed to July 9 2010 14:00 UTC

Some additional request for GNOME.Asia:

• We target to sponsor speakers (If you intend to go, why not give a talk? )
• Limitation of $400 for people flying inside Asia and $800 for people from Europe/US/Other.
• Only pay for transportation, not lodging cost. However, if you need help with accommodation, the GNOME.Asia Committee will book the hotel or hostel for you. Any questions, feel free to drop us an email.
• Asking for sponsorship does not guarantee you will get sponsored;
• A good application with good information will be processed faster;
• If you are GNOME Foundation member,  Google Summer of Code participants, contributor or speaker on GNOME, most likely you will get the sponsorship;
• The Travel committee should reply back about receiving your application within 2-3 days. After that we would accumulate all the sponsorship requests and process them together. So please do not panic (have any butterflies in your stomach) if we take some time to reply on the status. Affirmative/Negative you would surely get a response;
• No personal emails. Please keep travel-committee Cc’ed on all your replies.

Any questions, feel free to send email to the travel-committee : <travel-committee AT gnome DOT org>. Thank you!

GNOME.Asia Committee

Dear GNOME friends,

For this third edition of the GNOME.Asia Summit we’re delighted to partner with the organizers of the largest annual community-based Open Source conference in Taiwan, COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters). The event will be held on August 14th and 15th at the International Conference Hall, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica in Taipei (Taiwan).

Right now the joint conference of COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 is calling for papers. With a tagline of “Open Web and Mobile Technologies”, it emphasizes the exciting development in these two areas as well as the GNOME desktop environment, and leverages the world-leading hardware industry in Taiwan.

Call for Paper
Submit a Talk!

Important Information

The deadlines:

• Submission: June 25th 2010
• Notification of acceptance: July 4th 2010
  

Conference:

• Conference Date: August 14th – 15th 2010
• Venue: International Conference Hall, Humanities and Social Sciences Building, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

Main Topics
Possible topics include, but not limited to:

1. The latest GNOME 3.0
The three big things about GNOME 3 are user experience, accessibility, and apps. The most coolest apps on GNOME 3.0 etc.

2. GNOME library and application development
Development involves many different projects, on the GNOME Desktop Environment and the GNOME applications.

3. Desktop deployments and customization
Deploy and customize GNOME desktop in your country

4. Mobile platforms and thin clients
GNOME desktop on mobile platform, like on phone, thin clients like Sun Ray

5. Localization & Internationalization
Translation, Input Method, Dictionary, anything related to L10n and I18n is welcome

6. GNOME Communities
Organize local Users Group, spreading the knowledge of GNOME and building a vibrant, thriving community around GNOME

7. GNOME Accessibility
Accessibility enables people with disabilities to participate in activities such as work and the use of services, products, and information.

8. Testing
Automation testing framework, test cases developement, bug management and all kings of topic related to QA.

9. HTML 5 and the Web Technologies
Topics around web technologies including demonstrations, tips and applications etc. It would be best if it was related to HTML 5 and front-end technologies but is not a requirement.

10. FOSS & Hardware
Hack your devices using FOSS! The term “devices” include embedded systems, home electronics, set-top boxes, wireless base stations, e-book readers, automotive electronics, mobile phones, and PDA/MIDs etc.

11. FOSS Business, legally
FOSS legal issues which include standard processes on FOSS  commercial usage, FOSS business model research, and reverse engineering for GPL compliance check.

12. Other topics
Any FOSS related topic which not listed above is still welcome. Your participation can help us make the conference better, and that’s how Open Source communities work!

13. Lightning talks
A five-minutes presentation to demonstrate your work or promote an interesting topic. Reservation and on-site application are both accepted.

The sessions at the COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 will be scheduled for two time blocks:

A: 45mins talk + 15 mins Q&A

B: 25mins talk + 5 mins Q&A

Please take into consideration any time you will need for preparation. The session could be a technical talk, panel discussion, or BOF.

If you’d like to share your knowledge, experience, or opinion at COSCUP 2010, please fill in the form here before June 25th, 2010. The program committee will contact you before July 4th, 2010 to inform you whether your submission has been accepted or not.

All interested contributors are highly encouraged to send in their talks. Please help us to spread the invitation to other potential participants. Even you do not plan to be a speaker, please consider joining COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010. This is going to be a great event!

Sincerely,

GNOME.Asia
Organization Team

We’re actually in the middle of the call for host for the 2010 edition and you can find my post about the topic right here. So if anyone in Asia is interested to take up the challenge and be the lead organizer of a great Open Source technical conference showcasing GNOME technologies this is the chance. Note that the whole GNOME.Asia Summit committee will be behind you and we’re now strong of two successful years experience. So please do help spread the word.

I am also part of the localization team of a few GNOME projects especially the educational ones like GComrpis and Rur-ple. I spent a lot of time building a total FOSS solution for schools that included the OS with different educational apps for teaching and learning, tutorials for teachers, training and textbook for students. Of course we use a lot of GNOME and GNOME apps in the solution.

And when not doing GNOME things, I actually also happen to be the President of the (famous!) Beijing LUG (should you be in town please do contact me), on the board of Software Freedom International and very much involved with women in technology and students open source groups.

I hope that by now you have a better idea of who I am and should you have any idea on how to strengthen the Asian GNOME community please do get in touch. Also feel free to browse my previous post to get a better idea of the other things I’m involved with.

Cultural adaptation and knowing who that software was written for are paramount in the process. I’ve put up a few rules together hoping it will help newcomers, if I missed anything please feel free to add yours in the comment section!

1. Know your audience (the people using the software) and pick words that they can easily understand
2. Have some knowledge in software terminology (if not, web search is your buddy)
3. Be familiar with the software (try it out before translating it and don’t hesitate to use that software when you are doing the translation)
4. Be more than fluent in the target language and good enough in the original language (not the other way round)
5. Don’t be afraid to change the meaning in order to fit cultural differences (e.g. for Rur-ple, we picked a meaningful Chinese robot name rather than doing a phonetic conversion: names must have meaning in Chinese for people and more specifically children to remember)
6. Use the same terms across the whole software (either by proof reading or with the help of localization tools like Poedit and OmegaT)
7. Have someone good enough in both languages to review your work and hopefully familiar with the software (he needs to use the software not just read the text)
8. Fixes, typo corrections and improvements from the source language need to be fed back to the original project in order to help improve the overall quality of the software and all its translation
9. Keep track of changes and reasons behind so that can be useful for other languages
10. Have the passion and the time to commit to do a good work

Dear GNOME friends,

We are call for the host of GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 now !

GNOME.Asia Summit is the yearly GNOME Users and Developers Asian Conference. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, and also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss both the present technology and future developments.

GNOME.Asia Summit was held in Beijing, China during 2008 and in Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam during 2009. We would like to continue finding new national locations as we spread GNOME throughout Asia, and we are looking for local organizers to rise to the challenge of organizing an excellent GNOME event. The GNOME.Asia committee will assist in the process, but there is a definitive need for individuals to be actively involved and committed to the planning and delivery of the event.

You can learn more about GNOME.Asia Summit at our official website: http://gnome.asia

The following two links are “must read items” for organizing the GNOME.Asia Summit:

• How to
• Check list

If you are interested in hosting the summit please submit a formal proposal to the GNOME.Asia Committee at asia-summit-list [at] gnome.org. The deadline for proposals is 31st March 2010. You are encouraged to ask questions before writing the formal proposal.

GNOME.Asia is much like a few trees just planted and we want to grow a forest in Asia. We are looking for local organizers in any Asian country with the desire to take on and succeed in the challenges of organizing an excellent GNOME event. We know that you will need all the time you can get to prepare a proposal but we hope we have inspired you to get started.

We are looking forward to hear from you on or before 31st March 2010.

Sincerely,

GNOME.Asia Summit committee

Fred is now submitting the Chinese version upstream to make it available for everybody.  The TuxTyping developers have been very responsive and helpful with our translation problems and fixing minor bugs we found. We are now even working with them to make it workable for Chinese input method, as only pinyin typing is available currently. Hopefully we will have something ready to test soon.

In no time thanks to volunteers and passionate people like us, we went from nothing available in Chinese to a great looking software that will even deal with the Chinese language specificities. That’s the reason why I love Open Source; its community and its spirit definitely ROCK!

TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin.

There are four different kids of typing games for kids to practise typing.

Tux the penguin is hungry, and loves to eat fish. But Tux can only catch the fish if you type the right letters in time!

There are over 40 exercises learning the finger position of each letter and punctuation

1. give awards and recognitions to volunteers and migrant schools teachers (and RMB 50,000 red pocket will go to 99 teachers during the coming Chinese New Year, it was announced by Mr. Xu from Narada Foundation during the event)
2. give subsidies to Migrant workers’ families (a total of RMB 600,000 to 300 families)
3. enjoy the day with nice songs and dance (it was definitely a very nice show for all of us)
4. panel discussions trying to solve problems

It was a very successful event with over 400 participants. The whole venue was seated with migrant workers families and migrant schools teachers as well as volunteers coming from different NGOs all focusing on helping migrant workers families. It was also full of touching stories and hot discussions about how to improve the quality of living for migrant workers families. It was very nice to see that so many organizations were concerned about this society problem. But we all know that subsidy can only help in the short term, policy and education are the only long term solution. In order to solve the root problem the society should provide migrant workers with trainings in order to be able to access better job opportunities and their children with free and decent quality education. We should definitely invite the government and Ministry of Education to participate in these kinds of events and panel discussions Yes, it’s time to nurture and be responsible for migrant workers!

Awards given to volunteers from different organizations all over China

RMB 2,000 subsidy was given to 300 selected Migrant Workers' families

Gardener Awards were given to 99 selected teachers from different Migrant Schools

Volunteers dancing with 4 volunteering children, nice performance!

A few folk songs by a Chinese famous singer

Different Panel Discussions by NGO organizers, teachers, volunteers and even media