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Bangalore Hackfest – Day 1

Pockey — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:38:37 +0000

I am finally finding the time to blog about my first day working on GNOME in Bangalore. This is the first GNOME hackfest ever in Asia and the whole GNOME.Asia team is really happy to be part of one of the biggest GNOME hackfest. We have 16 hackers today (Monday 28th) and more will be arriving over the coming days. This is really making us wanting to continue on the “hackfest+summit concept” each year as we roam around Asia.

My workload today is totally focused on the GNOME.Asia team to finish all the GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 organization tasks and plan for upcoming years. I am however still hoping to find the time to work with Allan(s) and Andreas on marketing GNOME 3.0.

I also made the effort to take a few pictures to share and make people who couldn’t attend feel like they were here with us in Bangalore. We all think of you

10 hackers made in on Mar 27, Srini brought us to a very delicious Indian Restaurant for lunch.

Mar 28, our first hackfest day, starting off with a planning session run by Vincent: everybody shared what had to be done and built work teams.

Names were written down and assigned to tasks: performance will be reviewed daily.

Our GNOME release and marketing team.

After half a year of weekly IRC meetings, the GNOME.Asia team finally gets to make a face to face.

Evaluation time at the end of day in Intel office!

Another delicious Indian restaurant recommended by Srini and Bharath

I actually finished everything I planned to do for the day and Tueday will be conference site preparation with Bharath, volunteers briefing and final room/auditorium inspection for all the remaining activities (and they are a lot of them!).

The participating GNOME hackers have been really impressed with the enthusiasm around the GNOME project here in India, the amazing registration count we have achieved (over 1000!) and are all very excited to meet with those passionate people on the upcoming Saturday and Sunday.

To be continued…

JoomlArt & Candis, more regional sponsors

Pockey — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:48:18 +0000

We are very happy to announce that two more regional companies have decided to support GNOME.Asia namely JoomlArt! from Vietnam, providing commercial templates for several free software CMS, and Candis Group from China, an IT solution service provider including hosting services in and out of China. Both companies have centered their business around using, contributing and making money with free software and we are very glad to be receiving their support for this forth edition of GNOME.Asia.

In fact Candis has been a supporter of Free Software communities as far as we can remember and hosting the famous Beijing GNU/Linux User Group since its inception. The decision to support GNOME.Asia was taken on the fact that we will be hosting the 2012 summit most likely in Hong Kong.

JoomlArt! actually provides their conference template for free to any interested Joomla! Day organizer , promotion which they have extended to GNOME.Asia. We have to say it’s been a great design which has enabled us to get the website up and running within a week. We were able to focus on our content rather than designing, css’ing and html’ing, which is not our main expertise. Hopefully the two companies will have the time to join next year event and for foreseeable future.

The cherry on the cake was when we received this email from Alvin Xue who set up our VPS at Candis:

“Dear Fred,

I didn’t notice that. If it’s for gnome.asia, I am very happy if I did sth for it.

Best Regards !”

What else can we ask for?

Check out our brand new website now. We updated a few pages including the Business Sessions and Conference Program. Please help spread the word and see you soon in Bangalore!

Google, our Centurion Sponsor

Pockey — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 05:15:27 +0000

We are very happy to announce that Google is supporting GNOME.Asia Summit one more time and has taken the Centurion level sponsorship. In fact since GNOME.Asia inception in 2008, we have had a few companies backing up the event and Google is one of them. We’re of course very pleased to have them as a sponsor again in 2011 and take it that we must be doing something good. Thank you Google!

As a side note, we would also like to kindly remind everybody especially participants of the GNOME 3.0 Bangalore hackfest that we’d love to hear about what you’ve been working on during the conference so we can all be inspired and receive in-depth coverage of your field of expertise. The deadline of call for papers is tomorrow (Feb 18). If you haven’t added your talks yet, submit one today!

SFD preparation meeting@STU Linux Association

Pockey — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 06:59:17 +0000

After moving to Southern China, we have been attempting to meet with local FOSS communities. Finally we got to visit the Shantou University (STU) and talk to the core members of Linux Association, one of the winners of Software Freedom Day Innovative event award 2009 from sfdchina.org.

Since its establishment in 2005, STU Linux Association has been hosting regular meeting on a weekly basis (except holidays and exam period). They strive to introduce members of different FOSS applications and give technical lessons that their core members are familiar with. They even have members dedicating to help students with difficulty in installing Linux.

It was a great pleasure to meet with all of them due to their enthusiasm towards FOSS. Some of them have been the core members for 4 years, that’s usually not the case in other universities I’ve met. This year they are planning for a double capacity SFD event. Fred and I promised to support them with more goodies and be the SFD speakers. We are looking forward to celebrate SFD with Shantou University and wish everybody Happy Software Freedom Day!

A thousand people joined COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010!

Pockey — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:22:47 +0000

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

Thanks GNOME Foundation to sponsor my travel!

SFD 2010 registration is open!

Pockey — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:36:24 +0000

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?

A thousand registrations within 85 min. for COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010

Pockey — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 18:00:29 +0000

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.

COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 Call For Participants

Pockey — Sun, 30 May 2010 12:47:11 +0000

As part of the organizing team of GNOME.Asia Summit, I would like to post the Call for participants of the GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 here and let all the communities in Asia know that we are looking for speakers, exhibitors and participants this year. Please find below the announcement and don’t hesitate to pass the message along!

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

Basic rules for FOSS Localization

Pockey — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:03:43 +0000

I have been spending some time reviewing a few FOSS educational software translations over the last months. Localization is a commitment if you want to do a good job; badly localized software leads to poor experience (people simply won’t use the software) and gives the wrong message that FOSS applications are just bad software. So if you thought localization was just pure translation, then you need to think again! Hopefully my experience will help more people to start a localization effort well prepared and be proud of the work they did.

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!

Know your audience (the people using the software) and pick words that they can easily understand
Have some knowledge in software terminology (if not, web search is your buddy)
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)
Be more than fluent in the target language and good enough in the original language (not the other way round)
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)
Use the same terms across the whole software (either by proof reading or with the help of localization tools like Poedit and OmegaT)
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)
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
Keep track of changes and reasons behind so that can be useful for other languages
Have the passion and the time to commit to do a good work

First Joint Event with Beijing GNOME User Group

Pockey — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:10:23 +0000

Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG) and Beijing GNOME User Group (BGUG), two of the most active open source communities in Beijing just celebrated their anniversary in November (one day after the other)! With 7 and 1 year of services for BLUG and BGUG respectively it was about time we organized a joint event. In fact being a core member of both groups and a close friend of Emily Chen, BGUG’s President, I can recall how it all started: in 2008 we worked very closely to organize the first instance of GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 in Beijing, bringing passionate GNOME people from all horizons together, discussing and willing to contribute to the GNOME project here in China. The rest happened “all by itself” and it is really nice to see BGUG growing up strong with now a few core members taking over some of the group management responsibilities!

For this joint event we presented to both groups a report of the second instance of GNOME.Asia Summit which happened in Vietnam this year. Emily, Fred, Ray and myself were giving presentation there and we gave a summary of what happened, who we met, how vibrant the local Open Source scene is and showed of course many pictures of the 3 days event. In the second part of the meeting Peter Junge, core member of OpenOffice.org community, presented his experience while representing the BLUG and attending the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) in Italy. It was really a wonderful evening flooded with event highlights, innovative technology, travel and funny stories. After witnessing the success of GNOME.Asia Summit in Beijing and Vietnam, I can’t wait to know where it will be hosted in 2010 and of course participate again!

Emily Chen, President of Beijing GNOME User Group

Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org expert, represented BLUG to join the OpenOffice.org Conference

First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!