Month: December 2010

Hosting GNOME 3.0 Hackfest | GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 in Bangalore, India

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Mysore kottaram

It’s a great pleasure to announce that Bangalore, India has been selected as the venue of our upcoming GNOME 3.0 Hackfest | GNOME.Asia Summit 2011. It is important to highlight that GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 is matching the release of GNOME 3.0 and will be a great place to celebrate this launch. GNOME 3.0 is a big advance for GNOME bringing new desktop paradigms to facilitate users interaction with their computing world.

Potential sites for the hackfest are the offices of GNOME-friendly companies such as Novell and Intel. We’re still in discussion with several universities such as Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering for hosting the one day conference.

Bangalore, referred as the Silicon Valley of India, is known for its skilled and talented IT force. We believe hosting the event in Bangalore will bring the spotlight on GNOME 3.0 and make an impact locally, regionally and internationally in terms of business and community building.

We are currently discussing with the GNOME release, marketing and documentation teams about the best possible date of the event, and should be able to announce it within the coming week. It is important to mention that this GNOME 3.0 Hackfest will be the first GNOME hackfest in Asia, is already synchronizing with other GNOME communities around the world.

As a side note we also reviewed two other very strong proposals to host GNOME.Asia Summit this year (2011) and will continue working with the teams from Hong Kong and Bali to make it happen in 2012/3.

More about Bangalore

Bangalore is the capital of Karnataka and is India’s fifth-largest city. Often called “The Garden City,” Bangalore is full of parks famous for their flowering trees and greenery, giving the city a unique beauty. Many diverse cultures and customs exist in Bangalore, and its 5.3 million inhabitants favor activities such as football, cricket, bowling, hockey and rock climbing. For cultural lovers, Bangalore has maintained the preservation of its ancient arts and architectural wonders such as the Sri Radha Krishnachandra Temple, among many others. Please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangalore for more details.

Credits

A big Thank You goes to Intel and Novell for offering their offices to host the hackfest as well as the Bangalore team (Akhil Laddha, Bharath Acharya, Ayesha Iqbal, Srinivasa Ragavan and Parag Goel) for their compelling proposal. We would also love to give a special Thank You to the Bali and Hong Kong teams for their participation, represented by Utian Ayuba, Arif Syamsudin, Wayan Sudana, Azhar Udin. Edmon Chung, Haggen So, Sammy Fung, KS Wong, Amanda Lam, etc. We have indeed received three very great proposals this year, making the selection task very difficult.

Venue visits in Hong Kong – GNOME.Asia Summit 2011

Posted on by Pockey Lam

The pre-event survey results gave us a lot of insights about the upcoming GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 and GNOME 3.0 Hackfest expectations. Since the preferred hosting city is Hong Kong where I happen to be from, Fred and I went for a site exploration and meetings with local partners such as DotAsia and OAKA last week.

Survey respondents preferred universities and resorts as venues, so we chose the City University of Hong Kong as the venue for the 1 day conference while Breakthrough Youth Village seems to be the perfect compromise between resort and retreat for the 3-day hackfest.

We really appreciate that the University is providing us with 2 halls for free to host the conference. With the help of  a local NGO, we will also benefit from a discount at Breakthrough (about 30% off).  As you can tell from the pictures here, there are a lot of different corners for group discussions and workshops, each with their own style; we felt it would definitely help to stimulate new ideas and make people feel at ease to work out all the details of such an important release. The price is very affordable as well, 44USD per person including three meals based on double occupancy (shared room for 2 persons). Each family suite is equipped with a living room, a kitchen, 2 bathrooms and 3 to 4 bed rooms (do check the the photos for more details).

With proposals from Bali, Bangalore and Hong Kong, I feel it will be a difficult task to chose one location over the other ones. Anyway, no matter what, those not selected would be high on the list to host another chapter of GNOME.Asia Summit in the upcoming years. I will of course keep you posted on the location decision in a later post.

Likewise, if you feel you will attend the GNOME 3.0 hackfest and have comments or questions about the location described above (accommodation, food, access to the city, etc) please do feel free to use the comment section for those.