March 2011 – Inspiration is food for every soul!

Bangalore Hackfest – Day 2 & 3

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Pockey Lam

Time to blog again about what I did during the past two days: as planned, I did the site visit at the Dayananda Sagar Educational Institutions and spent quite some time discussing conference details with the volunteer leads. The college already has a Tech Club and its members are very enthusiastic about starting a separate GNOME / Free Software entity right after the conference. I was also very impressed to see that all the 100 computers from the computer room were already installed with GNOME. So here is my summary of things for 29th March (2nd Day):

Site visit with some professors and room inspections for the upcoming five days activities
Briefed volunteers for exhibition arrangement, registration, performance for opening / closing ceremony, master of ceremony and photo / video taking, etc.
Finished all the marketing material artworks for GNOME.Asia Summit 2011

And the summary of what I have done on 30th March (3rd Day) is:

Finished the artwork of the two-page badge together with schedule
Prepared and set up the GNOME 3 HelpDesk
Gave some insights to Chandni (Participant of GNOME Outreach Program for Women) for her upcoming presentation
Discussed with Vincent and Allan about planning of the GNOME 3.0 release day, my tasks will be to contact all the GNOME 3 party organizers to localize and advertise the press release as well as announce the release on the GNOME.Asia website

Dayananda Sagar Educational Institutions - 2nd hackfest venue — From Mar 30 to April 1, we move to a library in Dayananda Sagar Educational Institutions

Mar 30 Lunch — Bharath brought us to another delicious Indian vegetarian restaurant for lunch.

My plan for tomorrow will be to work on the GNOME 3 HelpDesk (both virtual and physical), contacting more press to join the conference and finishing all the outstanding items in the event checklist (we still have quite some work to do).

To be continued…

Bangalore Hackfest – Day 1

Posted on March 29, 2011March 30, 2011 by Pockey Lam

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 😉

Mar27 Hacklunch — 10 hackers made in on Mar 27, Srini brought us to a very delicious Indian Restaurant for lunch.

Mar28-hackfest — 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.

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…

GNOME People starting to arrive in Bangalore

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Pockey Lam

Members of the GNOME release and marketing teams have started to arrive last night and will continue to land in Bangalore today and tomorrow. We have been welcome by a lovely weather which is a change for most of us living in colder countries at this time of the year. The local GNOME.Asia team has done a wonderful job in picking the place where we are all staying and we could say that the moral is really high! Indeed the week ahead is going to be busy for all of us working at the GNOME 3.0 hackfest and the warmth and sun from Bangalore can only give us more energy towards our goals.

As a side note the second training session has been filled in no time and unfortunately we are not able to provide more seats. Now considering the interest we strongly believe that the local GNOME User Group will have no other choice but to rock and provide monthly doses of GNOME technology to its community.

JoomlArt & Candis, more regional sponsors

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Pockey Lam

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!

Novell, second Bronze Sponsor

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Pockey Lam

We are very happy to announce that Novell has joined the ranks of organization supporting GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 edition and has taken the Bronze level sponsorship. In fact two of our committee members, Akhil and Bharath from Novell, were the original submitters for the call for host back in December 2010 and have been helping us a lot in organizing the hackfest and conference. Thank you very much Novell!