Speaking at OpenSym + WikiSym 2013

opensym2013

During my last visit in Hong Kong I met a few of my usual friends and about 2 weeks later received an invitation to speak at the OpenSym + WikiSym 2013 which will be hosted in Hong Kong from 5 to 8 August 2013. Of course I’d thank Haggen for passing the message and the team behind the conference for the invitation.

I have decided to present my work with Open Education which happens to match the conference rather well (I was told), and will therefore summarize what has been done around Beijing since about 2006. The interesting part is that this project (named greenboard) covers a lot of different pieces ranging from hardware donation, curriculum design, using Free Software and customizing or translating the possible solution. It will of course talk about GNU/Linux, some of the GNOME and KDE educational applications we are using as well as putting it all together and allowing teachers to control the classroom. Since there will be researchers and communities flying from all over the world to participate for the event, I look forward to receiving good insights, get further ideas to improve what we have done so far and why not, expand to new territories.

As a side note the conference call for talks is still open, the submission deadline being on May 17, 2013. So feel free to either come and talk about something interesting or just drop by and say hi in early August if you are in town!

Celebrate CFD on May 18

cfd-banner 336x280

Culture Freedom Day is just around the corner and it’s not too late to decide to join the movement! Meant as an international day for Free Culture artists around the world to make themselves heard and known to the public we expect plenty of street concerts, gallery exhibitions and other local demonstrations of Free Culture work. Just as Satabdi Das from Kolkata, India you can join a local team, or create your own team in your area. whether you know free culture artists who can come and help you or just decide to broadcast a few free culture movies. Free culture is big enough and need your help to be famous!

For more information please visit the CFD dedicated website and don’t forget to spread the word. Note that we’ve also made a countdown and some banners which code and source file can be retrieved from our CFD wiki.

Celebrate Free Culture with us on May 19!

Hackerspace Hong Kong

dimsumlabs1

In order to promote Hardware Freedom Day that was hosted on April 20, I went to visit the only hackerspace in Hong Kong, the DimSumLabs. We met some new geeky friends including Graham, a professor at PolyU and Manolis, web admin at DimSumLabs among other many things… We had a lot of great discussions and talked from 8pm until 2am. We ended up agreeing to host some events in PolyU together in the near future.

The following Saturday, we went to do site visit and talked more. Of course we also met with our old friend, Mathieu who just started a hacking group in Hong Kong and had a very great first event. His main occupation these days apart from his job, is to work on an improved input method for Hong Kongese. We also invited him to join Digital Freedom Foundation as a director as he is helping us coordinating and running some local activities in Hong Kong, which happen to be a requirement now. All in all it was a great week, not really a HFD event but definitely big steps forwards for us.