Category: Beijing Linux User Group

SFD 2010 registration is open!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Software Freeom Day 2010

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 productive day at “Coding for Fun”

Posted on by Pockey Lam

As you may know Beijing Linux User Group has a lot of interest groups and one of the most popular groups is “Coding for fun“. The purpose is to bring together developers in an informal way to encourage them to share their projects and coding experience. It’s basically like a Hackathon, everyone hacks on their own code. Even you don’t have anything to hack on? Just look around and join anytime if you feel interested!

I personally found this group very interesting and joined numerous times already! Especially for computer science students, it’s a great place for them to learn how to get involve in FOSS projects as they can always get guidance from other experienced hackers. For other members, it’s their regular meeting place to meet and discuss about their projects. If you work alone on your own project? You can see from the pictures that the environment is very nice, it’s definitely a cool place to spend a day  working there. For myself, I always work on random stuff related to BLUG, GNOME.Asia Summit, Software Freedom Day , College OSS Society and Open Source deployment in schools. My projects of the day are mainly the BLUG website news / events announcement and TuxTyping localization. Here it is, the most popular group in BLUG!

Everybody hack on their own project there
Everybody hack on their own project there
Here is a group hacking on the Linux kernel
Hacking on the Linux kernel
Quadcopter Open hardware project
One of the projects is “Quadcopter Open hardware project”
All the projects of the day would be listed in every coding for fun
All the projects of the day would be listed in every coding for fun

First Joint Event with Beijing GNOME User Group

Posted on by Pockey Lam

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
Emily Chen, President of Beijing GNOME User Group
Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org community member
Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org expert, represented BLUG to join the OpenOffice.org Conference
First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!
First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!

Phnom Penh LUG and Open Institute in Cambodia

Posted on by Pockey Lam

The trip to Cambodia was amazingly excellent! Not only I went to the Open Institute Organization to know more about how they spread Open Source in Universities, joined the newly re-established Phnom Penh LUG first initial meeting, but also had a lot of great Cambodian food in Phnom Penh, as I never had any Cambodian food ever! As an animal lover, Phnom Penh is a paradise,  full of wide life too!

Open Institute focus on Universities doing localization, generate textbooks and train teachers / volunteers!
Open Institute focus on Universities: doing localization, generating textbooks of OpenSUSE / Firefox Thunderbird / OpenOffice.org and training teachers / volunteers
Phnom Penh LUG meeting: Fred presented Reprap 3D Printer Project
Phnom Penh LUG meeting: Fred presented Reprap 3D Printer Project and of course we discussed about how to grow the Phnom Penh LUG here in Cambodia
Cambodian Traditional Breakfast: Soup Noodle
Cambodian Traditional Breakfast: Soup Noodle
Cambodian lunch, look tropical!
Cambodian lunch, look tropical!
Monkeys inside a temple, we fed them bananas
Monkeys inside a temple, we fed them bananas
My favourite reptile, lizards everywhere~
My favourite reptile, lizards everywhere~
It's a very relaxing city, people are very nice and friendly! Highly recommend you to go!
It's a very relaxing city, people are very nice and friendly! Highly recommend you to go!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 ROCKS!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Followed by Beijing, the second GNOME.Asia Summit was successfully hosted in Ho-Chi-Minh, Vietnam from 20 – 22 November 2009. I am always happy to join International Open Source events, especially outside of China, I got to talk to the local communities from all over Asia like core members from Saigon LUG, Hanoi LUG, Phnom Penh LUG, Taiwan LUG, Open Institute Organization in Vietnam! I even got to talk to the Chief Director of the Government Information Center in Vietnam and learned that all the government officers will start to use Open Source Software like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird in 2010. Implementation will begin with massive training. The main reason for the migration is that the government wants to reduce illegal use of Windows. Isn’t it cool?

There were a lot of presentations and workshops covering many topics other than GNOME during the whole summit! The full schedule can be viewed here. As a woman leading the Beijing Linux User Group, I gave three talks and led one panel discussion:

  1. Women_In_IT / FOSS
  2. Building Communities
  3. FOSS Deployment in Schools
  4. Panel discussion about Women Participation in GNOME

I was very impressed by the whole GNOME.Asia Summit!  First, Vietnamese participants asked really a lot of questions which is not so common in China. Second, there were a lot of volunteers from different Universities, students of different domains like Computer Science, Trading, Economy and so on. They were very energetic and helpful.  Third, there were a lot of girl volunteers as well which is very rare in Open Source conferences! I can see that the GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 is just a start in Vietnam, with all of these young students’ energy, community building and government support, I am sure 2010 will be a great FOSS year in Vietnam!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 in Veitnam
GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 in Veitnam
GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Workshops
GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Workshops
A lot of interaction with audiences
A lot of interaction with audiences
GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Panel Discussion: Women Participation in GNOME
GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Panel Discussion: Women Participation in GNOME
GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Speakers from all over the world
GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Speakers from all over the world
GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 has over 100 volunteers full of energy
GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 has over 100 volunteers full of energy (a lot of girls as well)