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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!

Lemote, our Bronze Sponsor

Posted on March 8, 2011March 18, 2011 by Pockey Lam

We are very happy to announce that Lemote is supporting GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 edition again as a bronze level sponsor this year. Lemote is a manufacturer of MIPs based computers and a provider of loongson processors (Chinese MIPs based processors) as well as related integrated solutions. It is important to add that their system are fully “free software compatible”. All system source files (BIOS, kernel, drivers etc.) are free software, no close firmware are needed. GNOME as a GNU project cares about users freedom and encourages people to use free software, which is why we are very pleased to partner with a company sharing our beliefs. Thank you very much Lemote!