Planning our GNOME 3.0 Launch Party

Posted on by Pockey Lam

GNOME.Asia committee is planning on organising a special event (hackfest+conference) for the GNOME 3.0 release, detail can be found here. In order to collect feedback from the GNOME community especially our future participants and better address their needs, interests and desires we have published a list of questions to help us out. If you are involved in the GNOME 3.0 release process in anyway or the GNOME shell, please support us by filling up the pre-event survey.

We have also been talking to other local GNOME communities and a lot of them are already planning for the D-day as well e.g. France, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam and China. We’re trying to synchronise and coordinate all those events in order to have a stronger worldwide marketing impact.

So if you are preparing for a launch party for the GNOME 3.0 release, please link your event planning page here so we can all share our ideas with one another! Let’s work together to make a global worldwide event that will truly celebrate GNOME 3.0 release!

SFD’10 competition is on!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

All organizing teams of a Software Freedom Day 2010 event are invited to submit their event report in order to participate in the Best SFD Event Competition 2010 . There is a bit more than two weeks left so you should start to worry a little if you haven’t joined the competition yet!  We went to the extra mile this year to bring you amazing prizes (for the winning teams that is)  and are quite proud to  be able to offer in partnership with our sponsors the Open Source (GPL’ed)  Makerbot 3D printers and the book Free Software Free Society: selected essays by Richard M. Stallman signed by the author himself! Three teams will be selected as usual by the Software Freedom International board and reading previous years winning entries should give you some inspiration (this was a free tip!).

Submission deadline is October 31st 1200UTC and winning teams will hopefully be announcement somewhere around mid December the latest. And of course the submission link itself which I shouldn’t forget to remind you about is at http://cgi.softwarefreedomday.org/event_report.html. Good luck to all!

One more GUG

Posted on by Pockey Lam

A lot of good things came out of the COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 event: not only did GNOME.Asia committee recruit 5 more core members, but Max has taken on the challenge to run a local GNOME User Group! The website is already up and the Taiwan GNOME User Group has a regular monthly meeting day: the first Tuesday of every month. The first meeting was successfully hosted exactly a month ago, on September 7th which is less than a month after the conference,  and pictures of  the past two meetings are viewable here.

The group aims to address the needs of both GNOME developers and users. As far as users are concerned they are planning to host an installfest very soon and a launch party for GNOME 3.0 release. On the contributors side of things, they have widely promoted the GNOME Women Outreach Program and a few young women members have already applied. Their next efforts will be centered around attracting more contributors into GNOME localization. Members are also considering to start a campaign to entice all those unknown Taiwanese GNOME users into participating in the group’s activities as well as count them. Those are all very interesting ideas and definitely just a beginning!

Congratulations are definitely in order for the launch of GNOME.tw and a special thank you goes to Max, Imacat, Rex and all the participants who are making the local Taiwan GNOME User Group a reality!

Software Freedom Day 2010 – Shantou chapter

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Thanks to the good work from SFDChina, there were near 60 Software Freedom Day events hosted in different cities around China this year!  Some events had to be postponed either a day earlier or a day later due to Nanking Massacre Memorial Day conflicting date. Fred and I celebrated the D-day by joining forces with the one hosted by Shantou University.

As mentioned in my previous post, the event was organized by the Linux Association from Shantou University (STU). It started in the morning with an outdoor exhibition to demonstrate Free Software and followed with presentations in the evening.  Fred gave an overview on why Software Freedom matters, a quick history review of Free and Open Source Software and talked about how the audience could get involved and contribute to the community. Then I introduced some cool Free Software that I use everyday and demonstrated how FOSS helped me to get things done.  Unlike other events I have been involved with in China, we had the pleasure to talk to very active spectators asking plenty of questions such as:

  • How can Free Software sustain without any financial support from companies?
  • Which field / area do GNU/Linux systems apply to?
  • Knowing that Free Software is so cool, why the market share is so little in China?
  • How can we increase the market share of Free Software in China?
  • What are the benefits to use GNU/Linux systems and Free Software in terms of software development?
  • Do you think Free software will dominate the world market in the future?

The event ended with some great performances given by two other STU associations, namely the Guitar Players Associations and the Magicians Associations. This was totally in line with the purpose of SFD which is to make the day as constructive and fun as possible! We totally enjoyed our Software Freedom Day, how about you?

Outdoor exhibition to demonstrate Free Software
Who says Chinese students are shy? At least not the ones in STU!
Presentations given by Fred, Bean and myself in the evening
I introduced a lot of cool Free Software to STU students!
Performance given by Microphone who is also an Android developer

GNOME.Asia Committee 2010

Posted on by Pockey Lam

committeeOne of the main objective of the GNOME.Asia Committee, and the summits we’ve organized every year since 2008, has been to build a stronger GNOME community in Asia.  Thanks to the COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 event in Taiwan this year, we’ve moved a step closer to our goals and recruited five more members from various Asian countries to join our Committee. They are:

Welcome aboard!

Since early September we have resumed our weekly IRC meetings and started planing for the next GNOME.Asia Summits. It’s a real pleasure to be working with all of them and I can already feel the GNOME.Asia community getting stronger as more passionate people are joining the organizing team! One of the actual focus these past two weeks was to get a pre-event survey out and better address the needs, interests and desires of potential future participants. While still in its “beta version” we’ll be starting to approach some key people we would like to see involved in the next chapter of GNOME.Asia Summit and refine it. Planned public release is early October, so please stay tuned and do help us to get your ideas counted!