Pockey Lam spends most of her free time advocating Free and Open Source Software as well as Open Education. She is happy to give talks in events about the following topics. Please contact her by sending email to pockeylam A_T gmail D_O_T com.
Free and Open Source Software and Digital Freedoms
Since 2009, she has been Board Director of Digital Freedom Foundation, the organization behind Software Freedom Day, she helped DFF to found Culture Freedom Day in 2012, Hardware Freedom Day and Education Freedom Day in 2013. DFF seeks to educate the world about digital freedoms and promote the abilities to use, study, copy, distribute and improve upon the work of others in the area of software, hardware and content (Free culture and OER). She cares a lot about digital freedoms and definitely want to make more people know about it and its benefits.
Pockey uses free and open source software everyday and whenever she creates arts she would release the works under free culture license. She can definitely show people how to get things done with Free and Open Source Software.
Open Education
Started by refurnishing old computers donated by companies and installing them with free software as well as sending them to schools at Beijing GNU/Linux User Group, Pockey later co-founded Greenboard in 2007, a project aiming to bring computers with the use of Free Software and Open Education Resources to schools that lack resources. She has been giving talks to schools in Beijing and Guangdong Province and contributing to the Greenboard Open Textbook project. She helped to develop and deploy open educational solution in migrant workers children schools and rural schools, the solution includes collaborative open educational contents and free educational software that teach children different subjects like Maths, Arts, Science, Geography, English and Chinese, etc while learning how to use computers. It also included a free classroom management software which enables teachers to view and manage computers in their labs and interact with students. On top of that she also participated in the localization work for a few Free Educational Software like Rur-ple, Tux4Kids and GCompris to make them available for Chinese schools.
Community building
Pockey was Vice President and then President of Beijing GNU/Linux User Group. During the years of service, she helped the organization to grow from 80 members to over 1,000 members, from one or two monthly meetings to over 10 meetings per month with varieties of activities including regular meeting with presentations, interested group meetings , social event, hacking event and conferences. The BLUG also won the Golden Bull Award by CSDN and was elected as the International LUG of the Month by the UK’s Linux Format Magazine in 2008.
Over the past 10 years, she consulted and helped numerous international and Chinese local groups to start and grow their own communities such as GNOME.Asia Committee, GNOME User Group (Beijing, Taiwan, India…), Linux User Groups (Shanghai, Qingdao, Harbin…), Women FOSS Taiwan. She was also the founder of College FOSS Society which is a platform for Free and Open Source advocates in colleges to share experience in starting, maintaining and growing their free software clubs in their colleges. She assisted numerous universities to establish and grow their Free Software clubs like Tsinghua, BUBT, BUAA, USTB, Harbin HIT, etc. She is always fond of sharing her experience of building and growing communities and helping other communities.
Community events
She has been contributing to numerous international Free Software events like GNOME.Asia Summits (2008 to 2012), Software Freedom Day 2007 in Tsinghua University and in BUPT University, Linux Developer Symposium 2008 as well as OOoCon in Beijing in 2008. All these big FLOSS events attracted thousand audiences she definitely enjoys sharing her experiences in organizing events and tell you how she finds the right themes and topics to inspire people to participate as well as promote the events. She also believes that volunteers helping to organize the events is as important as those audiences and often succeeded in turning those green volunteers into big contributors in the communities after the events.
Women in Technology
Striving to attract more women in technology especially the FOSS domain, she was the founder of TechWomen Group she organized women’ Installfest on a regular basis. She also helped to found the Women FOSS in Taiwan. Pockey’s mission is to inspire more women to know how to as well as promote the eventsoin the technology industry especially the fields that she is passionate about i.e. FLOSS and Open Education.
Make a better world!
Having a life objective to create a better world, on top of contributing to Free Software and Open Education as mentioned above, she also devotes her free time to help animals in China, She volunteers for environment enrichment in the reptile house in Beijing Zoo and was elected as the best volunteers in 2007. She is an animal lover who has 5 turtles, 3 iguanas and 2 parrots at home and she believes they are all happy and healthy fellows!
