Conference – Inspiration is food for every soul!

Upcoming Greenboard deployment

Posted on March 30, 2014March 30, 2014 by Pockey Lam

Over the past few months we have been busy introducing the Greenboard project in a few places, namely at Teach for China in Shantou and at FOSSASIA in Phnom Penh to name just two places. Both have been very interested in the concept, its flexibility, past deployments and more importantly using it within their environment.

We are now working on refurbishing a classroom of sixty computers in a school not too far from Shantou, classroom which was installed ten years ago and has never ever been used. Of course not all the machines start (in fact only 15 out of 60) but the room is properly set up and looks like a very nice place to start in the region. The people we are working with from Teach for China are very motivated as well which brings a lot to the equation.

On the Cambodian side, the discussions we had with USAID and the representative from the Ministry of Education were very positive too. We will have further discussions during April and need to start checking the translation status of all the components we use. Luckily the person in charge of packaging Greenboard happens to be Cambodian too!

All in all we are pretty excited about what’s coming ahead of us and will work hard to make it happen. Stay connected to learn more as the projects move forward!

Speaking at FOSSASIA 2014 tomorrow!

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Pockey Lam

I will be giving a talk tomorrow at FOSSASIA 2014 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia about my work in Open Education. The talk (entitled “Let’s Raise Kids Up”) will be part of the opening keynotes. It will give a quick introduction of the Greenboard project and all the works done around Beijing since 2007. I will also be joining the panel discussion about Women in IT together with Hong Phuc Dang (FOSSASIA), Cat Allman (Google), Sindhu Sundar (GNOME), Sneha Priscilla Makini (GNU Mailman) and Richa Jain (Mediawiki).

If anybody is interested in deploying free and open source projects in schools, I am running a workshop on 1st March (10am) too. I will present all the tips we discovered the hard way from running our own open education project ranging from hardware donation, curriculum design to 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.
Thanks for Mario Behling and Hong Phuc for hosting such a great event! And of course thanks for FOSSASIA sponsoring my trip to participate!

Introducing Greenboard to Teach For China

Posted on February 21, 2014February 25, 2014 by Pockey Lam

Thanks to Education Freedom Day, we started a conversation with a local NGO here in Shantou, Teach For China which is non-profit working on Chinese education inequity and founded in 2008. They are currently looking at developing some e-learning solutions with the schools they are involved with this year and we have been invited to present Greenboard during their mid-year professional development conference. The conference is happening this weekend (22/33 February) in Shantou, China and we will most likely spend the whole Sunday discussing with their fellows. As we already had a pre-meeting last weekend we feel there are a lot of things which could be used from the work we did in the Beijing area and we are looking forward to share our experience on the matter. Hopefully, we’ll have more to tell soon!

SFD Hong Kong, we had so much fun!

Posted on September 25, 2013September 25, 2013 by Pockey Lam

I have been helping to organize a lot of SFD events in mainland China for almost a decade now. Being born and raised in Hong Kong, I was indeed very exited to organize my first SFD in my home town. It was a half day event starting at 13:15, we arrived at the venue at 11:00 to set it up and did some last minute promotion. As for myself I hosted a BoF about building communities in Hong Kong. Since I was told it lacks strong FLOSS communities locally we are considering to start one. Nick Jones from Network Box offered us a venue while Michael Iannini offered to run meetings in Wan-chai (different area so we still need to bridge the two proposals). There are still a few details to be ironed out but it’s a very positive start. Besides, from Naruhiko’s presentation, we learnt that the LibreOffice Japanese team is made of 50 people, so not so much in proportion to the project.

Below you can find snapshots of the great moments, please enjoy!

A huge thank you go to our sponsors, our speakers, our workshop hosts, our exhibitors and especially our volunteers, they are Graham, Michael, Mathieu, Jacqueline, Oi-to, Amity, Ray, See-ming, Messy, Cameron, Guo-feng, Hu-zhou, Xi-lin, etc. Right after the event, I received a lot of thank you notes from our speakers and volunteers for organizing the event and having them to participate. In fact without YOU it would have been impossible to have such a wonderful event! THANK YOU!

There were seven booths including LibreOffice, Stroke5, Blender, GNOME, Fedora, LinuxPilot and HKLUG. — Our exhibitions included LibreOffice, Stroke5, Blender, GNOME, Fedora, DFF, LinuxPilot and HKLUG.

Fedora 20 with GNOME 3.1 was demonstrated in our SFD HK 2013 event. — Fedora 20 with GNOME 3.10 was demonstrated in our SFD HK 2013 event.

An old friend from Beijing, Michael who is the BLUG founder. He was good in bringing the atmosphere up. — An old friend from Beijing and the BLUG founder, Michael was good in bringing up the atmosphere!

Graham from PolyU and DimSumlab, helped us in getting the venue for free and gave an introduction speech to kick start our event. — Graham from PolyU / DimSumLabs, helped us in getting the venue and gave an intro-speech to kick start the event.

Naruhiko Ogasawara, LibreOffice Japan team, came all the way to share with us their project and community in Japan. — Naruhiko from the LibreOffice Japan team, shared with us the project and community in Japan.

TK Kang talked about OLPC and announced his upcoming OLPC BaseCamp event in Malacca on 16-18 November 2013. — TK Kang talked about OLPC and announced the OLPC BaseCamp event in Malacca on 16-18 November 2013.

Nick Jones introduced us how NetworkBox Corporation is profiting from Free and OpenSource software. — Nick Jones explained how Network Box Corporation is profiting from FLOSS.

Fred introduced the Google Summer of Code program to some students during the event. — Fred introduced the Google Summer of Code program to students to join.

A BoF was hosted to discuss about building a stronger FLOSS community in Hong Kong — A BoF was hosted to discuss about building a stronger FLOSS community in HK.

sfdhk2013 — At the end of the event we invited all the speakers to come to the stage to do a wrap up.

We finished the event with beer and local food in Tsim Tsha Tsui East and heading home at 2am with big smile on our face. — We finished the event with beer and local food in Tsim Sha Tsui East and left at 1am with big smiles on our faces.

Speaking at OpenSym + WikiSym 2013

Posted on May 14, 2013May 15, 2013 by Pockey Lam

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!