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GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 – Call for Host

Posted on January 27, 2010January 27, 2010 by Pockey Lam

As part of the GNOME.Asia Summit Committee, I would like to post the Call for Host of the GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 here and let all the communities in Asia know that we are looking for potential host this year. Please find below the announcement and don’t hesitate to pass the message along!

Dear GNOME friends,

We are call for the host of GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 now !

GNOME.Asia Summit is the yearly GNOME Users and Developers Asian Conference. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, and also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss both the present technology and future developments.

GNOME.Asia Summit was held in Beijing, China during 2008 and in Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam during 2009. We would like to continue finding new national locations as we spread GNOME throughout Asia, and we are looking for local organizers to rise to the challenge of organizing an excellent GNOME event. The GNOME.Asia committee will assist in the process, but there is a definitive need for individuals to be actively involved and committed to the planning and delivery of the event.

You can learn more about GNOME.Asia Summit at our official website: http://gnome.asia

The following two links are “must read items” for organizing the GNOME.Asia Summit:

If you are interested in hosting the summit please submit a formal proposal to the GNOME.Asia Committee at asia-summit-list [at] gnome.org. The deadline for proposals is 31st March 2010. You are encouraged to ask questions before writing the formal proposal.

GNOME.Asia is much like a few trees just planted and we want to grow a forest in Asia. We are looking for local organizers in any Asian country with the desire to take on and succeed in the challenges of organizing an excellent GNOME event. We know that you will need all the time you can get to prepare a proposal but we hope we have inspired you to get started.

We are looking forward to hear from you on or before 31st March 2010.

Sincerely,

GNOME.Asia Summit committee

A productive day at “Coding for Fun”

Posted on December 12, 2009May 8, 2013 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

Here is a group hacking on the Linux kernel — Hacking on the Linux kernel

One of the projects is “Quadcopter Open hardware project”

All the projects of the day would be listed in every coding for fun

First Joint Event with Beijing GNOME User Group

Posted on December 9, 2009July 22, 2010 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

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!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 ROCKS!

Posted on November 23, 2009May 20, 2013 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:

Women_In_IT / FOSS
Building Communities
FOSS Deployment in Schools
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 Panel Discussion: Women Participation in GNOME

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Speakers from all over the world

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 has over 100 volunteers full of energy (a lot of girls as well)

2009 GNOME.Asia Summit Call for Participants

Posted on October 11, 2009February 2, 2010 by Pockey Lam

Gnome.Asia Summit 2009 As part of the organizing members for the first GNOME.Asia Summit in 2008 in Beijing, we had been calling for the next organizing community to host the second Asia Summit for months since early 2009. Knowing that my friend, Mario, would be moving to Vietnam, he proposed that the second GNOME.Asia Summit could be in Vietnam with the help of the local Linux User Group. After a few months of effort from the whole committee, here we are! Right now we are in progress of calling for participants including speakers, exhibitors, audiences and sponsors. Below you will find the announcement, please join us and help to spread the word!

The second GNOME.Asia Summit will be held in Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam, from 20-22 November, 2009. The GNOME.Asia Summit is an exciting event gathering many contributors from the free and open source desktop communities, bringing together the Asian community, and providing a forum for planning future development and growth. This document serves as the formal invitation to participate in the summit. Please join us and participate!

The theme of the summit is ‘Get Freedom With GNOME’ which refers to the primary goals of the GNOME.Asia Summit: spreading the knowledge of GNOME and free/open source software across Asia; and building a vibrant, thriving community around it. Our target audiences include GNOME users, developers, contributors, students, and clients in Asia.

The event will feature keynotes, sessions, lightning talks, exhibitions, and a hands-on lab. We are asking for submissions for three types of proposals:

Sessions
Lightning talks
Exhibition, hands-on lab

The sessions at the GNOME.Asia Summit will be scheduled for one hour blocks of time. You should expect approximately 45 minutes of lecture with the final 15 minutes used for questions and group discussion. Please take into consideration any time you will need for preparation. The session could be a technical talk, panel discussion, or BOF.

The lightning talks at the GNOME.Asia Summit are short presentations. Each lightning talk is only 5 minutes long with no time for Q&A. Please take into consideration any time you will need for preparation, such as projector setup. Proposals for lightning talks will be accepted on a first-come-first-served basis, limited by available space.

At the GNOME.Asia summit 2009, we will have a special area for exhibition and hands-on Lab. Exhibitions including booths, posters and stands, and hands-on Lab are welcome.

Topic areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

GNOME 3.0
Localization & Internationalization
Mobile platforms and thin clients
GNOME Communities
GNOME library and application development
Desktop deployments
School software

In short, any area of GNOME and its related projects that you feel passionate is a great topic for you to speak about!

To be considered for inclusion as a participant at the GNOME.Asia Summit 2009, please send an email to asia-summit-list@gnome.org with a short abstract about your proposal. The submitted abstract should indicate the type of your proposal. Include your name, biographical information, a photo suitable for the web, a title, and a description of your presentation (under 400 words). The reviewing team will evaluate the entries based on the submitted abstracts and available time in the schedule.

The deadline for submissions is October 28, 2009 November 6th, 2009. Successful candidates will be selected and notified by the organizing committee by October 30, 2009. November 9th, 2009. Once your abstract is selected you will need to create an account on the GNOME.Asia Summit website where you will need to update your topic information, along with providing some biographical information.

All interested contributors are highly encouraged to send in their proposals. Please help us to spread the invitation to other potential participants. Even you do not plan to be a speaker, please consider joining us. This is going to be a great event!

Sincerely,

GNOME.Asia Summit committee