The Gnome Asia Summit in Vietnam was impressive. Mario shared a whole lot of information about that effort through all stages of the project life cycle, the negotiation with partners and the difficulties and made me kind of feel uncomfortable that I was unable to join his event myself this year. So here is the press release:
GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) attracted 1465 developers, students, business professionals and government officials establishing Vietnam as one of the top spots for the Free and Open Source community and businesses.
14 countries, 79 speakers with 34 from outside of Vietnam, 109 talks, presentations and panels and 138 volunteers (44 males, 94 females) – these are the numbers of the GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 at Quang Trung Software City, Vietnam, announced by the organization committee.
Mario Behling, chair of the summit, says: “I am excited to see such a huge interest of the free software community. The summit in Vietnam is one of the top IT events in Asia in 2009 and I am especially happy to see a big participation from young women. 60 percent of all participants were women.”
“The 2009 summit is a big encouragement. The support we received internationally as well as through the local community has been fantastic.” Hong Phuc Dang, head of the Vietnamese Organization team adds. “We will continue to work hard to spread knowledge and education with Free and Open Source software (FOSS), content and Open hardware. IT and FOSS offer new income opportunities for local companies and provide the tools for families to improve their lives.”, Ms. Dang goes on.
In her keynote Stormy Peters, Executive Chairwomen of the GNOME Foundation, gave an introduction to the current advancements of the GNOME project. The GNOME projects offers contributors a space to learn about Free and Open Source Software, but also about design or other languages, Peters explained.
GNOME.Asia is the first community event of its kind in Vietnam. The engagement of big international actors, including SUN Microsystems, IBM, Google and Intel reflects the increasing importance of Open Source solutions and freely licensed Software for businesses in Asia.
A focus of the summit were lightweight Linux solutions for businesses and households. Tobias Gruetzmacher from Germany presented energy efficient thin clients. In a workshop students learned how to build a thin client from components or how to flash routers with Freifunk. Ping-Hsun Chen presented xPUD a webOS with LXDE and GNOME components developed since 2007. Core developers of the faster X-environment LXDE Fred Chien and Andrew Lee offered insights to the latest developements of the GNOME based desktop.
OpenOffice.org as a community partner was presented by Louis Suarez-Potts, who portrayed cooperation opportunities with the Asian community. Other projects present were Inkscape with Andy Fitzsimon, Songbird and OpenSolaris with Alfred Peng, moonOS with Chanrithy Thim Rithy, OpenStreetMap with Khanh Le Ngoc Quoc, Emily Chen for GNOME Beijing, KmerOS with Chantra Be, Statusnet (identi.ca) with Jon Phillips and Pockey Lam and Fred Muller from the Beijinglug.
The organization team also announced plans for events in Vietnam in 2010. From Nov. 12-14, 2010 FOSSASIA, the biggest FOSS event in South East Asia, will be held in Ho Chi Min City (Saigon). FOSSASIA is modeled after international community meet ups like FOSDEM in Belgium, Froscon in Germany and FISL in Brazil. The focus for FOSSASIA 2010 are Lightweight Computing and Women in IT.
Please find more information about GNOME.Asia 2009 here: http://2009.gnome.asia
Info about FOSSASIA 2010 can be found at: http://fossasia.org
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