GNOME.Asia Summit 2008

["chen Emily" <emilychen522 gmail com>]

Hi, 

Here is the report of GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 in Beijing. Might be a article candidate for GNOME journal. 

Thanks,
Emily 
======================================================
GNOME.Asia Summit 2008
Report 




The first ever GNOME.Asia Summit was held at the Beihang university,
Beijing, China, from October 18th to 19th, 2008. The GNOME Foundation was the
organizer of GNOME.Asia Summit in collaboration with Sun Microsystems, Beijing Linux User
Group (BLUG)  and China
OSS Promotion Union (COPU). This premier event was very well
attended:  318 people attended the first day, and 212 people attended
the second day. The majority of the attendees (2/3) were from
universities, the remainder from
companies.  Ninety percent of the participants were local (from China) 
with
the remainder from other countries. We had 46 volunteers from Beijing
Linux
Users Group, Beijing OpenSolaris Users Group, OpenParty, Beihang
university, Beiyou university and many individual contributors,  they
helped us in many ways including registration, guidance, emcees,
photography and video. 




This year, there were total 42 speakers, 70% were local speakers and
30% of them were from other countries,  including USA, Finland and
Singapore etc. There were 46 talks over the two
days of
the summit. The talks covered several topics, including: accessibility,
mobility, i18n, community, development and deployment. Each
day started with a general session in the morning and was followed by 5
tracks in the afternoon. For more details, refer to the schedule on the
summit website: http://www.gnome.asia/en/schedule/.
Most of the slides have been uploaded to
the website, as well as speakers' bios and photos. 




We had many sponsors for the first GNOME.Asia Summit. Sun Microsystems
sponsored the summit at gold level. We had three silver sponsors:
Nokia, Motorola and Mozilla. Red Hat sponsored the Summit at bronze
level. We also had one local sponsor, Lemote, who sponsored the summit
by providing three Lemote Laptops for the lucky-draw program. Google
sponsored the summit by providing gifts to participants. Finally,
CSDN and Programmer Magazine were media partners. We are
grateful for
the great support we received from all of our sponsors. 





We had 7 booths at the venue: Sun,
Motorola, Mozilla, Red Hat, CSDN & Programmer Magazine, Lemote, and
the Beijing Linux Users Group. Each booth brought their own 
booth materials such as: laptops, PCs, lab equipment, gifts, posters
and fliers. For
example:
http://www.gnome.asia/static/upload/photos/DSC_2131.JPG


http://www.gnome.asia/static/upload/photos/DSC_2140.JPG




We invited 5 media reporters to the Summit, they interviewed important
speakers and core contributors to the GNOME community. On the 18th,
they interviewed Stormy Peters and Brian Cameron from the GNOME
Foundation, Robert O'Dea and Paul Mei from Sun Microsystems, Kate
Alhola and
Richard Sun from Nokia Finland. On the 19th,
CSDN and Programmer magazine interviewed Rafael Camargo from Motorola,
Jack Guo from Mozilla Online, Kevin Song from COPU (China OSS
Promotion Union), Frederic Muller and Pockey Lam from
BLUG (Beijing
Linux Users Group). They also interviewed three Chinese input method
authors: James Su, Yong Sun and Peng Huang ,  and
Funda Wang from GNOME Chinese translation team. Below are the media
reports:
 


They are in Chinese. 


http://news.csdn.net/n/20081023/120205.html


http://publish.it168.com/2008/1023/20081023045901.shtml


http://soft.chinabyte.com/371/8517371.shtml



http://it.hexun.com/20 08-10-21/110209130.html  


http://digi.it.sohu.com/20081022/n260181226.shtml


http://paper.chinahightech.com.cn/html/2008-10/27/content_7247.htm


http://www.lupaworld.com/viewnews-117800.html




Highlights of the Summit




One of the top three OSS conference in China
The GNOME.Asia Summit  ranked as one of the
top 3 open source conferences
in Beijing this year.  The others were: the Linux Developer Symposium
in
February and the OpenOffice organization annual conference in November.
All the open source communities think it is time to go
to Asia! 




Keynote about GNOME Community


Stormy Peters' keynote "Community built
software is bringing change to the world" kicked off the summit on the
first morning. 


[Download slides from http://www.gnome.asia/static/upload/event_file/0810GNOMEAsiaCommunityBuiltSoftware-small.pdf
]


During this speech, Stormy introduced the GNOME project and its strong
community. She said that the GNOME community has developed core values
like accessibility, internationalization and developer-friendliness
that are shared amongst all the volunteers that work on GNOME.
Over time, the GNOME project has developed strong foundations like
time-based releases, universal access, and good communication with
companies in the industry as well as the community itself. Building on
the community's values and foundations, the GNOME community is now
enabling their technologies for the future with initiatives like GNOME
Mobile.  Finally, she encouraged everyone to join the GNOME community. 




Brian Cameron's keynote about "Building
Free Software Asia" was also very
interesting. At the start of his talk, Brian played a video, made by a
contributor in the GNOME community, which demonstrated GNOME
using animations and cool music. 


http://soaringbrain.com/GNOMEasiaSummit.swf


Next, Brian introduced the concept of free software, open
software, the GNOME community, how to get involved and be active with a
free software
project.






Accessibility


Accessibility was one the main topics in this Summit. So we were
honored to have Will Walker, lead of the GNOME
accessibility project, join this summit as well as other
accessibility developers, QA engineers, and teachers from the Beijing
School for the Blind. On the first day,
Will Walker gave an overview of GNOME accessibility. [Download slides
from http://www.gnome.asia/static/upload/event_file/2008-10-18-GNOME.Asia.odp




Later, Li Yuan introduced the accessibility infrastructure from a
developer
point of view. During a lightning talk, Ray Wang from Novell China
introduced Mono accessibility & UI Automation. On the
second day, Will Walker gave a second talk, this time about Orca.
Later,
Tim Miao and Harry Fu shared their experience with accessibility
testing. We also invited two teachers from the Beijing School for the
Blind.
They were interested in the screen reader, Orca, and they attended Will
Walker's talk. After the talk, they went to Sun's
accessibility booth to watch a
demo about accessibility and share their expectations and user
experiences with Will Walker and other accessibility developers. There were
many accessibility discussions covering
topics such as automation testing tools in GNOME community. Further
discussion are going on after the summit. 




GNOME Mobile 


GNOME
technologies are used in many of the world's leading mobile phones.
Nokia and Motorola, the leaders of the mobile industrial attended the
first GNOME.Asia Summit. Nokia representatives from Finland
participated in the summit by giving various technical talks which
covered the Qt port to GTK+ on maemo,
Tracker, GStreamer and memory management on
mobile devices. Motorola's director Rafael Camargo
talked about Motorola's commercial experience with Linux, how to
improve the collaboration between open source communities and
commercial enterprises. Finally, he announced that Motorola is joining
the GNOME Foundation this year. Building on open source
technologies enables them not only to get to market faster but also
to offer cheaper and more open solutions. 




Localization


Localization is very important to non-English speaking GNOME users. This
was also one of the main topics of this Summit. We invited four authors
of the input method sub-system. They were: James Su, lead of the SCIM
community (www.scim-im.org); Peng
Huang, author
of scim-python (code.google.com/p/scim-python) and ibus
(code.google.com/p/ibus); Peng Wu, author of Novel Pinyin (http://sourceforge.net/projects/novel-pinyin);
Yong Sun, maintainer of SunPinyin (www.opensolaris.org/os/project/input-method).
They co-hosted a technical talk about the input method frameworks and
introduced IIIMF and SCIM. Funda Wang,  leader of
i18n-zh team, talked about the overall localization infrastructure of
the GNOME project, the GTP infrastructure (administrator, team leader,
translator, tester), and how to contribute to the GNOME Translation
project. 




GNOME & Mozilla 


Mozilla is a sister community to GNOME. It was great to have Mozilla at
this Summit. Jack Guo from Mozilla Online talked about "Mozilla in
China", and shared his experiences promoting
Firefox in China. Mozilla Developers, Brian Lu and Alfred Peng from
the OpenSolaris
community, shared their experiences developing Firefox and Songbird on
the OpenSolaris
desktop.




Lightning Talks 



At the summit we introduced a new talk style to China: Lightning talks.



A Lightning Talk is a short presentation given at a conference or
similar forum. Unlike other presentations, lightning talks only last a
few minutes and several will usually be delivered one after the other
by different speakers.
At the GNOME.Asia Summit, we had lightning talks on
the afternoon
of the 18th. The lightning talks
session was one hour, with each
lightning talk being only 5 minutes, with no Q&A
session. We used a gong as timer. Here's the list of
lightning talks: 


1. Richard Sun : Package management 


2. Simon Zheng : New generation of GNOME Display Manager


3. Coly Li : Quick introduction to grub4ext4


4. Ray Wang: Mono accessibility & UI Automation


5. Anthony Fok : Attracting new GNOME contributors with Glade


6. Jon Philips ：The Open Clip Art Library + China Lightning Talk


7. Funda Wang: Experience Empathy



This was one of the most entertaining parts of the Summit, see:


[http://www.gnome.asia/static/upload/photos/DSC_2334.JPG]




Live Summit


Check Live Summit from here: http://www.gnome.asia/en/live/


Thanks to Alfred, Will and Joey's excellent work, we have successfully
built the GNOME.Asia Live Summit. 




Online Summit is a real time aggregation tool for
Flickr/Youtube/Twitter. 


To join in, you can use any of these services: 


1. Flickr 


   - Have an account on Flickr(http://flickr.com/).


   - Upload your GNOME.Asia summit pictures
and tag them with "gnomeasia" 


2. Youtube 


   - Have an account on Youtube(http://www.youtube.com/).


   - Upload your GNOME.Asia summit videos and
tag them with "gnomeasia" 


3. Twitter 


   - Have an account on Twitter(http://twitter.com/).


   - Send message to the GNOME.Asia twitter by adding "@gnome_asia".
For example, if you want to say hello, just send
this message "@gnome_asia
hello". 







Party and Tour trip 


We had a wonderful celebration party on the evening of the last day at
the Laoshe Tea House. We invited organizers, sponsors, volunteers,
speakers and media representatives. We had 120 people
join this party. See:
http://www.gnome.asia/static/upload/photos/DSCF7398.JPG


On October 20th, the GNOME.Asia Summit arranged a one day tour trip for
speakers to the Great Wall and Ming Tomb. See:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pockey/2967814109/




Future work after Summit


One of the major goals after the GNOME.Asia Summit is building
the Beijing
GNOME Users Group. There are already some GNOME
communities in Beijing, including: GNOME-CN and
the GNOME learning panel at Tsinghua University. It would be better if
we could gather together everyone who is
interested in GNOME and host a GNOME Users Group regularly in Beijing.
So far, we have recruited about 10 core members of the Beijing GNOME
Users
Group, notably: Pockey Lam from BLUG, Zhangshen and Da long from
Beihang university, Fengyi from Beiyou University and Yanghong from
GNOME-CN. We will use the
following infrastructure for the Beijing GNOME Users Group: 


1. Website: www.gnome-cn.org
(Need to add more
modules into this website, like Wiki, BBS etc.)


2. Mailing List: gnome-cn-list gnome org


3. IRC: BeijingGUG


We plan to host regular weekly meetings starting in November, 2008. 




Another big task after the Summit involves Pockey Lam from the Beijing
LUG who is organizing a student study group on GNOME accessibility
projects. Since accessibility generated a
lot
of interest in Beijing, this is
a good to time to encourage more people to contribute with GNOME
projects.
The accessibility project is the first project for the student's study
group. Some local engineers from Sun and Novell China will be mentors
for the study group. 




GNOME.Asia Summit was a success, we see a lot of things happening
during and after the summit! Let's ride on the momentum and continue to
build a strong community in Beijing, in China and in Asia!