Re: Article for Linux Pilot

[Frederic Muller <fred beijinglug org>]

Final version attached

On 05/23/2011 04:51 PM, Max wrote:
> Thanks Fred
> I am waiting your final version and translate to Chinese.
> Linux Pilot also waiting us, they ask if we can give to them at May
> Best regards
> Max
>
> 2011/5/20 Frederic Muller <fred beijinglug org <mailto:fred beijinglug org>>
>
>     On 05/19/2011 09:11 PM, Akhil Laddha wrote:
>
>         On Thu, 2011-05-19 at 18:36 +0800, Frederic Muller wrote:
>
>             Dear all,
>
>             Please find attached the first draft for Linux Pilot (that
>             Max will have
>             to translate). Please feel free to read and comment.
>
>             Depending on Linux pilot to chose only the Chinese version
>             or not we
>             might reuse it elsewhere or for another publication.
>
>             Can someone (Pockey) help to chose 10 high resolution photos
>             to match
>             the article and provide to Linux Pilot too?
>
>             I am going to write something similar but articulated
>             differently for
>             sponsors once I get all the comments.
>
>
>         Overall article is great. Thanks Fred. Just wanted to point out
>         minor
>         things
>
>         1) Shall we add information about giveaways like netbook and usb
>         drives
>         during conference ?
>
>         2) Spelling or typo error
>              (a) Alan day should be Allan day
>              (b) OpenSUSE should be openSUSE
>
>         3) My contribution mentioned is not right, i have closed most
>         number of
>         bugs in GNOME bugzilla in year 2009 and 2010 but i haven't fixed
>         any.
>         (a)
>         http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-bugsquad/2010-January/msg00000.html
>         (b)
>         http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-bugsquad/2011-January/msg00000.html
>
>         Or you can directly mention GNOME bug squad member.
>
>         Regards,
>         Akhil
>
>
>     Thanks for the feedback. I'll fix that and try to add the giveaway
>     stuff in as well.
>
>     Fred
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>
>
>
>
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GNOME going strong in Asia
==========================

Unless you have been living under a rock you are surely aware that the GNOME project has released the version 3 of its desktop environement. Announced two years ago and demonstrated last year at the COSCUP/GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 by Brian Cameron during his keynote address, GNOME 3 has been released right after the GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 in Bangalore on April 6.

So what does this have to do with Asia except for the similar timing? Some could say that GNOME 3 was finished in Asia: indeed half of the GNOME release team, three members or the GNOME Foundation board, five members of the GNOME marketing team and several representatives of some GNU/Linux distributions flew all the way to Bangalore to meet with the active Asian contributors and participate in what is the first ever GNOME hackfest in Asia. Planned during the very successful COSCUP/GNOME.Asia 2010 by the GNOME.Asia Committee and supported by the GNOME release and marketing teams the idea was to get everyone together right before the release and ensure that all those release critical things would happen without a glitch. 
Coming from the four corners of the world Vincent Untz (GNOME release team manager at the time), Andre Klapper (release team member), Frédéric Peters (new Release team manager), Ryan Lortie (release team supporter), Brian Cameron (GNOME Board Director and Secretary), Andreas Nilsson (GNOME Board Director and marketing team member), Emily Chen (GNOME Board Director, GNOME.Asia Founder), Allan Day (marketing member and GNOME UX design team), Pockey Lam (GNOME.Asia Committee lead, GNOME marketing team), Josselin Mouette (Debian GNOME packager and maintainer), Bharath Acharya (openSUSE packaging, GNOME travel committee, GNOME.Asia committee) and Akhil Laddha (GNOME bug squad member - most GNOME bugs closed in 2009 and 2010, GNOME.Asia committee) and a few other key people all spent a week to hack on GNOME and do what they had to do to make GNOME 3.0 a successful release. 

And indeed GNOME 3.0 is arguably very stable for a '.0' release with much more polish than GNOME 2.0 had back then, and definitely very slick. 

The whole team worked around the clock between Intel offices, DSI University and the service appartments housing them. Among some of the major achievements of the week one could cite a much improved fallback mode for people with graphic adaptors not supporting 3D acceleration, a new GNOME website, a successful GNOME release parties campaign, GNOME Users days where users could join either online or on site to ask questions, find answers and get their machines installed with GNOME 3. Quoting Vincent Untz, GNOME release manager "The opportunity to have an event the week before GNOME 3.0 overhauled the way the release team approached this release: we were able to pave the way for a much smoother process for the release, and meeting the extremely enthusiastic audience at the conference boosted our motivation to deliver GNOME 3 on schedule!"

In parallel free GNOME training was provided to 260 univerity students of Bangalore, business models around free software were explained to local businesses and academics by members of Oracle, Lanedo or EDF (the world biggest energy provider) and collaboration plans between GNOME and free software projects using GNOME technologies were heavily discussed.

And that was just a beginning: following the hackfest the GNOME.Asia Summit itself benefited from the great panel of speakers already on site, added to local GNOME experts to seduce the Indian crowd with Free Software technologies and the new edition of the GNOME Desktop. For having participated in all summits since 2008 it was probably the most GNOME technology focused event with over 90% of the talks covering GNOME related topics. The fact that a lot of GNOME development happens in India is probably not a coincidence in that number which is still a 20% increase over the Beijing edition (2008). Brian Cameron, a regular at the conference (participation in 3 out of 4 summits), and Vincent Untz gave the keynotes covering respectively the social and technical sides of GNOME 3. Then the remaining 35 talks covered everything between using, contributing and hacking on GNOME whether at home or in big corporations with specific case studies. 

With a thousand participants composed of students at 80% and professionals for the rest, the beautifully fitted main hall was really appreciated by all, showcasing traditional Indian dancing at the opening ceremony and closing with modern dancing on Sunday evening. Brian Cameron, GNOME Board Director and Secretary, talking about the event said "It really struck me how many people at GNOME.Asia enthusiastically approached myself and others with a genuine interest to get involved. The scope of this event was also much larger than any previous GNOME.Asia event with over 130 exciting GNOME 3 Launch parties simultaneously arranged around the globe." We also contacted Allan Day from the GNOME marketing team about his feelings on the conference itself and GNOME in Asia as he was coming in the region for the first time "GNOME.Asia 2011 was a wonderful event. I was impressed with the level of organisation, high attendance and wide-ranging programme, and it was excellent to be able to develop links with contributors, enthusiasts and corporate partners in this part of the world. GNOME.Asia is really going from strength to strength."


We also noted that this year event was the most supported in terms of advertisers with the usual big names like Google and Oracle, but also new participants like Mozilla, Novell and even Lanedo, a GNOME consulting company based in Europe or EDF, the world largest utility company. On the Asian side we still found the faithful Lemote from China and their 'everything free (as in freedom) hardware', but also a few new entrants such as Candis, a hosting company based in China too, or JoomlaArt, a company running a business around Free Software template design based in Vietnam.  We believe it is a good sign for the event which has grown over the years and is definitely starting to appear as a milestone of the GNOME and Free Software conferences in the region. To quote a Novell representative "GNOME.Asia attracted many different experts to present some of the very latest technologies in the free software world, but also attracted an extremely motivated audience: those are two of the greatest successes of the conference. This clearly puts GNOME.Asia as one of the most major free software conferences in Asia."
Rumors have it that Hong Kong is very well positioned for the 2012 edition with Indonesia and The Philippines not far behind. The call for host will happen this summer so definitely get in touch with the organizers if you want GNOME.Asia to come to your area. 

On top of the fun, the knowledge sharing and building, the exchanges and positive encounters, this year summit has also lead to the revival of the Bangalore GNOME User Group as well as 3 other GNOME User Groups in India. This is the first time there is so much enthusiasm in community building and we have to say that probably the fact that Emily Chen, Pockey Lam and Max Huang presence, respectively founders and leaders of GNOME User Groups in Beijing and Taipei, was not a coincidence. In fact the communication around the newly designed website, excellent press coverage in and out of India has probably even motivated two other GNOME User Group creations in China (Hefei and Chongqing). While students often struggle using university acquired knowledge to real life, taking part in Free Software communities bring them real experience working on real software that the whole world is using. GNOME is surely a good start to brush up one's skills and the GNOME Foundation actively supports those activities by sending goodies or speakers whenever possible.

One stricking example has been the GNOME 3 release parties, effort lead by the same people behind the GNOME.Asia Summit, also the most successful initiative in the category with 141 parties worldwide among which 61 (43%) were in Asia. Indeed 15 Asian countries participated as the organizers colaborated with local GNU/Linux User Groups and other FOSS communities from Hong Kong, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, India and many others. Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei being on the same time zone even had a video stream set up between their respective events and could communicate almost clearly during the celebration.

Last but not least Novell has provided 3000 openSUSE DVDs in May to India and China (10000 worldwide) and a second round of release parties with Installfests is being organized. The first distributions shipping GNOME 3 by default are getting released and if you are not able to attend one of those parties you should go to www.gnom3.org to download your own stable version of this new implementation of desktop computing.

And while we are almost out of breathe writing all those achievements we are very enthusiatic to seeing so much involvment from this side of the world. Sure Taiwan has always been a very active pole of the free software world thanks to the sheir numbers of device manufacturers and OEMs present on the island, but seeing so much activities elsewhere means that the young generations are sizing opportunities to learn from big projects like GNOME. GNOME 3 brings new development opportunities to these people, faster application development and a revamped developer's website (http://developer.gnome.org) with a cleaner design and much more technical documentation.

Joining the GNOME community is a very simple thing to do: you can check the current list of existing GNOME User Groups at http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups and drop by during regular meetings. If there is none in your area you should either check with your local foss community and suggest them to start a thematic sub-group on GNOME, or start one yourself. The best way to get help or ideas is probably to email the GUG mailing list at gugmasters-list gnome org . GNOME welcomes everyone and relies on all kinds of talents from artists to developers to people with 'just' communication or organization skills to name a few. So what are you waiting for?