Re: GNOME.Asia focus, strategy and medium to long term plan

[Emily Chen <emilychen522 gmail com>]

Hi Fred, 

Thanks a lot for raise those good questions. I was thinking the same questions after back from GUADEC. 

I ask myself many times: What is GNOME.Asia ? 

In the very beginning, when we first start GNOME.Asia in 2008, in my mind, I want to make it a similar GUADEC in Asia. However, after three years, I realized that the fact is:  GNOME.Asia won't be GUADEC, they are different. One person in GUADEC asked me one question: In GNOME.Asia, how many people are local and how many are the people from GNOME community?  I tell him, that 80% participants are local, and 20% are GNOME people. That's very true.

There are some fact: 
1. In Asia, the GNOME community is just start, not strong enough as in European. 
2. We have core developers on GNOME in Asia, most of them are working in company like : SUN, Novel, Intel, Red Hat, Google. However, the number is developers are quite small. 
3. The local company who is using GNOME technologies like CS2C, they are not involved into GNOME community and Foundation. Red Flag is transfer to KDE now. 
4. GNOME.Asia 2008 in Beijing is like a platform to gather all the GNOME people in China, GNOME.Asia 2009 is like a FOSS event, more marketing and promoting GNOME in Vietnam. I think it is really depending on the country and the cultural. 

What we are going to do for GNOME.Asia 2010 in Taiwan ? Our goal? 
1. I do think the community is very active and the local people are interested in GNOME 
2. We are going to encourage them to build a GNOME Users Group in Taipei, I talked to Max several times on IM, I also want all of our team talk to them, encourage them to think about build a users group after the conference. The conference is only 2 days, but users group last longer. Pockey and I will have a session on the last day of the conference, we will focus on : How to organize GNOME.Asia summit and how to build GNOME users Group. 
3. Invite the Taiwan GNOME developers to join GNOME foundation.
4. Promote: Friend of GNOME, Google summer of code/GNOME, GNOME Women program, GNOME store etc. 
5. Reach to other country in Asia : Like Japan, Korean, Indian, Cambodia, Singapore etc. 
6. For communication channels, we have : 
Mail list: asia-summit-participants-list gnome org
IRC: #asia-summit 
facebook ? 
6. Reach to 

GNOME.Asia is like a baby and now is a child. We do want to make it grow every year to build a better GNOME community in Asia. 

-Emily

2010/8/10 Frederic Muller <fred beijinglug org>

Dear committee members,

While we're approaching our 3rd conference in Asia, it would be nice to consider what we want to achieve (except suffering from organizing conferences with third parties). My understanding from the various talks I have had with Emily is that we are trying to encourage, attract, foster, build a GNOME community in Asia.

So what is a GNOME community? Is it GNOME users, is it GNOME developers, is it both?

Do we want as what happened in Beijing, to create a lot of Gnome User Groups?

Do we want to create communication channels, and if so, would they be users support vs dev support (or both).

I have been reading the recent posts on Guadec and I am under the impression that people tend to go again and again every year, creating a sense of belonging. I don't feel we have focused so much on getting this core group of developers (or if so, we haven't quite succeeded yet) in Asia.

I'd like to get a bit of feedback from people on this list before continuing and then maybe work together toward a better strategy to strengthen our efforts.

Thanks.

Fred

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