Re: GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 Report

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

chen Emily wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Here is the report of GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 in Beijing. Thanks for
> everyone's help.
> 
> Cheers,
> Emily


Congratulations Emily for organizing such a fantastic event and thank you for
writing an extensive report!


Regards,

behdad



> Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/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 <http://www.scim-im.org>); Peng Huang, author
> of scim-python (code.google.com/p/scim-python
> <http://code.google.com/p/scim-python>) and ibus (code.google.com/p/ibus
> <http://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
> <http://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 <http://www.gnome-cn.org> (Need to add more
> modules into this website, like Wiki, BBS etc.)
> 2. Mailing List: gnome-cn-list gnome org <mailto: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!
> 
> 
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