Re: GNOME.Asia Summit 2008

[Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>]

Emily and all,

I've linked this article off
http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/AnnualReport2008

So that it can be used as source material, or perhaps an article in its
own right in the annual report.

--d

On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 00:41 +0800, chen Emily wrote:
> 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! 
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-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
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