Original blog post (unedited) here

GNOME.Asia 2009

The second GNOME.Asia Summit was successfully hosted in Ho-Chi-Minh, Vietnam from 20 – 22 November 2009 after the first GNOME.Asia summit in Beijing in 2008. I am always happy to join International Open Source events, especially outside of China, and I was able to talk to the local communities from all over Asia such as core members from the Saigon LUG, Hanoi LUG, Phnom Penh LUG, Taiwan LUG, and the Open Institute Organization in Vietnam! I even got to talk to the Chief Director of the Government Information Center in Vietnam and learned that all the government officers will be starting to use Open Source Software including OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird in 2010. Implementation will begin with massive training. The main reason for the migration is that the government wants to reduce illegal use of Windows. Isn’t it cool?

There were a lot of presentations and workshops covering many topics other than GNOME during the whole summit! The full schedule can be viewed at http://2009.gnome.asia/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/gnome-asia-schedule2009.html. As a woman leading the Beijing Linux User Group, I gave three talks and led one panel discussion:

• Women_In_IT / FOSS
• Building Communities
• FOSS Deployment in Schools
• Panel discussion about Women Participation in GNOME

I was very impressed by the whole GNOME.Asia Summit! First, Vietnamese participants asked a lot of questions which is not so common in China. Second, there were a lot of volunteers from different Universities, students of different domains such as Computer Science, Trading, Economy and more. They were very energetic and helpful. Third, there were a lot of women volunteers as well which is very rare in Open Source conferences! I can see that the GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 is just a start in Vietnam, with all of these young students’ energy, community building and government support, I am sure 2010 will be a great FOSS year in Vietnam!