report from FOSSASIA 2016
FOSSASIA[1] took place from 18 - 20 March at the Singapore Science Centre[2]
Chris Lamb, Chow Loong Jin and I were involved in various ways with
exhibition tables and giving talks and workshops. Various other
developers and contributors were present at various times during the
weekend, it was great to meet so many more members of the Debian family
for the first time.
The DPL authorized production of some banner stands out in Singapore,
they'll come back to Europe, possibly for the Vienna[3] MiniDebConf
(please come, it looks like it will be a lot of fun)
The FOSSASIA team gave us a really good position in the exhibition
space. We weren't aware of this in advance, but the exhibition
space/tables were distributed throughout public areas of the Science
Centre and this gave us significant exposure to the general public, not
just FOSSASIA visitors. A photo of the table and banners is on my
blog[4]. If we have an opportunity like this again it would be really
good to prepare some promotional materials to distribute and try to get
more volunteers to the table.
The table also brought me into contact with a number of potential GSoC
applicants. I tried to spend some time getting to know each of them
personally and showing how they can find people with similar interests
in Debian, e.g. looking through the GSoC project ideas wiki[5], package
maintainer info and bug tracker participants.
Debian's participation at FOSSASIA also involved a close collaboration
with Savoir Faire Linux[6], producers of the Ring[7] softphone.
Alexandre Lision from SFL presented Ring at FOSSASIA while his
colleagues Guillaume Roguez and Adrien Béraud (who some of us met at
FOSDEM[8]) presented the solution at LibrePlanet[9] by making a call to
the FOSSASIA afterparty at the Singapore Hackerspace. There was a 12
hour time difference between the two locations. SFL is based in
Montreal, the host city for DebConf17.
Please also don't forget to send messages of support for the creation of
a debian-events-apac mailing list[10] so it can be used to facilitate
further growth in the region.
Regards,
Daniel
1. http://2016.fossasia.org/
2. http://www.science.edu.sg/
3. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/12/msg00009.html
4. http://danielpocock.com/fossasia-2016-singapore-1
5. https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2016
6. https://www.savoirfairelinux.com/
7. https://ring.cx
8. https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/universal_network/
9. https://libreplanet.org/2016/
10. https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2016/02/msg00034.html
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