Open Source in Asia
Ho Chi Minh City
11-13 Nov. 2011

FOSSASIA 2011 was held at Van Lang University in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam from November 11 to 12, 2011. The event attracted 798 participants in 2 days including students, developers, business professionals and government officials. The majority of the attendees (2/3) were from universities, the remainder from companies.  Ninety percent of the participants were local (from Vietnam)  with the remainder from other countries. We had 36 volunteers from Ho Chi Minh University of Technology (BKK), University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam Lubuntu group and many individual contributors, who helped us in many ways including registration, guidance, emcees, photography and video.

There were a total of 24 speakers, 60% were local speakers and 40% of them were from other countries, including USA, France, Denmark, Cambodia, Germany, Singapore etc. There were 26 talks over the two days.

Highlights of the Event 

The talks covered several topics categorized into four main tracks including: Mobile solutions, Web technologies, Operating Systems/applications and Women in IT. The first day started with a general session in the morning and was followed by 4 tracks in the afternoon. The second day had several tracks starting in the morning.

Talks, Keynotes and Projects

The first day of the event started with talks in the main hall. In his keynote Dung Nguyen, the president of Van Lang University, gave an introduction here to the current Open Source education across universities in Vietnam and expressed his great interest on promoting more Free and Open Source Software inside the University's technology department.

It was exciting to learn about UNESCO and the Free Software Community in the talk of Davide Storti - member UNESCO Open Suite Team. Our annual speaker Chantra Be from Cambodia again brought us a excellent insight to Open Technology in Cambodia.Creative Mobile Technologies from Vietnam were presented by Ian Morrison, the founder of GKIM Vietnam. Students had the chance to get a better understanding how open source is used in everyday businesses.

Focusing on education in schools Nancie Severs introduced her beautiful work with the One Laptop Per Child Project in north of Vietnam. Many Linux related talks dealt with questions about web installations and Content Management Systems like Drupal. Anh Tuan Truong (Vietnam)  introduced new features in Fedora Linux after the release of version 15.

On the second day students had the chance to learn in depth about Open Source software projects in workshops and panels. One of the most exciting get together happened at "Women in IT". The meet up attracted around 50 young girls who showed great interest and passion about open education and the global contribution of girls in Asia to FOSS projects.

After the Event

A number of get together and hacker meetings took place after FOSSASIA.

Debian Hack during Mekong Tour

We had a wonderful weekend in the Mekong with Jonas Smedegaard, a Debian Developer from Denmark. Jonas got met with a few local developers and conducted a Debian session where he showed people how to set up debian server and to develop an automatic SMS service on a cheap mobile device.

Student Code Programs After FOSSASIA 2011

Another big goal of us after the event was to "ignite" student study groups to join existing open source projects or start coding on their own ideas.

Apart from programs and meet ups with university students in the region after FOSSASIA, the FOSSASIA team was hapy to support students and mentors through the Google Summer of Code program. Google Summer of Code offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. Since 2011 FOSSASIA is a mentor organization at Google Summer of Code. FOSSASIA functions as an umbrella organization for a number of projects in the region and supports new coding ideas of students independently from a big Open Source project.

The main topics of FOSSASIA 2011 are all related to Free and Open Source Software with a track for Mobile Solutions, Web Technologies, Operating Systems and Applications, and Women in IT.

FOSSASIA 2011 Tracks

Four sessions in parallel for FOSSASIA 2011.

a) Mobile solutions

* Android, MeeGo, Chrome OS, Symbian, Bada, OpenWrt and embedded Debian
* Frameworks and SDK including Phonegap
* Lightning talks with app presentations

c) Web Technologies

* Frameworks
* CMS
* HTML5
* Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP 

d) Operating Systems and Applications

* new interface design and lightweight trends with KDE, GNOME, LXDE and XFCE
* Package design and development

b) Women in IT

While most Open Source and Free Software projects are based in Western countries there is an increasing number of projects from Asia. Women are also becoming a stronger force in the IT community. The FOSSASIA team strongly encourages the participation of young women and achieved this goal with an astounding participation of women in 2009 and 2010 – more than half of all attendees were women. How can we make this trend sustainable and support the flow of women into the technology companies?