Reflections on FOSSASIA 2017

Srishti Sethi
Jul 22, 2017 · 3 min read

Putting some old notes here in an attempt to add one more piece of documentation to my life events

What is FOSSASIA?

FOSSASIA is a non-profit organization supporting the open source movement in ASIA since 2009. They host an annual meet up attracting developers from all over the world. They participate in outreach programs such as Google Summer of Code, Google Code-in and also organize a similar program CodeHeat to promote the development of various projects used within their community.

This year’s event took place at the Science Tech Center in Singapore. The event’s theme focused on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Interesting enough, one of the keynote speakers was the CIO of GovTech (Singapore) who shared that their government’s central information technology systems and infrastructure, drive the development and delivery of innovative public services for citizens and businesses and that there is a growing adoption of open source projects within their team.

There were about 200+ talks & workshops. Unlike the other FOSS conferences, this one consisted of both types of organizations: whether or not their involvement with open source is in full (e.g. Google) or in a limited capacity (Microsoft).

Wikimedia’s presence at FOSSASIA

I gave a talk on “The Wikimedia free software community: Learn ways to get involved” (slides).

Talk attendees at the Wikimedia session

Tony Thomas and I conducted two back-to-back workshops around introduction to MediaWiki and extensions development (agenda). For the first workshop, younger students (8–14) showed up along with their parents and expressed interest in learning about the Wikimedia ecosystem. So, we had to switch gears a little bit. We shared with them how to a) contribute to Wikipedia b) participate in the Google Code-in contest c) get involved in our community and d) chat with us on IRC. John Vandenberg shared his experience of mentoring students in Google Code-in. It was a pleasure to learn about John’s outreach efforts around this contest in schools in Indonesia.

John Vandenberg talking to students about Google Code-In

During the second workshop, we walked a few students through the getting started steps for contributing to Wikimedia projects. For all Wikimedia activities, we did some outreach during the event via Twitter, circulated the information through our extended networks, posted signs in different corners of the venue, etc.

A few important lessons to consider for the future:

  • Wikimedia/MediaWiki is less known in the open source world, but Wikipedia is. So needs some figuring out how to leverage what is known to spread the word about the unknown.
  • In spite of the outreach efforts, there were a very few participants who attended the workshops than I had imagined. It was because there were more talks and workshops than there were participants. It will be useful to recruit participants from local universities or groups beforehand.

It is always great to see a growing interest and enthusiasm in Asia to contribute to the open source world! A pleasure to meet in-person Stephanie Taylor (Google), John Vandenburg and hung out with Tony Thomas, Srijan Agarwal, and Vaishali Thakkar at the conference.

Srishti Sethi

Written by

Technical Engagement @Wikimedia. More here: http://srishtisethi.com.

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