Participating HKOSC 2015 & MozTW Community
We totally 7 MozTW community participators (all are volunteers) flied from Taiwan to attend Hong Kong Open Source Conference (HKOSC) 2015 on June 26–27, 2015.
I’m Ernest Chiang, who is mainly participates on SUMO Project (SUpport.MOzilla.org). You can find my Mozillian contributions at https://reps.mozilla.org/u/dwchiang/ and https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/ernestchiang/ . Now, let’s get back to HKOSC 2105.
Overview
Conference
It’s a 2-days conference with 6-tracks. HKOSC 2015 theme covers: Cloud, Maker, Community: Source and Data, and Startup.
Venue
Hong Kong Open Source Conference (HKOSC) 2015 was held at Hong Kong Science Park.
Preparation & Schedule
Speaker Dinner
It’s great to have a dinner meetup with other speakers and sponsors. We can learn more about the conference history, the orginization committee, meeting with other speakers to know how open source is helping on their projects. We also meet with the representatives of HK Science Park and Cyberport.
Conference Agenda
The conference topics are all related to open source. Some interesting topics are:
- the two keynotes (I will describe more in next section.)
- Terrarium — How to design and make an interactive prototyping tool (speaker: penk, who is also from Taiwan.)
- Transcompiling — towards the freedom of programming language and platform choice (Andy Li, from Hong Kong.)
- Open Source Vehicle (OSVehicle) (Tin Hang, Liu, from Italy.)
- Gandi CLI (Thomas Kuiper, from Germany.)
The detailed agenda is located here.
Keynotes
Day1 keynote is presented by AWS Olivier Klein about `How Open-Source enables Real-time Analytics at Scale in the Cloud`. Olivier’s presentation is awesome because it’s not so sales-direction way. It’s more practical way. He introduces lots of open source solutions for each different situations when doing real-time analytics, and of course he did the live demo at his keynote (we all love live demo :p).
Day2 keynote is presented by Jonathan Corbet from USA, he talks about `The Kernel Report`. Jonathan Corbet is a Linux kernel contributor, co-founder of LWN.net (and the author of its Kernel Page), a member of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board.
I’m very lucky to sit next to him when we were having speaker lunch on day1. :-) At that moment, I didn’t know he is the keynote speaker of day2.
Mozilla-related topics
There’re at least two topics related to Mozilla.
One is `Mozilla Webmaker Workshop` led by Irvin Chen from MozTW community.
One is `Building a self learning word prediction and auto-correct module for FirefoxOS and openweb handling multilingual input` presented by Rabimba Karanjai from United States.
Lightning talks
We have two lightning talks presented by community members from Taiwan.
The first one is introducing about the largest open source conference in Taiwan — COSCUP by Bob Chao. His topic is named `http://2015.opensource.hk/agenda/topic/coscup-what-why-and-how/`.
It’s amazing to achieve this kind of numbers as an open source conference which is built and run all by the open source communities.
The second lightning talks is given by Orin Chen, he talks about `摩茲工寮 MozTW Space: Open The Community Space`. To find more about this great space which is openly managed by community, please visit: http://moztw.org/space/ .
MozTW Booths
Good Location, Good Traffic
HKOSC 2015 arranged very good location for the community booths. Our MozTW/Mozilla booths have a two-tables width. It locates at a walking channel between two major buildings therefore all the people who work or visit at Science Park, they will walk by and stand by our booths when they’re going to have a lunch or afternoon tea.
#Foxyeah
We display all the Firefox, Firefox OS, open hardware devices on one table, and the other table goes with #FoxYeah theme! Lots of people taking picture with the enlarged #FoxYeah boards when they passed by.
The #FoxYeah boards are good materials to attract people’s attention and come closer to our booths. We then give them some more information about taking picture (for fun and also for promotion), and even more, we can introduce them a little bit about Firefox, Mozilla, mission (Mozilla Manifesto) :-)
Communication
IM, Mobile 4G Data Pack
All of us (MozTW community members) got one local SIM card which includes one local mobile number, 5G data. If you visit Hong Kong within half year, you can use another 1.5G data at that time. It’s a good package for us, so that we can keep syncing all the information like arranging booths, which materials will be taken by whom, share our locations when someone needs help on the booth, etc.
etherpad and google spreadsheet
We also have one etherpad and one google spreadsheet to organize lots of information. It’s very helpful when opening all the information between us and even discuss publicly.
Uber
Ha, yes, we split the Uber fee when transporting between hotel and conference venue. It’s convenient that we don’t need to exchange and keep all the foreign coins when we going back home. (Try: sign up Uber and get your first ride free.)
Summary
Connected
It’s a great opportunity to connect all the open source communities and contributors together in Hong Kong where has lots of connection flights. We have many communications between Hong Kong and Taiwan with Sammy Fung (who is also a Mozilla Reps). This leads us to exchange information and resources, to build local community, and to connect with neighborhood such as China, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore.
Numbers
Connected countries: 13+
Hong Kong, Taiwan, Irseal, United States, Malaysia, Bulgaria, Argentina, Germany, Japan, Spain, France, Russia, China. (I checked the conference agenda to list these countries.)
Estimated Booth visited: 1000+ persons
- Conference attendee: 600+ persons
- Walk by: (average 40 persons / hour) * (6 hours / day) * (2 days) = 480 persons
We meet local.
We openly share our Hong Kong trip with all the community channel and very lucky to meet with some open source contributors and promotors who are also in Hong Kong during the conference period. We meet with them before and after the conference, to know and understand how they promote open source, what is the hardest part when they are doing/promoting open source projects in Asia. These are great experience sharing and we will never know if we don’t meet and talk with local people.
We open, we respect, we share.
We 7 MozTW community volunteers take our own two-day personal leave and fly to attend HKOSC 2015. It’s not just putting resources but also make contribution much more deeper. We all love open source and keep contributing on one or more specific open source projects, therefore we know when we keep open, respect open, share open, then it will lead us to a better future for the all parts of the world.
Thanks for Mozilla and Reps program to make this connected contributions happen. We will bring all the energy to inspire more contributors to step one more step.
See you next time at next open event. ❤
