» Archive for the 'Sessions Updates' Category

The Making of the Giant FOSS Penguin

Sunday, February 4th, 2007 by Sam

This is a recap of what Track 4 did…


Brainstorming and sketching the final presentation for what Track 4 had learnt for the past 8 days. Creativity was part of the thing that Track 4 mastered. ;-) So we planned to make a skit out of a giant FOSS penguin puzzle coupled with a PowerPoint… oops sorry… Open Office’s Impress slide show.


Yes that’s what we covered on Information Management. Hands-on on CMS and CRM. We set foot on Information Design and Information Life Cyle, and a full belly of Project Management stuff. All these would contribute to more Open Publishing and technology can be creatively used to Mobilize people for various purposes.

Track 3 - FOSS Implementation & Migration - Summary by Ekta

Sunday, February 4th, 2007 by dina

Ekta has done a neat day-by-day summary of Track 3 - FOSS Implementation & Migration.

Am posting it here in full:

Day 1:

Case study of NepaLinux and Nepal FOSS initiative by Ekta from Nepal
Ekta from Nepal made an impressive presentation about the NepaLinux efforts in localisation and advocacy of free software in their country. The group had some questions about the initiatives and Ekta was able to address them without any problems. She also presented the declaration of the use of FOSS by the local community.

Group Dynamics
The group was then split into five groups that discussed about the challenges they face on implementing and advocating FOSS in their owfn communities. Afterwards, each group presented the results of their brainstorming and highlighting keypoints that need to be done to make FOSS work in their organisation.

Installing Ubuntu Linux (by Simos)

Simos then made a presentation about Installing Ubuntu Linux Desktop and used an Ubuntu CD to demonstrate the six step process of installing the said distribution.
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Gender Issues - Are we too sensitive?

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 by farzaneh

The Source events have a certain awareness towards gender issues. This is reflected in many aspects right from the selection of the participants among the many applications, to the different sessions on gender issues during the source camps. By selecting roughly the same number of female and male participants there happens to be a very cheerful ambiance in the camp, but the classic issue with affirmative action is still there, since you find more capable and competent male participants compared to their female peers–and we are still in need of role models; for instance, all the facilitators of my track were men.

During Asia Source II there have been many afternoon sessions on different issues regarding gender. Cheekay and Natasha did an afternoon session on GEM (Gender Evaluation Methodology) on January 23rd; Gayatri, Jaya, and Gayatri facilitated a session on “Gender, Culture, and IT” on Friday which ended up in controversial debates on the causes after Jaya cited a number of published studies in India. GEM was also presented as a speed-geek project on Sunday. Cheekay and I offered the “Female Hackers” session today to discuss some solutions in the form of DOs and DON’Ts rather than causes, to have more female hackers with hands-on technical jobs. No one attended that session.

Was it mere chance, or are we just over-doing it?

Gaya’s Bazaar (3) – Craters rock and information overload!

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 by gayathry

After a long day of negotiating the wet craters at the Tangkubanparahu Volcano in Bandung, Sunday was a bad day to start working again. No amount of coffee could restore the energy lost during the day’s trip.

Anyway, it was an intoxicating day on Monday. From strategising for your organisation during the track session to open licences, drawing comics on FOSS and making nasi goreng during the afternoon session, it was indeed a flood of information.

Here’s what I took away from the speed geeking and the skills sharing sessions:

  • Better to use left over rice to make nasi goreng, and tastes much better when you chop (not blend) the garlic and use omelette
  • Copy left and creative commons are also part of copyright. You can have the best of sharing and still being rewarded for your work
  • Straight lines do draw chickens and ducks…
  • There are so many boxes to take home – SME-in-a-box, NGO-in-a-box, disaster management in a blog(?)
  • We Malaysians and Indonesians should get our lingos shared
  • There’s a tool on gender evaluation methodology! Great for NGO projects that have or plan to have a gender component

So, my box is getting full too with these projects and ideas! I’m afraid I will overwhelm my staff when I get back on Wednesday:)

More goodies expected in the next bazaar!

Gaya’s Bazaar (4) – Speed geeking in the Track

Monday, January 29th, 2007 by gayathry

Our new buzz word has to be speed geeking. We did it yesterday during the afternoon session, but we also used it this morning when we had to present our organisation’s Specification Documentation in our Information Architecture exercise.

Definitely an energizer! What we did was that four participants would present their case for five minutes each to four groups, and then we switched presenters. That kept us busy most of the morning. The projects presented ranged from personal forums to company websites and also revising those that have been set up.

The last describes me, Ela, Wandee, Muno, and well, many others. We all have up and running websites but are hoping to apply some of the concepts and tools we have learnt over the week. I’d like to make our organisation more aggressive in reaching out to two target groups: journalists and other NGOs.

Wandee’s organisation works with so many cooperatives in Thailand and targets two million people! That’s a lot of people. She wants to revise some of the features of the website.

Kunthy had the most simple and most personal project. He wants to use his forum to link with IT people around his area in Phnom Penh. So far, he says there are about 100 people on KhmerICT.com.

Seng Sophoan, who works with Voice of America in Lao, is sad that the website is ranked second after Radio Free Voice, which entered the scene later. At the moment, she says the main problem is that the site is in English, since the target group are the Lao people in and out of the country.

Some of our friends who have problems using technology because of the lack of localisation into the respective languages are from Cambodia and Lao. Hopefully the FOSS movement will soon provide some relief to our friends.
In the afternoon, I picked up for my bazaar del.icio.us and other Firefox Applications. With these features, the next thing has to be to set up blogs and use the Performancing function in the Firefox browser. Well, a lot of work to do when I get home !
Now, we are all gearing up for the final track presentation tomorrow and for once, we actually had more than one meeting for the track members in a day:) Bazaar closing down for tonight…

CRM WILL FIX YOU!

Monday, January 29th, 2007 by Sam
Track 4’s musical report at the Morning Circle today.

Lyrics: Track 4
Composer: The Queen

Everything’s a mess
Don’t know what to do
Everybody panicked, and they were totally screwed
They’d done what they could
But very confused
Kickin their asses all over the pool

‘coz
We will we will break you X2

Information’s poor man, slow man,
Hit you in the face, and become a mess someday,
Better get it today,
Not another way,
Everything’s gonna be OK someday

‘coz
We will we will reach you X2

Buddy we gonna solve all the problems
Make you start singing in the street someday

Gaya’s Bazaar (2) Using Friendster for campaigns

Saturday, January 27th, 2007 by gayathry

What do I have in my bazaar today?

Since we are all in FOSS spirit, I’m reselling – or in FOSS spirit – sharing what we chatted today about online advocacy. During Cheekay’s conversations this morning, we talked about using the web for our campaigns and outreach. Often NGO websites exist as an island – only friends tend to visit us – and that is not good for outreach work. We need to break out of the box and take advantage of the different tools people use on a regular basis. For example, Friendster, myspace and the different social networking sites and blogs.

I never thought I would have to share the same platform as my young students in using Friendster, but that’s where my campaign audience is. So, here’s to exploring the trendy sites and tools for the benefit of NGO work!

Anyone out there who has other experience using such tools in their campaigns? Signing off now!

eRiders Afternoon Session

Saturday, January 27th, 2007 by dirk

Hey Y’all. Just wanted to thank all the fabulous folks that attended my eRiders session a few days ago. Both for those folks and those that are interested in eRiding but couldn’t attend, I thought I’d paste a few links here:

Track 2 - Alternative Hardware & Access

Friday, January 26th, 2007 by dina

This is what the real geeks at the camp have been playing with. Coooool. I wish I could be in more than one track :( .

We’ll get one of them to share more about the stuff they are making. Soon.

lab.JPG

track2-pic.JPG

Tags: Open Source; Open Source Software; Asia Source 2

Knowledge Management

Friday, January 26th, 2007 by widyantoa

Afternoon Session with Idaman A:
Knowledge Management is the further evolution of information management which was first developed and adopted by many organizations as standard mode of information documentation. People have learnt how to use and how to store information for their organizational purposes.
As an introduction, we first discussed the value of information for human life.
The management of information usually started when an “event” happened. An observed event called fact. So, any event that nobody observed cannot be classified as fact. A fact that is recorded then called data. Data itself cannot play an important role until it was processed and presented as information. This information that helps people make decisions and then perform an act to improve the previous event to be in better condition.

event I — fact — data — information — decision — act — event II

For example, there is an event Famine at certain location, then reporters or volunteers reported this as information with sufficient data. The following act of the government should be a food relief program, improving the agricultural system, etc. to create food security (event 2).

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Camp Blog Buzz

Friday, January 26th, 2007 by dina

Wow … the internal Camp Blog rocks. I wish we had the bandwidth to go live with it! It was set up by participants of Track 1 - Open Publishing as a live project in open publishing. Today the team took what started off as a place for newbie bloggers to a whole new level. They evolved a strategy to engage all participants at the camp in the blog, and have offered themselves up to be blog mentors!
It has grown into a great place where people are sharing their learnings from sessions, lots of photographs, their moods and feelings ‘in-the-moment’ and other cool stuff.
presentation1.jpg

Here’s some of the cool stuff written up there today:

“Is copying wrong:- The Challenge to Originality Copyright constructs an absolute binary of Original/ Copy Moving away from the idea of the Copy as a taking, and looking instead at the idea of Rescensions. The Ramayana and Mahabharat are works that get created through various retellings. A rescension is a work that is created through a modification, adaptation, addition, or use of an existing work but each rescension stands in relational autonomy to every other rescension, and it is not treated as a replacement of another work even if it modifies the reading of another work” — Jagadeesh
“Everyday we try to learn different things in a different manner. We start with a case study from one of the participants and follow up with the discussions. Then Simos does hands on training session on different tools on Ubuntu. To relax our mind and freshen up we take a coffee break with some delicious local snacks. We then get divide into different groups and do some exercise and group discussion on migration.” — Ekta
“It’s my first time to be in a crowd like this…with people coming from different countries. And honestly, before i got here i thought ill just be hanging out and spending time with Filipinos only. Well, this camp proved me wrong. I totally enjoy talking to people from other countries. Language can never be a barrier as long as we all exert effort in doing it. Agree? Agree? Agree?” — Ela

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Another Day, Another Gender Session

Friday, January 26th, 2007 by c5

Being the Resident Gender Token in most situations has made me reticent to initiate gender-related discussions in mostly-tech gatherings. I don’t what to be that chick that everyone rolls their eyes at while thinking “there she goes, harping about gender issues again”. Not that I don’t think there are glaring gender issues in information and communication technologies and its communities and practices. It’s simply that when you become the predictable gender person in any gathering, you lose your effectivity in getting your message across — and that doesn’t do much for the cause.

Or at least I think that’s the case.

In any case, I was absolutely excited when I saw the Gaya, Gaya, and Jaya Trio was organising a “Culture, Gender and IT” session this afternoon. Natasha P and I had already done a Gender Evaluation Methodology for ICT Projects session a few afternoons back, and I really, really didn’t want to be the Resident Gender Person in this camp. So seeing The Trio’s session on the board made my day.

Or so I thought.

What really made my day today was the actual session. The Trio had prepared a presentation on what they believe were the connections between culture, gender and ICT, contextualised in the Indian experienced and focused on the serious lack of female FOSS developers.

The presentation was pretty controversial. It grounded current gender issues — and their ripple effects on the FOSS developer community — in the socialisation of women and men in Indian culture that begins with the Ramayana (of the pure and virtuos Sita who had to prove her virtue and value by going through tests and how Indian girls are expected to be just like her when they grow up). This is all reiterated in current portrayals of women in Bollywood movies and local soap operas — where the protagonist females are always nice and sweet and obedient victims of situations who eventually find happily ever after because they’re so nice and good and virtues, and where strong female characters are always portrayed as villains and / or end up dead.

The presentation then moves on (but not after many, many interruptions from the session participants who were asked to share the gender contexts in their countries) to explorations on whether that the male and female differences in aptitude in the hard sciences were genetic or social.

The main question, I suppose was: Is the reason why there are not enough female FOSS developers because women are simply not genetically predisposed to the hard sciences?

Jaya presented a study conducted by Elizabeth Spelke on female and male aptitude in the hard sciences. Apparently, according to the study of 13 year old Math Whiz potentials, the variance between boys’ abilities was higher than that of girls. Which means that while there are more boys in the Super Duper Math Genius category, there were also more boys in the You Better Invest in a Nifty Calculator Because You Suck at Math category. Girls, on the other hand, because the differences between their aptitude were less striking, tended to be in the Average Zone.

So while there are girls who are good at Math, more boys are better and worse than them. Kind of balances everything out.

So it’s not about genetics.

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Balthas The Illusionist

Thursday, January 25th, 2007 by diki

Balthas vs Edward NortonFor anyone of you who has been watching Edward Norton’s movie: The Illusionist, we have Eisenheim’s twins in the camp! Balthas from InWEnt leads an afternoon session titled “How to spread the word on FOSS through training?”. When the session started, most of the session’s participants had come to join the session to find solutions and answers about how to spread FOSS. But with his magical sticky-pad (some enchanted yellow and sticky post-it notes) he hypnotized us and made  us answer our own questions with some crazy ideas! There were four main magical spells that he used:

  1. Reach many - Can you think of innovative ways to reach large numbers of people through training?
  2. Challenges and Solutions: What are the biggest challenges and successes that you have encountered while training FOSS-related issues?
  3. Get involvement: In your experience, what motivates (Asian) people to train other people on a regular basis?
  4. Priority needs for training: What is most needed in your situation?

The complete results of the session are available on camp’s local server wiki, the list of crazy ideas, concepts, experiences and the solution clouds/diagrams will be uploaded as well on the main wiki. Gunner said, today (or tomorrow?) Balthas will demonstrate a more higher level of illussion. He will disappear! The illusion was called: “Leaving the camp early”. We will miss you Balthas, thank you for the great FOSS brainstorm!

Gaya’s Bazaar - Mobiles and SEO

Thursday, January 25th, 2007 by gayathry

Welcome to my bazaar! No, unlike Patrice’s Turkish tea or Sunil Abraham’s palm reading, I’m not selling anything. I’m a shopper myself, from Malaysia and trying to collect all sorts of fun and cool things to take home. And there’s so much to choose from here.

But I guess the best part of it is really talking to people from different backgrounds and finding that either you are not alone in your struggle (:)) or that you have something to learn from someone else. This evening, I was talking to Roberto and was totally inspired by the work he is doing in the lead up to the elections in the Philippines this May. Some people would have also attended Trixie’s afternoon session on Mobiles to organize civil society mobilization.

Yesterday, my list of collectibles included SEO, or search engine optimisation. What gizmo is that, I thought. Well, according to Sreekanth S. Rameshaiah , apparently it is one of the best and easiest ways of getting visibility for your website, be it a static or dynamic one. That’s what I need for my organization’s websites. We are in outreach and advocacy and do podcasting, we’ve got to get the readers and listeners. Its basically about making it easy and fast for search engines to locate your website and honour it the top listing through effective use of your titles, tags, keywords, images and links. A tip: don’t overload your page with one keyword, search engines know you are trying to cheat it!

More bazaar reports later.

Web application 25 minutes top chrono

Thursday, January 25th, 2007 by david

During the Afternoon Session today, Sayamindu a seasoned Python developer (python is a Free Open Source renown for its ease of use) demonstrated that by using the Rapid Development Framework called Turbogears, one could create web application in no time. In fact, our facilitator just showed us by doing a simple form in less than 25 minutes. And truly even if it was not as simple as a word processor everything seemed to be understandable.

The participants were wondering what he could achieve in one day. And how much we, the less experienced ones could do in few days. All of this is free to use, modify and share.

That is FOSS power. Period.

More info here :

http://turbogears.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_%28programming_language%29