 Hello, everyone. My name is Hong Phuc, and I come from Vietnam. Before I start, I just want to tell you a bit about what I'm wearing now. This is a traditional dress of Vietnam called Ao Dai. This is not convenient at all, but I want to wear this because... So you feel a bit like Vietnam. Actually, I have to think very carefully before I decided to wear this. I asked my friend whether Ao Dai or not, and he told me to do whatever everyone else does. So whenever Western come to Vietnam, they wear a jeans and a t-shirt or shoes, which is the European style, so I'm here. I have to wear a Vietnamese style. So today, I'm going to talk about how to get contributors for your free and flexible open-source project from Vietnam in Asia. So this is kind of a challenge that most of the projects are facing at the moment. The lack of developers, or you come from many different projects here, and do you know any Asian developers? How many Asian developers do you have? One. None? And we all know that most of the people live in Asia, right? Yes, we have a billion of people live in China, in Vietnam. We are just a very small country, but we have 84 million people. So let's get started. Okay, so this is the summary of a few points that I'm going to go through today. Let's start with a small introduction about myself. I'm not a designer. I'm not an artist. I'm not a developer. I studied in marketing. And I got into the open-source community since 2007. I attended an event in Hanoi called Force Bridge, which is an event that connects the European open-source company to the local companies. So I was there as a translator. And then after the event, I got very inspired by the idea of sharing, collaborating with people all over the world because at that time, I was so many foreigners and all handsome guys from the west, so I was very excited, so I joined the community. And then after that, I moved to Singapore for my study. And in Singapore, they have a group called Lino User Group. This group is very active. And the guys, they always help meet up every month. And they organize events. The developer is very free, the software freedom day, bar cam, all these kinds of stuff. And so I get involved, actually involved into the community of open-source. Then after that, I finished my study. I go back to Vietnam and organize the event called Norm Asia in 2009. At the moment, I have a food truck manager for a local hospital, which is not so big, it's very small. I come from a small town. And I did a lot of translation for free software into Vietnamese and organize events, have with translating a website and try Vietnamese articles on a Wikipedia. So that is a little bit about myself. Okay, I will go quick to this. Why a marketing student like me interested in open-source? The first reason is because I like to meet international people. I like the idea of sharing. And for me, like here attending this event, I learned a lot about new modern technology and design also other languages. And another thing is working for open-source projects give me the opportunity to be here. I got invited to be here because I contribute a bit on the open-source which is very good for a girl. Let me come from North Carolina city. And the last point I want to say, I'm very happy to be here. I really love the idea of sharing and study from each other. Yesterday I attended a workshop with the people from OSP. They spent like two or three hours showing us how to make a poster by command lines, which I have never done before. So they are very nice and friendly. So I think that I should give something back to the community by having the talk. I try to help the project get more developers from Vietnam as well as Asia. Okay, this is a map of Vietnam. For some of you who don't know, Vietnam is a little bit below China, next to Thailand, Laocambodia. This is Ho Chi Minh city, the economic powerhouse of Vietnam. We have events like Cunom Asia or 4th Asia. It will be this year, November 12th to 14th. It will be held in Ho Chi Minh city. This is a small city where I come from. It's located by the Mekong River. This is the floating market in Can Tho, which is very famous. This is a screen shot of Cunom Asia 2009. We organized it last year in Ho Chi Minh city. The very shy girl sitting on the right is me. We have a woman panel at Cunom Asia talking about how Cunom can evolve into IT or to an open-source community. Next, I will tell you a bit about this situation in Asia, free and open-source in Asia. There are a lot of projects that, while using Asia, I got to read from the screen. Containment management systems like Chimla, RuPaul, or WordPress, devices using Android, Fire Phone and OpenWRT, server using Linux companies using Scream and InScap for services like 3HP Vietnam, which is a very big company in Vietnam. They use Scream to making personal manga portraits for the Japanese people. Most of the people in Vietnam are using Wikipedia, so we are all involved in the open-source community. This is a website showing that we use RuPaul and free licenses for commercial websites. Actually, we earn money from the open-source project which is RuPaul and all the containers under Creative Common License. This is another example using Chimla and we also earn money from this. By the way, I forgot to tell you, I recently founded a company that do enforce for ICT project marketing and consulting, so that's what we are doing. So, go to the main points of the presentation. Projects need new contributors. Okay, I don't know if Ali is here. No, the other day I talked to him and he explained to me that at the moment, most of the project is facing a challenge in the lack of developers. In the beginning, usually, there are many developers, but later on, some become less motivated as they have to take care of other things in their life, like their family or they don't see a lot of movement and justly because if you don't see anything going on, why you have to do it anymore so no one else even bothered to care about it. And some find other interesting projects or need to focus more on income, I think that we all experienced this. So there is a content list of younger newcomers and why don't you look at the Asian community? There are many capable young people in Asia. And, okay, many people in Asia, you are open source, but still number of contributors seem very limited. So what are the reasons? In Asia, we have millions of people study IT, design, languages, and communication while there are more contributors, in particular students doing projects in the community. So to answer the question, actually we have to ask a lot of people. We ask people during Norm Asia, during force mix-up and during education project we do like here in Badli province. This is a project our company did a few weeks ago doing research about ICT in the education on climate change awareness in Vietnam. And so whenever we have a chance to get out and we try to ask people why they don't involve in the community. So we come up with a few points like this. There is very little research that has been done about community in Asia asking potential contributors why they did not involve yet. I often hear things like I do not know enough about free and open source or I would like to submit a first report to change the system, but I don't know how to join the project and help. Or I want to help, but I do not have a lot of knowledge. So what is the solution? So I come up with nine top things that I would like to suggest to the project. I picked nine because actually nine is a lucky number in Vietnam. So nine means very rich. In China I believe eight is a lucky number for your information. So top one is to understand background of your potential contributors and consider implications for your project. So what is that? So you have to understand the Asian people. The first thing is you must understand the Asian people like me are very side. We feel that we are not confident in speaking English because it's not our mother tongue. And also another thing you have to be considered is the time difference. Asian people sleep while Europeans and Americans are up. And I know it's very simple, but it's good that you need to arrange some meeting with developers all over the world so you should pick a time frame that everyone can join. Even some know a lot, they might still say they do not have the knowledge because we are very modest, even though we don't know, actually we know a lot, but we don't say it. Okay, so some contributors might be afraid to contribute and discuss anything like code that is unfinished because in Asia, the people like one developer, he wrote a code, but it's not finished yet. He don't want to show anyone. But we know that development is always ongoing. So if you just don't tell people what you're doing, how can they help? How can you finish? You will never finish. And the next thing is just about software projects. It seems like Asian-founded software projects do not often encounter mailing list fights. Do you have this problem here in Europe? Because we always, actually in Asia, we don't tell people exactly what we think. Even though this guy wrote a very shitty thing to people, oh, you are so annoying. It's better if you write this way. We don't tell directly. So that is like the different culture between Europe and Asia. And another thing is in many Asian countries, parents pay a lot for the education of their kids. Some students may have to justify what they are doing contributing their free time to a project for free. I don't know if you get free education here in Europe. In Asia, we have to pay. Everything has to pay. Because the government does not give us anything. So come to the next topic. After you understand the background of your potential developers, you need to identify some simple entry points that are suitable for contributors and make it easy to join. For example, create a join bay on your project, on your website in as many languages as possible. Define different to-do items for different groups. For example, developers, designer, translator, and event organizer. Mention as well that people can help by offering support in forum or writing an article on their blog. Tell the advantages of people have contributing to your project. So if I would tell someone that what is the advantages of contributing to an open source project, I would say you have a chance to go to conference overseas. The last thing you consider the way to communication in your project, do you use a lot of abbreviation and insider language, which is very difficult for an Asian to understand. Okay. Top three, make it easy to communicate. Adapt communication channels people are using already. So for example, in China, I see a lot of people using Google group or in Singapore, most of people use IRC. And for some in Taiwan, people also use IRC or many developer blogs in Taiwan. And in Vietnam, the user community, they mainly use forum. Some developers, they have mailing list, but most of the people are still using forum. And I think many developers do not like forum, but this is very useful for the beginning level. Set up meetings at a time that Asian could join, which is I told you earlier. Provide guides for new channels like IRC for people here in Europe, IRC is so old. But many Asian people do not know or never heard about IRC. So you need to make a guide for the people how to join the IRC channel. Top four is set up projects within your project and ask people to become project leads. So just set up the web project. You have many different projects, but inside the project, you can set up smaller projects so it's easier for people to contribute. For example, set up web projects, video projects, documentation projects, and translation projects. This works very well with the LSE translation project. Actually, at the moment, we have 120 active translators for the LSE project. Make a wiki page and a forum page for projects like design projects, like we all designer here set up. We can set up a public sharing folder on prop box, for example. It's easier to share big files. Speak to people at the community gatherings and make the buster send the file to university and ask them to hand it up to inform the students. I think it's a very good way to promote your project to the students and the school, they would be happy to boot up your buster because they have nothing to do. They don't have any buster in the school anyway. Top five, create guides for contributors. Involve designer, translator, writer to make guides and publication for contributors. This is a lot of work, but people need to know how to contribute. And there is a genuine good luck opportunity to meet up at conferences and community events compared to Europe or North America. In Asia, we seldom have this kind of meeting. So the only way that people can get information online on the internet or through books. So it's very helpful if we can publish a book. I think that somebody at the conference John mentioned about having LGM book or something I would be happy to translate it to Vietnamese. Okay, next point. Translate your core website and documentation to other languages. Make a weekly forum available in different languages. So it's very... For your project, you don't know anyone from... How can you translate to different languages if you don't know anyone in China or you don't know anyone from Vietnam? How can you do that? It's quite easy because every country they have a Linux user group who are very passionate about open source and normally people are willing to translate some free software to their own languages. So you can start with the Linux user group in that country that you want to translate to your project. And for Vietnamese, anyone who wants to translate I would be happy because I have a team of people in the community that do generation for projects. Okay, next. So this is exciting. John in set up contest a support program and offer certificates. We love certificates. So I wish that I would be in here. I can have a certificate to bring back and show my parents or show my friends that even, you know, we experienced this in North Asia. The certificate just say that the student participates in North Asia and they were so happy because it means something when you apply for the job. If the people, your lawyers see that you are so active you've been to many places, many conferences and they are more willing to hire you. Start a contest or a call event in cooperation with local partners. After Linux user group or local companies to contribute to the project or to cooperate and help you Google some of cost is well known and everyone know about Google some of cost project but you can make your own project as well. For example, you need developers in China. You can go to Beijing or Guangzhou to make a summer contest and it's not so difficult because everything is cheaper than here in Europe. With like 1500 or 2000 you can have a three month summer contest to attract students and for developers you can give a gift like 200 dollars for one developer or something that would be very happy to contribute or if you don't have the financial you can just tell them that maybe you introduce them to go to another conference or you can give a gift like t-shirt or bag and people would be happy and get more enrichment to the project. Okay, lastly the consideration the challenge is often to have someone of your team to take care of the program and contributors rather than the funding so I think that for the project for famous project like Kim Inskap or some other thing here it's not so difficult to get funding like 2000 or 1500 then you can go to Asia and have a summer court or something and get more developers. Okay, so this is a picture of Beijing Lino Group and one laptop per child project in Afghanistan and Vietnam are progressing well offering Chinese certificate for teacher and student again they offer certificates for the teacher just to learn something and you get certificates. So this is a picture of a young teacher showing her student how to work with the one laptop per child and this is the student from a fishing village in Ha Long Bay Ha Long Bay is one of the most beautiful beach in Vietnam it's from the north. Top 8 attend and organize events in Asia why we should have an event because personal meet up is always good it creates a personal relationship like what we are having now fun events are important to develop a sense of community after all force and leap of graphics is not only about getting windows but also about beautiful collaboration and international exchanges right? So I think that after if you come to Asia for an event you should stay a few days longer to meet up with the local people and you can add the local community to set up a workshop or support businesses working with your project and if you cannot attend events consider offering event organizer in Asia to submit a video presentation and to be available for a live video chat showing event like we see earlier today Top 9 the last month consider add-ons on your project website to offer your community more opportunities you can offer a job section for people who are looking for a job other section based services to your site and offer active contributors to bot for free you can take an example of rootpaul website visit all the things that has been done on their website and add the name of contributors as sub-projects and offer them to put up a link to their site from the project page this is a way to feature your contributors and give them better opportunities to get a job or to be well known in the community okay so this is recruitment opportunities during events so I almost come to an end of my presentation and if you have any ideas or any successful story you can share with us and contribute to the presentation and so at the end I would like to invite you all to Vietnam to the Mekong Delta or to Ho Chi Minh City there are a lot of people waiting to meet you and we welcome all visitors around the world and for my company we would be very happy to offer you a free internet connection and our famous Vietnamese coffee for everyone so our slogan is better together and another thing I would like to mention is we are having an event called 4th Asia in Ho Chi Minh City November 12th to 14th more information can be found on our website 4thasia.org if you can join us at 4th Asia okay so I can give you my contact later or if you don't come to the event you want to go to Vietnam for a visit or something I can give you suggestions if you have a place to go or this kind of thing thank you very much for joining my talk okay I want to say something I would like to thank the organizer for giving me the opportunity to be here and special thanks to Femke and the constant people who have so much trouble happy me with the visa thank you so much a pleasure so thank you very much I've yes now it's working I'm actually just two weeks back from staying in India where I talked about a dozen students about how to interact with open source projects the interesting thing was that these students are doing a project an internship sponsored by a company for their university and what I was thinking is what are the opportunities in the rest of Asia for starting this kind of project where a university makes it possible for the students to do an internship or a project with an open source project because I think it would be possible for people like me to mentor those students but if their university tells them you have this opportunity then it might be much easier for them to get started instead of doing things voluntarily yes it's true it's totally true because it's always better if you have a connection with the university because they can help you refer the student and when the teacher say a student you can have an internship at a company that are very willing to come and in Asia at the end of the final year normally students have two, three, two, six months internship at that time they don't expect to earn a lot of money but they want to get experience so it's very good if you have the connection with university to get interns for your project you don't have the connection yet as I said yes in India maybe you can try to look online for the Linux user group in India and lots of people speak English in India maybe they can help you or you can directly contact with the university okay thank you maybe also you will be around the coming days probably not wearing your beautiful dress we will know who you are now so thank you very much thank you