 Thank you for having me and thank you for being here at my talk. So I'm going to tell the story of Fox Asia, how we started, scale and sustain our open source development during the last 10 years. Before that a little bit about myself. I am one of the co-founders of Fox Asia. I also recently got elected to be a board director of the open source initiative, a global organization based here in the US. So I consider myself very relatable to you and the community here. Since last summer I've been working on open source and inner source strategy as Solando, which is the biggest online fashion platform in Europe. So yes, I'm very lucky. I have the opportunity to work with people from the three continents around the world. And this is all because of open source. So I feel grateful every day to be part of this community. This is a recap of what I'm going to talk today of my slides. First, a quick introduction about Fox Asia, what and why, three applications that we developed, and a little bit on open source hardware production. And then I will cover some lessons learned over the years in 2009, how we build and draw our community. And finally, I would like to share some ideas how we can work together. Fox Asia, our mission is to build a better world with open technologies. We focus on three areas. First, develop open source software and hardware products. Second, we organize events and meet up through our Asia to bring people together in physical spaces. And we organize a lot of education, program, online coding contest that teach people how to contribute to various open source projects. The organization is registered at a private limited in Singapore and Vietnam, but we operate like a nonprofit. We generate an income to support the community and continue the open source development. Some of the income models that help us to fund the whole operation are, for example, we offer software as a service. We sell hardware, we organize events, we got sponsorship, and we also offer consultancy service to companies. We are a network of people from everywhere, not only from Asia. We have a lot of contributors actually coming from Europe and many supporters are here in the room, as I can see. But we all share the same vision. We want to build a better future by sharing and collaboration. Let me share some numbers so that you can have a better understanding of the scale and the scope of our organization. On average, every 15 minutes, we will get a much poor response to one of the First Asia repositories. We have 35,000 people on our mailing list and social media. Almost 4,000 developable registered on the First Asia GitHub. Every year, we train about 2,000 people through our coding programs. We have several events and meet up throughout the year, our location in Asia. And right now, we have about 100 authors for our First Asia blog website. These are some of the projects developed by the First Asia community. We have Sucia AI, which is an alternative to Google Home or Alexa, a smart speaker device. We have our own distribution. We do open-sort hardware. We have an imaging editing app. We have automatic documentation generation. We also have an open-sort game, many projects. And as I said in the beginning, I would like to take the chance to highlight three of my favorite projects. First of all is the Pocket Science Lab. This is a USB-powered device, open-sort hardware. It is a combination of different instruments, the oscilloscope, multimeter, logic analyzer. There are also a lot of digital pins where you can plug in all kinds of sensors. Yes, I have, the ball would be extremely small and portable. So our friend over there will pass out so you can take a look. We have the kinematics of the hardware, the firmware, and also the software that controls everything released under open-sort and available on the First Asia or on GitHub. This is how it looks like on the Android app. So if you have a phone, you can just download, look for Pocket Science Lab, and download the application. You can also install it on your desktop. We produce the hardware in sunshine and also in Berlin, Germany. This is the close-up of the device. And I've seen a few months ago, we started to distribute this throughout the world. We have the Tribution Channel in Singapore for Asia. We have the Tribution Channel in Europe. And we also have a fulfillment center here in the US. So if you want one of those, you can just basically order online. I have a few here with me if you're interested. We sell it at $60 per device. It basically helps students not happy to measure all kinds of data and good for science experiment. The second project that I want to introduce is our own event minima system called Event.yay. We organize events in 2009. We run a lot of events also. And we always find it difficult to find an open-sort solution that good enough for ticketing or speaker handling. And of course, if we have a choice, we'd rather not use a close-sort software. So we decided to develop one ourselves since 2015. And right now, the system is able to handle ticketing similar to Eventbrite. We offer a very easy process to register the speaker. And something that I really like, we have our own scheduling system that allows you to drag and drop different topics to a timetable. So let's say if you have 500 or 1000 of submissions, it makes your life much easier as a content manager. It comes with Android application where you can scan QR code of your attendee, view the schedule similar to what you have here. And this is the interface of our scheduling. As you can see, it works for a single check event or many different checks the system be able to handle. And it also generates a printed version of the schedule if you want to give the hand out to your attendees or something like that. We have the feature of people to select your section, bookmark your session, and ask it to your Google Calendar. And finally, we have an interay, the name badge, custom design to the event. So you can basically decide your own name badge and print it out to your attendees and speakers. The third project I want to introduce is our open source smart speaker that I have right here, powered by 2CAI, our own open source AI system. I'm going to pass this around. Thank you, Andrew. It's run on any manual device and of course you can install it on your own server. It works very similar if you are familiar with Google Home or Alexa, it's called similar concept but you have the control over your data. You can easily set up the speaker by download the 2CAI installer. We release a tutorial online that helps you to build your own speaker to a Raspberry Pi. There is a list of components available and also the order link so you can just get and build on your own. Another thing that's really nice about this solution is it's possible for everyone to participate and contribute. So we developed something called the 2CAI skill CMS that allows the user and the contributor to write skills for the AI. So basically every skill is an action type that allows the user to communicate with Susie. To write the skill it's very simple. We make it like a wiki-style content management system and we create our own markup language that's called the language approach that makes it super easy for beginners to contribute the knowledge base for Susie. So these are the three projects of many projects of forced Asia. Some of the projects are for fun because we try to encourage our developer to work on the technology that they like but a lot of projects also generate the income so we can continue to grow the ecosystem of the forced Asia. How did we do it? I would like to look back a little bit in our history and share some lessons learned from the whole journey. In 2009 my partner Mario and I founded the forced Asia with the goal to connect Asian community with the global force developer. In that year we hosted the GNOME Asia in Ho Chi Minh City and we got to learn and get in touch with a lot of local user groups not only in Vietnam but in the neighboring country like Cambodia, Indonesia and Singapore. In the same year we also started to write our own distribution channel. The company back then working on offering web services so that we can get generated income to support our open source development. In 2010 after we got in touch with a lot of local activists, the people who want to work more on open source, we kick-started new projects. We also hosted the mini DEF CON in Ho Chi Minh City and again the second forced Asia summit. I still remember that year we have 47% of participants who are female. That was something really nice and we saw them see at tech conference in 2010. The lesson that we learned after two years how to rule a community. At first we learned that we need to understand the landscape. The culture of the local people, what is the motivation, what they want to achieve in order to offer them the opportunity and tell them how open source can help them. Another thing that we try to do, we try to promote contribution apart from coding. As you know that the success of a project not only relies on developers, engineers and code but we need all kinds of people in the ecosystem. So we promote different types of roles that can be side, beyond software. For instance, designers, writers, promoters, organisers and mentors. We try to keep the entry barriers very low. For instance, we try to have very good documentation. We also label different tasks from the beginning on to advanced and very friendly environments so everyone can join in. We also learn that people love to travel and meet other people face to face. So we make a commitment that we will continue to organise events and give people more opportunity to travel and to meet other contributors. In 2011, we introduced label graphic tool to the local community to show them they can make us a design with free software. We invited experts and labour office contributors from the Kim Project in SCEP and many more to come to Ho Chi Minh City. We did an open design week. We accepted many of the artwork that make by free software. And we even go to university to introduce the tool to the teachers and students in our school. We got a lot of support and attention from the students and teachers back then. At the same time, we continue the First Asia Summit in Ho Chi Minh City. And again, the lesson that we learned from last year. In order to attract people, you need to be part of the community. Contributor always looking for a exciting project to work on. So if you offer the project around, if people interested in art and design, so you offer something that more appealing to the people, people like to work with positive brand that doing cool thing, but also good thing at the same time. And you need to make very clear to show the people what are the opportunities in open source or for them, like giving recognition, financial support, travel, or offer them jobs to work with your organization. And design process that they like to work with or they are accustomed with. In 2012, we developed more application. And it's also our second year being part of Google Summer Code. This is an image editing app developed by, started by a young Vietnamese developer in a very small town in South Vietnam. And it still continue to be available these days on Android and Approid. Being part of Google Summer Code brought a lot of benefit. And we learn a lot by participating in the program. So we integrate the visibility of the organization and make ourselves known in the developer community. We also get code contribution over the summer. And the best thing was to connect with so many different organizations around the world that we can learn from. But we also realize it's quite challenging to run the program. The student often less committed compared to the mentor. And when the program ends, the contribution also ends. And for many years, not only us, but a lot of organizations are facing the same problem. So we constantly think how we can grow the contributor base and keep people on board. In 2013, we decided that we want to do more open source in education to educate more people to prepare for the younger education to increase the pool of developers and contributors who are able to work in the open source space. In the same year, we also decided to move our infrastructure to a hosting service. This, it was a big decision for setting up infrastructure in North edge hub, but maintaining has got a lot of effort. Our people like to focus on development. So we have to make a compromise to move our service to GitHub. Even though GitHub is not entirely open source, but we learned that we got to go where the people are and what people used to. So that was the decision to host all the false Asia projects on GitHub. We start to establish connection with the university and school throughout Vietnam and start to teach people how to use Git and how to work with Python as most of our projects listen in Python and show them how they can contribute in various ways. We, at the same time, we cooperate with development organization like the GIZ or the UNESCO to work on educational content. Our opportunity at that time was we see increasing number of students who usually know within the country and also the English ability of the young people also So maybe in the future, language is no longer a barrier for entering to the open-source world anymore. In 2014, it was the first time we organized a false Asia summit outside of Vietnam. In the same year, we started our first open hardware project. This is a picture taken in 2014 and I saw somebody back then also here today. This is the picture taken together with Praveen Patel. He's a visit teacher from India. It was his first time ever travel outside of the country to attend a technical conference. And he told us that he'd been looking for an affordable device to help his students to learn science, to make science more exciting for the young kids. And so we started to look around and we said, okay, we will make a commitment to Praveen. We try to turn his idea to reality. And today we have the device after over four years of working is now available in the market and it being piloted in school in Singapore and India. I would like to share also some lessons learned about hardware production. It is a much longer cycle compared to software. It requires higher investment, higher risk. And if you do not have a self-funded model, it's really difficult to sustain the project. In order to produce something, if you talk to the manufacturer, they always ask for a build of materials, which is a document listed all the raw material, the component, the assembly process. And no matter where you produce, you need to have a local person who can speak that language in order to help you to handle logistics and inventory and ordering with the local supplier. Another thing that we learned from ordering working with manufacturer from China, there is something called the three manufacturer offer, which is the company refurbished component or return component from customer that provide a cheaper price and lower the cost of your product. Another thing that you need to put into your calculation is consider 40 parts. And it's always important to consider about the availability of different components and the local schedule time for instance, public holiday. In some of the Chinese people have holiday over two weeks. So if you have a deadline on your deliveries, you need to take all these things into account. Moving to 2015, we decided to move the First Asia Summit to Singapore and started the development of our own event management tool. Since 2015, the First Asia Summit has always been happening in Singapore because it is easy to access for a lot of people from different countries. We got very good support from the Singaporean government and very good facility if you want to do research, make a lot of advance machine, 3D, printer, laser cutter, many things that offer if you want to invest in technology. So Singapore is a trade place to be and it's now the home of the annual First Asia Summit. Also in this year, we started the OpenTech Summit in Europe as a continuous of the Linux talk which ended in 2014. But we want to continue the momentum to keep it going. We bring more people, contribute to Asia, connect them with the European community. And now the OpenTech Summit Berlin happens every year in May. 2016, we launched our first online coding contest CodHead and organized a series of science hack days in Asia. CodHead basically focus on code contribution via pool requests. People from anywhere can participate. The good thing about the program is young developers can work together with peer from everywhere and get the support from the mentor directly on certain issues in pool requests. The winners will win a trip to the First Asia Summit and the participants will get digital certificates and thank you present from us. Every season we got about 600 to 800 people participate. This is one of our programs for CodHead in a school in Hyderabad. Lesson learned how to retain the developer in scale. We need to set up very clear expectation not only from outside what the organization want to achieve but we also need to understand what are the expectations of our contributors and try to fulfill. We developed contribution guidelines to address all the First Asia project to make it clear and easy for people to attend. And we tried to keep a minimum number of two maintainers on any project, promote peer review process, delegate tasks and assign project lists for different repository and we also tried to promote mentor roles. We realized that when people have more responsibility they tend to be more excited about working on the project. And it's been a very good strategy for us to promote developers to become a mentor and then to become project leads. This is a science hack workshop in Belgium, India. Another science hack day in Singapore when we show people how to make cool product with our DIY laser cutter. In 2017 we polished our First Asia best practices. These are some of the highlights of the practices. For instance, much one issue with a pull request something really like a symbol but it's not easy to to enforce. So for instance, break big issue into multiple small issue always provide test system and dream source and only change what you taste in the pull request or help each other review pull request of each other encourage people to test before they really submit a PR. Document white coding and then after some time they can earn the right access. And one thing very important we try to avoid a minimal private chat. So everything related to the project should happen on the public channel of the project to make the communication transparent to to everyone and how we make sure that people follow the best practices so we encourage people to remind each other and it has been working very well. So you change the young people the next year they even become more strictly following the the practice than yourself. So it's been a very good development methods for us. In 2018 we tried to connect closely with our community in India, China and around the world. For the first time we have Yuga Fest in Hyderabad over three days we bring our contributors around India together and also open to the public so they do a lot of hacking, fixing bugs and enhance the new feature for some of our projects. We hosted hackathons together with the UNESCO in Vietnam and Singapore and we run the open tech summit in Sanjian to show people our partner manufacturer and show people how the entire open the open hardware production works. In this year we bring the Fox Asia team to the Cal's Computer Congress in Germany which is one of the biggest hacker conferences in Europe. 15,000 people were there. We got in touch with a lot of cool projects and they also give us feedback to improve our board. 2019 we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Fox Asia. This is the picture taken of that event earlier this year in March on the front row are the two youngest speakers of our event and Charlie and Sofya are the daughters of my very good friend Kiroutika who is in the blue shirt and she also the lead organizer of the Maker Faire in Singapore. Something happened recently we acquired the Voice Republic together with the open tech company in Germany and released under open source. So Voice Republic is a professional live audio streaming and archiving of events. There are a lot of good content on there. The entire stack now being open source and it go under the Fox Asia umbrella. Earlier this year we also announced the Fox Asia Academy. We're going to offer open source courses that certify by the Singaporean government in Singapore and we're also looking for partners around Asia to offer similar courses so that more people can learn and work with open source. The whole idea of this courses is a self-guided learning method. We have a teacher that is a facilitator and mentor. We provide the tools and equipment for students to learn in college self-learning. So to summarize what I resented all about about Fox Asia and our development there's a few things that I want to highlight here. Sustainability, some of the things that we find that work well for us develop best practices and share the best practices ensure that people agree and follow, create a welcome friendly environment for everyone. Constantly attract new contributors by organized coding program or contest. Promoting mental rules and provide resources supporting long-term contributors. Offering travel support for them to go to conferences, offer a squad or even if there's opportunity to hire them to work on your project. Draw different type of income model to pay for all the development. And turn a lean organization and infrastructure with a reliable team. We also partner up with enterprise and project to have us so not all enterprise are evil. So they also care about our own world and they also want to contribute to the ecosystem. So we're very happy to collaborate and work with them. So I'm here because I want to connect with you. I want to see how we can work together in the future. And luckily yesterday I found, I met Eric from the conference and he said that he's going to develop an Android application that we need for our batch and release the open source. So my mission kind of complete. I already got a new contributor for Fox Asia. And this is some idea how we can work together. So if you organize an event, no matter how big, how small, you can try our event. We are still looking for distribution partner for our pocket sign lab. If you work for university or you want to get them for your student, please try it out. We're looking for people who want to co-organize or sponsor our coding programs in more context and hire us if you want to get more funding so we can continue to work on the open source projects. And partner with us, partner with the Fox Asia Academy. If you have any content that you'd like to share or you'd like to teach in Asia, get in touch with us and finally join our upcoming events. Lastly, something that I learned personally to be a good contributor, a good citizen in the open source space. Always stay humble, flexible and passionate about what you are doing. Our friend in Hong Kong, many people in the Hong Kong open source group are participating in the contest and you can see a lot of students study while being part of the contest. Young people everywhere in Asia are inspired to do something to make the world a better place. And we need to leverage that energy for the open source community. So come to Asia, connect with us and work together with them. These are a list of events that are coming up out of Fox Asia. If you want to visit or come to our event, we have the next one in Bangkok, October 1st and 2nd. And then Ho Chi Minh City, October 11th and 12th. And then another open tech in Sunshine China in November 21st to 23rd. And our annual Fox Asia Summit again going to be in Singapore in March from the 19th to 22nd. So check it out and keep in touch, connect with us. Thank you very much for your time. All right, we have time for some questions. So if you have one, raise your hand and we'll do the mic for the recording. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Really, really interesting. I was curious about one of the bullet points you put up on the slide about working in GSOC. You said something about different expectations for developers based on culture conflict or culture clash. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Yes. So what we see that difficult for GSOC, so it's a full-time program, so that the students expect to work over the summer and continually contribute to the project. But often we get the email of students that, okay, we have all the order arrangement, so they do not commit and they promise in the beginning. Even though the program policy exactly, but there's often a lot of cases, so we have people don't know exactly how much time and effort they need to put in. So what we change, so what we adopt now, so before they apply to be part of GSOC, we have our own organization guidelines and requirements that they need to follow. So everything communicates very clearly to them in the beginning. For instance, we will not accept if you miss one week of contribution. So if everything communicates really to them and at the end, after every evaluation, there is less conflict going on than what we learned from the past. So if you go on our website, so we have anyone want to participate with us during GSOC, there will be a requirement. We listed out all the things we expect from the student. And if there is any conflict at every evaluation, we just show them. The beginning of GSOC, we also do an onboarding talk. So we talk to them, we ask them, have you review the guidelines and requirements? Are you sure you can make this commitment? So make sure everything is clear. Yeah. Again, some people say that, oh, they only read everything away at the end. They will say that I'm not aware of it. So you always have every conversation got archive. So we always have evidence that we show we already communicate this to you. I also wonder about cultural divide. Do you have ideas about how FOSS participants in the West can be involved in FOSS Asia in a way that would help tech folks bridge that divide between East and West? Because we have different ways of working, different languages. I wonder if I or someone from a FOSS project wanted to go to Asia to be involved with FOSS Asia, how could we help bridge some of those divides? Yes. So as I mentioned earlier, language is no longer a barrier. A lot of Asian people, now young people, be able to communicate very well in English. But I think the type of contribution to any open source project also changed over the year. So if you talk about the different culture between the West and East, as you know, in Asia, the pressure about earning an income for a living, we don't get a lot of support from the government. So whenever they want to contribute into something, they need to consider what kind of opportunity they will get to be able to support their own life. So AIC in Europe, it couldn't, it might not be the case now. So a lot of government in the West, they have sufficient support to the people. And a lot of people, back then, they contribute to open source because they're interested in one particular technology or this is something that has with their work. But the mindset of the Asian type of community, they contribute to open source, they hope to get the opportunity to draw their career in order to support their family. That's totally fine. There's nothing wrong about it. So being in part of community, we just need to ensure that when people support our contributors, there should be a good opportunity for them out there. And as you mentioned, how you can support for Asia project, there's so many different ways to do. If you are a coder or developer, all of our projects are available on GitHub, all the documentation about deployment, you can try out, there are a lot of bugs. So basically, there's always enough work to do if you are a developer, but something that we are needing right now, we need iOS developers. The reason why we focus on Android. Many people in developing countries, they are not able to force an iPhone. And so that last contribution coming from the outside to open source application in Android phone. And if you are not a developer, we need more people to have documentation. We need people to go out and introduce our project to other people. You can always be welcome to come to one of our events. And as I mentioned now at the First Asia Academy, we need more people to teach. So not only offer courses in Singapore, we work together with partners in Bangkok, in Vietnam that go to central to teach open source. If you happen to be in this country by chance for vocation, you can stop by to meet us and offer some courses during your time there. Yeah. So there are a lot of opportunities for you to get involved. Hi. Thank you for your talk. It's been really informative and interesting. I wanted to first off declare my strong interest. I run sponsorships and global events for my company. And I'd love to talk to you before we leave the conference about how we could talk about supporting. But I also have a question about your content, which is you said that a lot of people you found in Asia are traveling and are very interested in having face-to-face events. And I was wondering what travel patterns you see. Are they crossing national lines or do they tend to be regional inside a specific country? Just because Asia is such a big place, I wasn't sure exactly what you were referring to. And also what are you, if anything, are you doing to get girls to travel? Because, you know, if somebody has a young daughter, maybe they don't want them traveling solo. Is there anything that you've put in place logistically to support that? Talking about travel. So we have different people involved in the First Asia community. A majority of our contributors coming from India, Sri Lanka, we also have people from Vietnam, from Taiwan. So normally people prefer to travel outside of their country to go somewhere to see new places. Whenever they go somewhere, they can learn something. So we see that people also travel because of the content, the topic of their interest. So people, the people that the kind of travel I'm talking about, they travel to meet all the contributors who work on projects. So if we try to create events in different locations where we can bring the First Asia contributor together, I also see the increase in number of people from Asia coming here. So I already saw quite a number of people to the West. It's always good to learn what's happening here. So you are so far away. But the sad thing is that it's not so easy for to travel. I don't know how much longer we'll be able to come to the US with all the visa policy and everything. People tend to travel more to Europe, easier visa policy over there. And how do we do to engage women and with family? So as you can see on the picture that I showed earlier, participants of the First Asia Summit from the age of 12 until like unlimited age. So we try to raise a base where students, where children and also women can participate in. And we also offer travel funding to our contributors. But when we talk about travel support, so we don't look at whether you are, we don't look in at your background or your channel. So we look in at the work that you do. So of course, the lack of women is not a new topic, not only in this industry everywhere. So we try our best to do what we can to help the people. But we also realize that people should be recognized based on their work, not based on their background. So if you are a man and you work very hard because you're not a woman, you're not allowed to go or something. So we don't want to have this concept. We encourage everyone. We also, that's why we introduce different type of contribution. For instance, non-code contribution, there's a lot of things that women can contribute and be part of the community. All right. That's all the time we have for questions. Thank you, Hong. Thank you.