COSCUP 2015 Day 1

A few days ago I had the chance to attend COSCUP in Taiwan for the second time. This time I was lucky to get travel subsidy from Fedora APAC’s event budget. Below is my event report for day 1 (Aug 15, Saturday).

The venue of COSCUP 2015 is Academia Sinica, which is the same as in last year. But this time I stayed in a hotel not quite near the venue, sharing room with another Fedora ambassador tonghuix. So in the morning of day 1, we got up early and caught the Taipei MRT (Massive Rapid Transit) train. For the last mile to the venue, we took a taxi with FreedomKnight, a Fedora ambassador in Taiwan, and his girlfriend, who we happened to meet near our destination MRT station.

We arrived at the venue at about 8:30 AM, and it was about to allow registration. Quite a lot of attendees had already queued up before the gate. Shortly after that we registered by scanning the QR code. Then we looked for the booth location and set up the booth. FreedomKnight brought some Fedora 21 DVDs and I brought the badge reel which tonghuix carried from Beijing to Taipei. I tried a few ideas of placing these DVDs and settled down to a “4F” form. People started to visit our booth before we finished the preparation!

I spent the whole morning around our booth, talking with interested people about Fedora. Some of them were not familiar with Fedora, so I introduced to them that Fedora is an Linux distro similar as Ubuntu and openSUSE, but with special stress on our “Four Foundations” (aka 4F). Quite a few visitors had previous experience with Fedora, or current work experience with testing their company products on (somewhat old releases of) Fedora. I talked about Fedora.next with them and encouraged them to try out (or let their companies to try out) newer Fedora versions. Besides, we also met several guys who had used Fedora a lot but had not quite joined the local community, and I invited them to the Fedora BoF (Bird of a Feather) at night.

FreedomKnight’s girlfriend was also around our booth and helped out a lot. COSCUP continued to organize the “Dadi” game: every booth had a unique seal; anyone who had collected all booth seal stamps gained a chance in the lucky draw. There was a RPM packaging workshop which was proposed by the other Fedora ambassador in Taiwan, zerng07. Unfortunately zerng07 was not able to arrive on time due to work emergencies. FreedomKnight took the place and delivered the session.

In the afternoon, there were a workshop by tonghuix about how to use XMPP to chat, and I was asked to help with the demo. We demonstrated how to use free and open source XMPP clients both on Linux desktop and Android cellphone to chat, with and without OTR (off the record) encryption. I also took a few photos for the session.

Then at around 16:00 PM, tonghuix gave an impressive lecture on free software community management. He took many little stories from the book Zhuang Zi as examples to illustrate how and why certain management practices succeed or fail. He summarized the Tao of free software community management as “Three-Self”, which can be roughly translated as “Freedom (aka Self-will or Self-choice), Self-governance, Self-organization”.

When the day’s session almost came to an end, zerng07 finally arrived. We had him and some other Fedora community members for the BoF session in the evening. The total number of people for Fedora BoF was about ten. During the BoF we discussed the interesting differences of languages and education between mainland China and Taiwan, as well as their impact on software localization and overall cooperation of Fedora Chinese community. The Chinese glossary might need to be revived. More interaction is needed to facilitate cooperation, and more awareness and support from the whole Fedora project are also required.