The second day of COSCUP 2015 was August 16, Sunday. Since we had FreedomKnight and zerng07 at the booth, and we did not find very intersting talks in the early morning, tonghuix and I gave ourselves a bit more rest and did not get up quite early. We both found the talks this year were not as attractive as last year. Part of the reason might be that this year’s theme “Open Culture” is kind of too general and it is not easy to talk about it. Or in a sense it is align with COSCUP’s philosoph “more social than tech”, which means it is more a chance of letting open source people to meet than diving into specific technical topics.
Around the booth we found some interesting swags that might be useful for future Fedora events. One is the retractable network cable as shown in the middle figure above. Such cables were distributed in COSCUP previously as gifts. I think it is quite nice because: 1) it is so useful that one can start to use it directly at the venue; 2) the central circular part is perfect for branding logo etc.; 3) it is not expensive and can be cheap with mass production. Another nice swag is shown in the rightmost figure above, a toy moe girl (optionally, with a toy laptop). As soon as she appeared on our neighboring booth, a crowd of people and cameras came around the booth. Westerners might not understand, but moe culture is quite popular among East Asia countries, and it is getting mainstream. For example, in Taiwan you can find quite a few moe girls on various posters in public. Besides, ".moe" has become a registrable top-level domain name. Since she is so eye-catching, I guess it is worth trying to make one for Fedora. Regarding design, the Fedora moe girl might be a good starting point.
At the booth I also discussed with FreedomKnight and zerng07 about Fedora community development. zerng07 is getting busier with his work, and they are trying to develop a new ambassador. It seems that currently the Taiwan contributors prefer to use the Facebook group of Fedora Chinese community for discussion. I encourage them to keep an eye on our mailing lists and attend weekly IRC meetings, where activities are more visible to the Chinese community and the whole Fedora community. I also encourage them to go outside for better communication and cooperation. When the local community grows strong enough, Taiwan can be a good candidate for FUDCon APAC.
At around 15:00 PM, almost all attendees gathered into the large hall to listent to jserv‘s last speech “Retrospect on Taiwan Open Source Ecosystem”. jserv is a long term open source contributor in Taiwan, and he has contributed talks to COSCUP for all the ten years. In the morning I caught up with his experience sharing of open source in education. To encourage new contributors, he decided this talk to be his last speech in COSCUP. In the talk, he introduced the history of open source development in Taiwan and showed quite a few impressive early projects by Taiwan open source contributors. He also motivated the young generation in Taiwan to contribute more to open source in the world.
After that was the lightning talk session. In COSCUP, a lightning talk can be not a “talk” at all, because all kinds of performance are also welcome. I had learnt the rule for a while, but this time I finally had the chance to hear an ocarina show as a lightning talk by a COSCUP volunteer! Why ocarina show? Simply because others learnt that he can play ocarina during face-to-face discussion.
At last, after a short closing speech from the lead organizer came the group photo session. All volunteers were invited on stage. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was used for taking photos, which was really cool. By the way it was also cool when the UAV flew over your head!
All in all, I enjoyed the two days of COSCUP very much. Looking into the future, I believe COSCUP can continue to be a great chance for Fedora Chinese community to gather up. Besides, non-Chinese contributors are also welcome to join to take the opportunity to meet face-to-face and get things done.
GAL (grep art life) 