HK was the place to be last week

In addition to BarCamp this last week, Hong Kong hosted the SIBOS financial conference this last week. That brought in a lot of visitors including Aza Raskin from Mozilla, Guy Kawasaki, and Jeff Barr from Amazon. The week was topped off with a TEDx event and Software Freedom Day on Saturday. Though a bit exhausting, the week was a lot of fun. Read on for some notes from Software Freedom Day.

HK Software Freedom Day 2009

My favorite session from SFD was the hour long Open Source developers from Hong Kong session. Four local developers where featured:

• Andy Li with his ActionScript 3 port of the audio STK library
• David Wong who contributed the DMB-T driver to the linux kernal
• KS Chan, a Google Summer of Code participant, helping with the PHP documentation project
• Punky Tse who maintains the Voyage Linux distribution

I was really impressed with each speaker and would love to see more of these sort of local “highlight” sessions. Perhaps we could get a weekly article running up on opensource.hk or something like that. I was also surprised to learn that only 4 Hong Kong students have ever participated in Google Summer of Code. We need to work on that for next year.

As for myself, I ran two sessions: Incubating Open Source Communities and The Apache Way. The slides for both talks are now up on slideshare for download.

So that ends one crazy week of events. Next up, for me at least, is ApacheCon US 2009 in November where I’ll be giving my REST training course and my talk on open source licenses.