Open Source Event in Guangzhou Next Week

Meet other open source developers in Guangzhou this weekend.

The Code Fest for the Asia Open Source Symposium is this coming weekend, March 8-9, at the Guangdong Linux Center in Guangzhou, China. At the moment, we’ve got 8 “mentors” from Japan, China and Hong Kong attending along with a few dozen university students from southern China. The mentors will be working with the student attendees on a number of open source projects.

I’m currently putting together a list of small bug fixes and feature enhancements to work on over the 2 day event. My thought is that code is code, and so just spending two days writing open source code won’t be a particularly unique experience from writing any other non-open source code. Rather I’d like to teach the students how to submit patches and enhancements. If you’ve got some low-hanging fruit that you think a couple university students could work, please let me know.

Even if your not a student or want to be a mentor, you can still attend and hang out with some open source developers. Just fill in the registration form and email it to me. I’ll forward it on to the planners (rather than publish their email addresses on my blog).

Asia Open Source Symposium

The Code Fest is part of a larger event - the 10th Asia Open Source Symposium - running all of next week in Guangzhou. The symposium is broken into a series of smaller events including the Code Fest, a meeting for governments and NGOs, and an open conference and expo. I’ll be giving a talk on The Apache Way as part of the main conference on Thursday.

There’s still time to register, so hopefully I’ll see you there.

Upcoming Events

There’s a number of open source related events happening in China this year, ranging from large conferences like the symposium, to user group meetings and training classes. A short list includes the Symposium, the W3Cs conference in April, the Taiwan Open Source Developer Conference, COPU’s Open China, Open World event in Guangzhou in May, the Gnome Asia Summit in September, and the Open Office 2008 conference.. Apache and Eclipse are still looking at running an open source conference later this year as well.

Trying to keep up on all of this can be difficult, so I’m starting to track things using a Yahoo! Upcoming group. Please feel free to add your China open source event to this group, or at least send me an email about it.