Colin Charles Agenda

Last week I found out about the Open Source Economy Conference 2008 held in Putrajaya, Malaysia on the 19th of November 2008. Its co-organised by Sun and the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC). Its also the “launch” of MySQL in Malaysia.

I only mention this because I’m speaking – check the agenda out. Don’t hesitate to register now.

my memory is fading. the last week has been really long, with sleep sometimes a luxury i didn’t get. it was filled with work (lots of it), and on tuesday, i had an interesting lunch with the maybank2u folk…

heavy rains… and then there was a nice, long, chat with sk2. it was so nice and long, that i’d completely forgotten when i was supposed to fly off the next morning. fifteen minutes after sleeping, the alarm rang, and there i was off to start the morning to head to jakarta.

its ok, slept on the taxi to the airport, checked in, slept at gates (no lounge access unless i take the train to the other terminal), slept on plane, arrived in jakarta. found my way to a taxi, and had another good 1.5hr sleep (fail distance from airport->location). arrived, found some lunch (event was oversubscribed, there was no more food for me, so i wandered to a starbucks), then gave my talk. the event ended after, and one of the locals took me to a mall to buy about five dozen krispy kremes.

then took a cab back to the airport, found an earlier flight, sms’ed sk2 on the off chance that she’d see me, got on the plane and slept some more. all in all, i think i slept most of the day, because all i was doing was being in transit, and my laptop wasn’t even juiced up (they had no internet or power adapters for me in indonesia, sadly). saw sk2, which is always fun.

thursday. spoke at a malaysian government event. then went to see sk2 again. fun ensued, while at the bookstore. lets see how far/often we go places. we sat at starbucks at the end of it all, trying to beat blogger into shape, and failing massively (me, that is). if it were straight html, it’d be easier, but the widgets are seriously fubar… say hello to wordpress soon. but starbucks was fun otherwise – hot flushes, is all i will say.

friday, work, and then straight off to the event location in bkt. jalil. long day, since we also had to do airport duty. saturday+sunday = conference. great success (as borat would say). sunday evening we (ruben, john, carmen) tried to find some sup kambing but failed – ended up in alexis.

and we’re back to monday. i’m tired. yet, pumped with energy all at the same time.

As a heads up, we’re one day towards foss.my and the wheel’s a turning. Our numbers are good – i.e. we’ve officially been oversubscribed. Looking at statistics last generated by Aizat, we have about 20 t-shirts left for those that have already paid to attend the event. That means if you’re still in the unpaid status, don’t hesitate to hop on over and drop us some much needed moolah.

The schwag report: Novell carry bags. Mozilla stickers, pins, tattoos, and more. The very nice foss.my t-shirt.

Just remember, schwag are of course for a first registered, first paid, first given basis :) There’s a limited amount of schwag, so what are you waiting for? Go on and pay us already.

You can also of course walk in to the event and pay on the spot. Its just that schwag will almost definitely be limited/non-existent!

Less than 20 hours to the event, or so says the countdown on foss.my. Excited!
Update: Just to be clear. If you’ve paid up, you’re getting your schwag. Officially, there are about 20 more slots to completion till we hit schwag fatigue, so beyond that, there are no guarantees of goodies. So pay up, and pay early!

Busy next few days: Sun Systems Tour in Jakarta, Indonesia on November 5, then MyGOSSCON 2008 on November 6.

For the Sun event, there’s a corporate slide deck – MySQL from Sun: The Platform for the Web Economy. For the MyGOSSCON event I’ll be speaking about MySQL Best Practices.

If you’re in Jakarta and free on November 5, don’t hesitate to say hi. Similar invite for MyGOSSCON, though I don’t actually know if its open to all.

I haven’t written much about foss.my because I’ve been busy helping organise it.

The sponsors
Well, the crunch time is here. In a month we’ve managed to pull some amazing things off. For starters, we’ve confirmed four great Gold Sponsors: mixi.jp, Novell, Mozilla, and Microsoft. We’ve also managed to get some local companies to be affiliate sponsors: bytecraft and inigo. And we must be gracious to get APIIT to sponsor the location, of course!

So, what do the sponsors do? They help pay for things. Like the speaker party, happening on Saturday evening at IZZI. Suanie, Aizat and I have already scooped out the location, and its a great place, with WiFi. Much thanks to Suanie for sorting this out, naturally. They help subsidise the cost of the event. They might even be helping pay for prizes for early registrants :)

If you’re unsure ~RM50 will get you far
What inspired this blog post was @nazroll’s post. Running a conference isn’t cheap. RM30 for students, is actually a loss leader: you are getting 2 lunches, and 3 teas. Food in KL is surprisingly not so cheap, even if you go the Subway sandwich route. Early registration for non-students, with a t-shirt, is RM50. The t-shirt is actually pretty high quality, and sadly costs more than RM20 – surprisingly, making t-shirts isn’t cheap these days either. We could have gone the RM8-15 route, but its a t-shirt you wouldn’t be proud of owning, as after a few washes, the print comes off, and you’ll soon forget what a great time you had at foss.my 2008.

We’ll also sell the t-shirt, because if you’re not convinced pre-purchase, i.e. before registration, we want you to see it, touch it, feel it, and realise you probably want to be cool wearing it. So there.

The only way the event was going to be 100% free, was if we were going to not offer lunches, teas, a speaker party, t-shirts, etc… then you come to learn. But I hear this kind of event doesn’t work in Malaysia (or most parts of Asia, for the matter).

Don’t forget, the swag you’ll get. Bags, stickers, etc. The new friends you’ll make. So, the theme of “free & sharing of knowledge” is very much there. The culture is very much there.

The speakers
Have you seen the awesome speaker list? Open source conferences overseas typically costs hundreds of dollars, even for students. Less than RM50, is peanuts!

Speakers, I don’t know how to thank you enough. You are what’s going to help make the conference a great success. People are coming to see you. The speaker party reward on Saturday evening is so tiny in comparison to what you’ll be doing for the attendees.

The attendees
That’s you. You make the event a success. Register, pay up, come, have a good time, share, make new friends, hook up with people you’ve only chatted to via IRC. Thank you for taking time off from your busy weekend, to come enjoy the event.

Everything else
There are also Side Sessions. Birds of a Feather sessions, an Ubuntu Malaysia launch party, and much more.

All in all, pointing to a truly awesome event.

On thinking back, with regards to Rusty, CALU, and what is now LCA
The famous story goes that Rusty bootstrapped CALU on his credit card. I now realise that foss.my is no different. We’re bootstrapping everything on credit (or really, whatever cash there is in the bank – Malaysia and credit cards are still not there yet). CALU happened in 1999… foss.my is coming nearly a decade later.

Lets hope this event is as successful as LCA, and we have something to look forward to, on a yearly basis, in South East Asia. We’re not as far on yet as to have a howto, but we have ambitions to be the awesomest conference in S.E.A. ;)

What are you waiting for? Register and pay up, already! And see you November 8-9, 2008.

Check out VoteMatch USA. This idea was developed in the Netherlands by the Institute for Political Participation, I saw it on CNN today, and now they’ve got it applied to the US Elections.

I always felt I liked Barack Obama, but now I know that I am skewed to his policies, by about 83%. I really like the idea of VoteMatch.

In 2008, Malaysians showed Barisan Nasional that they’ve had enough. March 8 2008 is a day that will go down in history books. The next general elections, Malaysians will be ready for something like VoteMatch Malaysia. By 2012/2013, there will be so much Internet penetration, even more young guns who’ve been exposed to more freedoms, and even more that will want change.

VoteMatch is a propaganda fighting machine. No matter how many adverts there are in the media, how much parties embrace social media, there’s just been no way to show clearly, whom one would want to vote for. VoteMatch seems to be the answer