Colin Charles Agenda

Daniel (aka Mr. Messina of Malaysia) is organising a bunch of events, and since they’re on weekends, I’m going to gladly participate, without seeking approval from the overlords.

First up is Startup Camp KL, on 22-23 November 2008, in MidValley. On Sunday, I’m going to lead a session titled “Using Free Software to bootstrap your startup”. Check out the agenda. It should be fun, especially in today’s market to ensure there are no software licensing costs, especially if you’re a startup.

Then there’s BarCampJB, 6-7 December 2008, in Johor Bahru. I haven’t been there in…. ages :) I’ll be talking about “MySQL Best Practices for Developers”, where we’ll go through good schema practice, understanding different engines (and their uses), and probably a lot more. If there’s enough interest, a similar discussion on free software in business, will be there (AMP stacks, ftw!).

It’s over! I can’t speak for the others, but I know I’m still recovering. In summary: the event was awesome.

The Organising Committee

First, a word of thanks, to the people that didn’t get enough of it - the amazing organising committee, who scurried around for both the days (and much before that too - besides, we only had 43 days), to make sure things were a-happening. In no particular order:

• Aizat - You rock. From handling the registrations (since we don’t have a good payment gateway in Malaysia, he had to see photos, scanned receipts, and a lot more crap), to handling the registration desk, to writing “updates?” to the mailing list, to creating the initial website, to updating the website as and when I tell him to, to handling the volunteers and probably so much more - you rock. Thank you. You are now officially the foss.my registration and website dude.
• Ditesh - From the initial website, right down to monitoring the halls, to giving suggestions to whom might be great local speakers, to dropping in and giving a most fabulous keynote, you rock.
• Angch - Hall monitor, to bank account bootstrapper, and all around great help, you rock. Thanks for also getting your company to be a sponsor!
• Yoon Kit - From the press, right down to the speaker gifts, if it wasn’t for you, there would be no opening keynote. You rock!
• Kaeru - From the initial idea, to handling the PR, for sponsoring the event, and for giving a last minute talk about ORCA, while the speaker was down with a bad fever, you rock. And folk, he did this all while changing jobs!
• Izhar - You did the posters. You did the amazing “I Love…” badges. You handled the food preparation. You also participated in a “side session”. You sorted out hotels. And you had exams on Monday (the day after foss.my). You rock for being an all round gopher! Your mother also rocks :)
• Yondie - You’re Mr. Subway. Thank you for sorting out the food, and thank you for harnessing the power of volunteers to make sure things ran smoothly. You are now officially the foss.my food dude (probably alongside Izhar :P).
• Wariola - You’re Mr. T-Shirts. Without you, there will be no foss.my t-shirts, so you rock!
• Gurdip - Not enough can be said about you. Thank you for giving us the great location, that was APIIT, to sorting out the logistics, the driver, the booking of hotels, to getting the nice (and easy on the eyes) volunteers, to making sure the network worked, to ensuring we had power sockets, you rock!
• Suanie - Without you, we would have no speaker/organiser/volunteer party. Without you, there would be no press. You rock, and we’re sorry you couldn’t be at the event (hope the weekend in Singapore was productive, though).
• Firdaus - For registering foss.my events, with the RoS, and for also going to get that bank account, you rock.

The Volunteers
Thank you for taking time off from your busy weekend, to come spend time with a bunch of free and open source lovers. There has to also be a special mention to Sean, who single-handedly sorted out the logo for us, early in the game.

The rest
Speakers, you rock. Without you, there would be no event in under 45 days (on Sunday, led the 45th day).

Sponsors, you rock. Without you, this event would have to cost a lot more money, and nobody would have liked that.

If I missed anyone, E&OE.

In conclusion
I believe foss.my has been deemed as a technical conference. Fluffy talks weren’t taken kindly to, even during the lighting talk sessions.

I believe foss.my will continue to exist in 2009.

I believe foss.my will be longer than two days, to ensure that there is enough time to move in between rooms, hack while you’re there, and so on.

So, to foss.my 2009, bigger and better, and a lot more well planned, than foss.my 2008 :) Don’t forget to give us feedback.

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.

Going to LCA? We have two days of glory for what is known as The Open Source Databases MiniConf. We have a webpage on the wiki, the announcement went out a few days ago, and the call for participation is open!

Tasmania is a fabulous place to be in January. 19-20 January 2009 is when the OSDB-MiniConf happens… topics on MySQL, PostgreSQL, Derby/JavaDB, Drizzle, CouchDB and many more are to be accepted.

What are you waiting for, submit a talk already!

What started as some chat about having a one-day event, after MyGOSSCon, on the 26^th of September 2008, about open source, has turned into a full-blown conference, to be pulled off in about a month, affectionately known as foss.my. Its being held at APIIT from November 8-9 2008, and is touted to be the most technical conference of its kind in South East Asia.

We want people to participate as speakers, delegates, sponsors, or volunteers. This is a grassroots event, and its purely non-commercial - no vendor talks, or marketing gimmicks are permitted. Largely the motto is very foss.in/linux.conf.au-ish - both community events I truly enjoy going to, and wouldn’t miss for the world.

The Call for Participation is open till midnight October 10 2008, so if I were you, I’d rush and submit some topics. If you’re nearby - Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, the rest of South East Asia, it would be silly not to show up, with all the budget carriers there are today (maybe next time, we’ll get an official airline ;)).

Conferences must have themes, and foss.my is no exception. We believe the world is just awesome, and there’s so much FOSS goodness that can be shared with others. So if you’re involved in something free and open source related, its only sensible that you submit a talk topic. Share the knowledge, foster more open source development growth and contributions.

There are expected to be talks on topics such as: hacking on phpMyAdmin (a Google Summer of Code Project, run under the MySQL project), MyMeeting (a Malaysian government open source project), Asterisk, Django, CSS, source control, OSS Development on OS X, PHP, open source databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.), and the list goes on. There will be four great keynotes, and lightning talk sessions (so everyone can share).

Just show us your awesomeness. Read more from Aizat, Khairil, and Izhar.

This is a picture with a lot of impact. This was from Seedcamp. The question asked was “What tools will you use?”.

Mårten pointed this out to us at the opening speeches at the Sun Database Group Developer’s Meeting. Its interesting to see what technologies are used. MySQL is by far, the most popular database server that all startups seem to use (though to be fair, I see CouchDB and PostgreSQL there too). PHP is about the most popular language (followed closely by Java, then Ruby). Its amazing to see what kind of technologies people are using to build the companies of tomorrow.

Find out more about it, at the Zeitgeist redux on the seedcamp blog.

It is no secret that I am the Program Chair for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, and am truly excited about it (big shoes to fill in from Jay). I expect it to be a great conference, with over 2,000 attendees and lots and lots of great talks. The paper submissions have been coming through, the excellent voters have been voting, and the progress is impressive. Its a great learning experience.

Now, I’m excited to tell you that I’m also going to organise the Open Source Databases MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2009. Its going to be in Hobart, Tasmania, in January 2009, and again, I’m excited. Read the press release for more.

Why is this exciting? Because we’ll have a two-day mini-conference, as opposed to the usual one day. There might even be time for tutorials. And now, we’re combining all the great databases out there, not just focusing on MySQL or PostgreSQL (as we have in the past). Come discuss on anything from CouchDB, Drizzle, SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Derby/JavaDB and many more. Next up is setting the wiki, and an appropriate e-mail address (we already have mysql-miniconf[at]mysql[dot]com, but maybe I’ll ask for osdb or something soon) to accept papers.

Lots of conference organising fun, coming right up!

Tomorrow (Saturday, September 20 2008) is Software Freedom Day, and we’re taking Latvia by storm! We’re hosting it at the University of Latvia, and we have an awesome schedule.

Why awesome? Because we have exciting speakers like you wouldn’t believe.

• Mårten Mickos, former CEO MySQL AB, current SVP Database Group, Sun Microsystems
• Kaj Arno, VP Community, Database Group, Sun Microsystems
• Mark Callaghan, Google Inc - he’ll be talking about running a database when your business depends on it - very cool stuff
• Domas Mituzas, Wikimedia Foundation and Sun Database Group Support Engineer

There are many, many more, but just the list above is pretty impressive if you ask me.

There is to be free lunch at the university, and in the evening at 7.30pm, there is to be free buffet dinner and beer at the Radisson SAS Daugava Hotel. Come unwind with the rest of the Sun Database Group!

So, if you’re currently not in Riga, Latvia, consider coming. Take a flight in, or if you’re in Finland, there’s a ferry; if you’re in Estonia, there’s a train; and if you’re in Lithuania, there’s a bus!

As an aside, I find it funny, that I have traditionally never been in my own country when there has been a Software Freedom Day. Last year I was in Beijing, China delivering a speech on MySQL. This year, I’m in Riga, Latvia, with the rest of the Sun Database Group for our yearly developer’s meeting.