Barcamp.my, Day 1
So, much beer on Friday night led to waking up late and almost missing Raj’s 10am talk at barcamp.my, Malaysia’s inaugral unconference. Fortunately, KL roads were clear and I was only fashionably late lah 
I attended three talks at barcamp, the aforementioned Raj’s talk on his Google Summer of Code work on phpMyAdmin blob streaming support, the OpenMalaysiaBlog talk and the Nokia talk. Raj’s talk seemed to be well received, so kudos to him for his very first free software talk! Also, he played Classical Gas by Eric Clapton, for which he got a round of applause.
The OpenMalaysiaBlog was standing room only, and true to style, Yoon Kit presentation was rather awesome. In fact, this is the very first time I’ve seen a mind-map style talk. There were many questions from the audience, most seemed to be awed by the level of dedication the OpenMalaysia people seemed to have put in to promote openness and transparency in Malaysia’s government ICT policies. Richard raised some good questions but I did not understand a point he made asking why we bother with all this effort in promoting openness in ICT (and battling Microsoft) when we could be sitting down, hacking and making Microsoft irrelevant. In my mind, the two are not mutually exclusive and the OMB guys efforts to promote openness has directly benefits the Malaysian public sector in absolute dollar and cents, in addition to getting them to participate more openly in formulating government policies which is clearly a win for all parties (except perhaps, Microsoft :p). In any case, his other points were well received.
There was a slight diversion into software patents and I must say, I was truly delighted to see so many people in the audience speaking up strongly AGAINST software patents. Now, we need to convert them into speaking to the Malaysian ministries ahead of the next round of Free Trade Agreement (FTA) discussions with the United States.
The Nokia talk was, in my not-so-very-humble opinion, a FAIL. I don’t blame the presenter as he was clear in his presentation, but the focus of the talk was extremely focused Nokia marketing then anything else. In addition, he did not seem to know much about the technology behind Symbian, which didn’t really jive well with the tech-savvy crowd. I’m personally allergic to marketing talks, so I tuned out after a few minutes and (being too lazy to move) started hacking on some code.
Late afternoon was spent meeting people, talking about ideas, putting faces to twitter-ers and the like. Soon-ish, we left to go watch Dark Knight again (much to my dismay, as I wanted to catch Khailee’s Entrepreneur Gangbang talk which I hear was received well too). The Dark Knight … ahhh, truly it’s a movie that brings out the id in us.
Anyway, over dinner, I suggested that Aizat run a lighting talk session tomorrow, which may be of interest to the barcamp.my audience. Looks like it is on, go forth campers and share your stories!
My talk tomorrow is on the Free Software Movement in Malaysia. I would be interested in meeting people who can commit to helping push forward the Malaysian Free Software movement, so do contact me if you are interested
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