FOSS.MY Conference, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia
I had the pleasure of visiting Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last week to attend the first FOSS.MY conference. It’s been almost a year since I traveled outside the country and it was great to visit Kuala Lumpur again, and being part of FOSS.MY made it a blast!
I arrived a day before the conference and was met at the airport by good friend Colin Charles. Now some Ubuntu people might remember Colin from Ubuntu Down Under way way long ago. I also got to meet memcached and Drizzle contributor Toru Maesaka. First thing we did after leaving the airport was get something to eat, so we went to a popular “Mamak” place at the business district of KL and had some awesome Nasi Kandar!
It was good to see my friends Pia Waugh and Jaya Kumar after a few years even though we get to chat on IRC regularly.
The FOSS.MY conference was the first grassroots-led event about free and open source software. There were 26 tracks in total, majority of them technical in nature, and there were some BoFs as well. The local Ubuntu Malaysia and Fedora communities were also there, but I wasn’t able to catch up with them as the schedule was pretty hectic (there is always a next time!). Attendance was surprising as well, as the organizers only anticapted around 100 people to join but more than 200 registered and attended. Seem to be that the region is well positioned to have regular annual technical events like this similar to linux.conf.au and FOSS.MY did a great start for this. Also with the rise of low cost airline carriers and KL being a nice city with good public transport coverage and cheap food and accommodation make it an ideal city for future events.
More FOSS.MY pics at the Gallery!
The conference ended with some great food and drinks at the Suria KLCC with the Petronas Twin Towers in view.
I woke up very late the next day and had to rush to KL Sentral to take the KLIA Ekspres. Airport check-in at the train station FTW. Good thing the airport train system in KL is very fast and efficient and i was able to catch my flight just half an hour before departure.
It was great meeting new friends (Yoon, Aizat, Ditesh, Abdullah, Pamela Fox, Fajar, James Morris, Preetam, Toru Maesaka, etc. you know who you are) and learning a lot of things. I also thank the FOSS.MY organizing team for taking care of me and the rest of the non-Malaysian speakers during our brief stay in Kuala Lumpur. See you guys at FOSS.MY 2009!
Hey Jerome, was there for your talk. I was rushing around as well so didn’t get a chance to spend much time with the speakers. But yeah, with low cost air carriers and affordable hotel rooms, it’s easy for us to get to more FOSS conferences in this region. FOSS.ph? I’d be glad to come and meet old friends there.
Hey Kaeru, its ok there’s always a next time. Besides there is always online. I got to attend the BoF session where you discussed about starting on your own and eventually getting business out there in the Malaysian context which is quite similar to how people do business here as well. But I think there is still a lot to learn from each other in this region which I think we really need to improve upon. If our governments have ASEAN, why can’t FOSS communities in the region? I think this is something we can look into in the near future.