Let open source communities meet

I've been running the open source community for more than seven years, building Web sites and speaking at
different kinds of user groups, conferences such as Huihoo, Beijing Open Party, BEA User Group, IBM DeveloperWorks, and so forth.

Let's take an overview about technology and open source community from China:

* Open Source Projects
o Huihoo.org
o Linux Virtual Server
o StarDict
o SCIM
o XOOPS
o ZEUUX
o SpringSide

* Open Source Project Host
o Cosoft
o JavaScud

* Open Source User Group and Events
o Beijing Linux User Group
o Beijing Open Party
o Open Source Camp
o Open Source University
o JBoss User Group Beijing

* News and Forums
o CSDN
o ChinaUnix
o ITPUB
o LinuxPK
o LupaWorld
o JavaEye
o BlogJava
o Martix
o Open Source Force
o JActionGroup
o LinuxFans
o LinuxRen
o PHPChina

* Open Source Documents
o Huihoo.com
o redsaga

It's an interesting phenomenon that there isn't much communication between communities. For each community, members just gather and talk about topics which they are interested in. Well, the same questions would appear every two or three years, so it's really not a good way for knowledge innovation and it's a waste of resource and time. Why not let these different communities meet up and share ideas and experience? And why not introduce a mashup event for all of the communities? The Open Source Camp is an idea that spun out of this.

Open Source Camp events are already running around the world. The original ideas come from Barcamp, an international network of user-generated conferences--open, participatory workshop-events, where content is provided by participants--often focusing on early-stage Web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Open Source Camp brings together open source developers, geeks, entrepreneurs, academics, venture capitalists, technology influencers and the media for an intense user-created conference about open source, emerging technology topics. It's organized by the community, for the community.

The event combines sharing, learning, networking, and fun. Participants, who are experts and innovators in their fields, are also the presenters. We invite all of you to join as members and share your ideas, and communicate with each other. The goal is to boost tech community and innovation around the world. Open Source Camp will become a different way to let the people from communities meet, and we promise there will be no boring formal topic and no speaker-only presentations... Everyone can join in and share their ideas with everyone else.

Last year on Dec. 22, we launched the first Open Source Camp event in Beijing. Around 120 people joined the meeting, where many interesting and funny technical and ideas were exchanged between people from Finland, Janpan, Canada, China, among others. We chatted intensely for six whole hours. You can get more details from the Open Source Camp group on Facebook.

Where will Open Source camp go next? This year, camp events will be hosted in more cities across China: Shanghai(May 18), GuangZhou (Sep. 20), Beijing(Oct. 25). Everyone is welcome to join the activities. You can get the latest updates from the Open Source Camp site or on Facebook.

Thanks to Google for sponsoring our events at all the various cities, as well as other sponsors such as OW2, Intel, Red Hat and Thoughtworks. I would like to thank for all of our community partners, BLUG, JavaEye, JActionGroup, Beijing Open Party, ZEUUX and the many community individuals. Your effort will make the open source community better in the furture.

Finally, the Olympic Games opens tonight at 2008.08.08 8:00PM. Let's enjoy the sport meetup.

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Peter Cheng

Peter Cheng is a community strategist and open source evangelist, who is based in Beijing, China. In 2003, he initiated the Open Source University program to gather industry experts and help spread open source technology and culture to over 100 universities. In 2007, he organized the Open Source Camp in five Chinese cities, with the aim to enable the open source community to share and exchange ideas and to promote the technology in China. Peter currently runs TargetSource Tech, a company he founded to provide consulting services on enterprise open source software.