Being Involved

Being Involved with FOSS, the lack of Asian participation

It was something that has been noted, but something I haven't looked at much.  Now I'm looking further into the reaons behind the lack of participation by Asian developers in mainstream projects. Participation here doesn't mean coding, it can be inputs, questions or even bug reporting, heck.. in any form. What surprised me was it was virtually no participation for desktop projects especially from developing countries.

I heard the common reaons; time, money, language, culture, lack of awareness, knowledge etc.

For every one of these reasons however, you can counter them. So I've been investigating further, and it's interesting so far that one of the problems is lack of knowledge of how this FOSS thing works. Mailing Lists, Planets, Bugzilla, Wikis, CVS/SVN commit logs etc. etc. Then higher up, which I'm researching, there may be lack of knowledge even of how to work with FOSS projects, development processes and schedules etc.

If you don't participate, how can you know?

How can I or my project participate?

What are the benefits?

I hope to have a start at addressing some of these questions in a presentation slide for MyOSS. More will come out as I keep digging at the issues and find a solution to all this. FOSS adoption means naught, if developing countries continue to be users and all the hype about capacity building, knowledge transfers and putting developing countries in control are not realised.

What's a good way to start for now?

Lurk. :)

Subscribe to a few mailing lists and add a few RSS feeds into your reader.

You can already start getting insights into discussions from questions and posts from the international community. These can include the lead developers of your favourite software.

So hope to see you at the next MyOSS Meeting.