www.johndbritton.com

I just received the email below on the Google Summer of Code Students mailing list. In 2008 I worked on Gallery as part of Google's Summer of Code. I did the bulk of my work while I was on exchange in Beijing, China. Luckily, at the time, the Summer of Code management application wasn't censored, apparently it is now.

This really hurts. If the Chinese Government doesn't lift the ban on the GSoC site, there will inevitably be a drop in participation by Chinese students. Further, these tech-savvy individuals will likely bypass the firewall by using a proxy and may be in direct violation of the law.

This could all be sidestepped by providing an alternate URL & IP address for GSoC, but this is really just one example of censorship catching more than intended.

I'm a GSoC 2008 student from China. If Google hold SoC this year, I will apply it. But I found I can't access socghop.appspot.com in these days.

In China, sometimes socghop.appspot.com was accessable, but in most time it is unaccessable. Under GFW(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project), many websites can not be visited in China. The govenment thought these sites threaten country's stability. Websites like YouTube, Blogspot, and any website with "appspot.com" domain name were blocked.

The govenment have no intention to ban GSoC, the reason of blocking appspot.com is that Google App Engine can be used to set up proxy sever and circumvent the GFW, so the government blocked all sites with domain name "appspot.com".

Yes, it is very ridiculous, but what we can do? There are many Chinese students participated in the past GSoC seasons and made remarkable contribute to Open Source. It would be a heavy losses to Open Source if there are no Chinese(and other undemocratic countries) GSoCers in 2010.

If google can provide an alternative entrance besides socghop.appspot.com and students can commit applications on it, that would be enough.

Last year I organized a gathering in Beijing's Beihai Park for Couch Surfing Day 2008. This year we were featured in the Wanderlust Newsletter. Check it out!

I've spent the last week decompressing my brain from organizing this year's Open Everything Hong Kong, so I apologize for the delay in posting this recap story.

First of all, the event was a huge success! Thank you all for your support and for making the day worthwhile. We had a great turnout, around 45 people came by with just over 30 in attendance at any given time. In the week leading up to the event the number of registered attendees almost tripled (to 62 registered attendees)! The speedy increase in numbers had me worried about space, but in the end the venue was just the right size.

I kicked off the event at 10AM with a short history of Open Everything and a quick look at the agenda (slides [PDF]). We then proceeded with short introductions by attendees and a talk by Haggen So from Creative Commons Hong Kong.

The rest of the day was left in the hands of attendees who organized some great Open Sessions.

Open Sessions:

• Creative Commons Hong Kong
• Flickr
• Guilt in Open Organizations
• HK Drupal User Group
• How to Encourage Open Organizations (and Society)
• Open Feedback and Retrospectives
• Open Government
• Open Hardware (AKA - How We May Build Our Own Toys)
• Open House: Internet Mediated Hospitality Exchange
• Open Public Information
• Openness and Mental Health
• Peer2Peer University

Note: Audio & Video recordings along with summaries and reactions are available on the Event Wiki.

We wrapped up the official event with an excellent presentation by John Bacon-Shone from Hong Kong University entitled Open Access to Research Publications & Data followed by a video handover to Open Everything Berlin.

After cleaning up the venue a number of us made our way to Lan Kwai Fong for some dinner and drinks at Whiskey Priest.

Date

6 December 2008

Time

Registration 9:00AM - 10:00AM, Main Event 10:00AM - 5:00PM; Social Mixer immedately following the main event

Venue

SOHO Life Office - Guangdong Investment Tower 1/F - 148 Connaught Road Central, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

Full Details

http://openeverything.hk/2008/

Over the past month and a half I've been organizing Open Everything Hong Kong 2008. Thanks to some help from Nick Wang and the Hong Kong Drupal User Group, I've finally secured a venue and everything looks like it's in order. The guest list is growing fast, hope to see you there!

Open Everything (global site: http://openeverything.net) is a collection of events scattered all over the world, organized by ordinary people just like you. The purpose of the event is to explore and discuss 'open'. The interpretation of the idea is in the hands of attendees, and each event differs from the next.

Let there be no confusion, Open Everything is not a tech conference. There is much more to 'open' than technology, part of the goal of the event is to bring the less known aspects of 'open' to the attention of the general public.

At Open Everything Hong Kong 2008 there will be two invited guest speakers and four open sessions left in the hands of attendees. Feel free to come prepared with a topic to share, discuss, or present. Also feel free to act spontaneously and lead a group discussion with no preparation at all. The magic of the event is that it is open and we're all free to contribute as we desire.

The event is free and open to the public, we do kindly ask that you register so we can give you a fancy name badge and maybe even a T-shirt. We'd also like to know how many people to expect so that we're prepared.

Sister events will be held in Berlin, Germany and Madison, WI, USA on the same day. We're expecting to have some sort of video link to hand over between timezones. Wish your city had an event? Join the discussion and we'll be happy to help you organize an Open Everything of your very own ;).

Questions/Comments/Concerns about the Hong Kong Event? shout@openeverything.hk

This past Saturday was Barcamp Hong Kong (photos). If you've never heard of Barcamp you should check out the Wikipedia article. The event was organized by technologists from the area and was hosted by Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. at their location in Quarry Bay.

There were five rooms available during each of six time slots for a total of 30 possible sessions. I attended six:

• Online Marketing for Consumer Acquisition
• Technology Yesterday, Relevance
• Making iPhone Apps
• Open Culture
• Just What the ____ is SPAM?
• Theming Drupal

I organized the session on Open Culture, and was very happy at the amount of discussion and participation we had. Most of the other sessions were more like lectures but still quite good. The interactivity was mostly thanks to Conrad Benham's idea to make the session an "open space" discussion, it seemed to fit perfectly with the topic. We placed five "hot seats" at the front of the room. To control conversation, only people seated in the designated seats were allowed to talk. Anyone could join the conversation by bumping another person off the floor. The discussion mostly focused on open education and it's practical application, but we hit a few other topics as well.

There were more than 25 Drupalistas at Barcamp HK. It was quite funny to bump into Dave Hansen-Lange from Advomatic again, I met him earlier this year on the other side of the planet at Drupalcon Boston. I took the first few minutes of the "Theming Drupal" session to talk about the Knight Drupal Initiative and answer questions related to the grant process before the other talk begain. There was quite a bit of interest in KDI; let's see those proposals!

After the conference ThoughtWorks and others sponsored a gathering at the East End Brewery.

Many thanks to everyone for such an enlightening day.