Open Tech Summit Taiwan - Day 1

Reporting from the luxuries of free Internet at our hostel in Taipei, Ian and I have been going over the talk that we’ll be giving on Amarok tomorrow at the Open Tech Summit here in Taiwan. The entire day today has been spent at the (very nice) Asus corporate headquarters - about 20 minutes on the metro ride outside of Taipei. The metro itself is a nice analogy to the Taiwanese people. Exceptionally efficient, very friendly and hospitable, immaculately clean and well thought out. Kudos to you, Taiwanese government. So friendly have the Taiwanese people been that I’ve been escorted up 10 flights of stairs, around train stations and through chaotic traffic - just to lend a hand. The Asus headquarters are totally awesome, if simply for this rendition of the Mona Lisa created entirely out of motherboard parts.

The aim of OTST is to promote open software and hardware to the Taiwanese, who are quite backward in their thinking of FOSS culture. We’re here on a religious missionary crusade to try and convince them to pick up free software! There were a number of interesting talks today, such as an introductions to OHI and OpenPattern, ultra cool speech recognition software for the EeePC and a general EeePC hacking howto. There were a few talks in Chinese, but I still found it easy to understand how cool it was to see compositing support on the EeePC.

In the early evening we had a light dinner party (which was quite heavy as we’d been fed all day), with two performances by local creative-commons artists. It’s heart-warming to see that Asus is putting a lot of effort into hosting this event and really trying to push the FOSS movement in Taiwan.