Another great event by the great people of Malaysia. Collaborative event management will be the new trend. BarCamp Malaysia & FOSS.my will be the two events that I will follow and criticise closely as these two events are eye openers for Malaysians who has been living under the coconut shell for a very long time.

FOSS.my was a great success as it has brought together 250 people (or more) from all around Malaysia, Singapore, India, Japan, Australia & the United States. I’m pretty sure I’ve missed a few more countries, but my point is that people were sharing knowledge & experiences like crazy in the event.

The open source culture, which is not relatively new in Malaysia, will be the upcoming trend in the next few years. As pointed out several times by the speakers from FOSS.my, the government played a major role in putting open source software up & down people’s throat as the new “in” thing. This year FOSS.my event, from my observation, has injected the right kind of spirit & gave hope to the open source aficionados that it’s not a weird thing to be advocating some good for once in their lifetime. And being weird is good, never bad. It makes you a little bit more interesting, in a weird way.

Although I was expecting a lot more technical talks, but putting forward conceptual talks about the open source movement was the right thing to do for the first time. I’m not sure it was done on purpose by the organisers, my guess for next year is that you will be expecting more than 250 people attending the event. It’s a longshot, but looking at the faces of the attendees & listening to them being so excited, it’s a foreseeable future. I hope next year, the FOSS.my committee would mix the talks more evenly, for example, Track 1 talking on concepts & Track 2 touching on technical aspects of open source movement & software. Maybe with this mixture, you will catch a good, balanced crowd & the attendees will be able to not miss the talks they like to attend. I’m saying this because I missed Toru Maesaka’s talk on memcached while learning the new hotness in source control called (gi)git with Kamal. But it’s all good.

As I hope the spirit of open source will never die, I also hope the direction & most importantly the intention of these 2 events will never fade away. Talking from experience, I’ve helped organised sevaral collaborative events in the past in the entertainment & action sports industry, I must say it was sad to see that some has creep their way to the dark side & failed to return to innocence.

Good job to the FOSS.my team. I salute you. And people, take a look at what happened.

Update: One more thing though, the food was a huge disappointment. Some were expecting some nasi briyani buffet or nasi lemak kinda thing. Subways? Ungh. It’s geek food, but not Malaysian food. Burp.