I went to Beijing last weekend for the three-days GNOME Asia event. I was there not only for promoting KDE, but also to promote open source concept in mainland China.
Open source communities in mainland China are not as active as the European communities, neither GNOME nor KDE has a very good growing environment there. I’d rather regard it as an open source in general event in mainland China instead of a GNOME Asia summit.

Around 300 attenders went to the talks and BoFs, about 90% of them were local Chinese. There were employees from SUN, Novel, Nokia, Motorola, Redhat, and some Chinese local companies. There were students and opensource community members, and most of them were using open source operating systems. Although there are half of the talks and BoFs were introducing pure open source concept, histories and current situations, it is rather understandable that Asia people, especially mainland Chinese need this kind of education. As I introduced the scripting concept in Plasma and Amarok, there were also speakers focused on development and improvement of the current projects. About 30% of the speeches related to GNOME applications. ( the schedule is here: http://www.gnome.asia/en/schedule/ )

When talking about GNOME, many KDE guys may regard it slow and ugly, but I still enjoyed sharing ideas and different perspectives with the GNOME developers. KDE and GNOME are not really competing with each other. We learn from each other, and we fight for freedom together, especially now in China.

Freeflying and I talked about we would probably hold KDE Asia or KDE Asia Pacific some time appropriate in the future. We would learn from the failure and successful experience from GNOME Asia community and we should introduce the beauty of KDE to the Asia users definitely.

I found the “western developers” or the “far east users” actually didn’t communicate well, I will write more English blogs for the KDE guys to introduce the situation in Asia as I wrote many Chinese blogs to promote KDE. I’d like to share my point of view from the perspective of a local Chinese KDE developer.

Here are some photos token by the volunteers during the two-days-event, and token by me for the last day Beijing trip.

Booth area with people

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Firefox and Sun in the booth area

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Talks in a small conference room

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

The conference rooms were awesome. And from the European standard, you cannot imagine how cheap they cost.

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Stormy Peters in her talk

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Kate was promoting Maemo ( hey guys, n810s )

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

I was promoting KDE, HAHA.

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

One day trip in Beijing

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing