Time just flies! August meant a lot of travelling for me, as well as getting my hands dirty with the making of the Gdium and shipping out all the Software Freedom Day goodies. Yes Software Freedom Day is just around the corner, on Saturday September 20th and from what I can read on the mailing list everybody is hard working on its preparation.
Nevertheless I had the opportunity to visit Lemote office twice, get some special deals for the Beijing LUG and on my last trip to Shanghai even stop there and meet the nice people from Shanghai LUG and the Dining Philosophers.
It was for me the opportunity to see in real Lullideath with whom we regularly converse on IRC (and discover she was a girl…), meet again with Geek, one of the founders and core members of the Shanghai LUG and a few other great and enthusiastic people from Shanghai. Amazingly there was even a French guy who used to teach Mandriva at Supinfo in Qingdao! Among the many topics we discussed one was about Software Freedom Day in Shanghai and trying to get both LUGs coordinate and do something together, the other one was about regular monthly meetings in Shanghai which today are not so regular. Shanghai LUG has been increasing its meeting frequency from twice a year to quarterly events this year and the Dining Philosophers do meet monthly but not at regular dates. I do believe one of the success of Beijing LUG has been to be regular on our meetings and have a stable meeting date and point: every second Tuesday of the month at the same place. Location tend to be difficult to find and keep, and we have had to change yearly based on group size, budget and convenience. I sincerely hope Shanghai LUG and Dining Philosophers can join forces to have those regular meetings. It can start as just dinners and evolve into something more technical down the road. With companies such as Intel, Lemote, ST Microelctronics, HP, raincity, PowerE2E and many others it should be fairly simple to find speakers and topics that attracts the Shanghai Linux and Open Source crowd.
So good luck to you guys and hopefully I can return for your next regular monthly meeting!