FAD APAC KL 2016

FAD APAC for budget planning has been happened during two days 9th-10th of July in Kuala Lumpur with a lot of exciting discusions (something really hot 😉

Day 0:

My flight was booked lately so I have to transit in HCMC (the direct flight fare from Hanoi to KL was increased so much) and I came to KLIA a bit late. After a almost 2 hours to pass through Immigration gate, I decided to take a taxi to the hotel. It was a bit late so I did not want to look for routes on the map (I also had not got Internet connection on my phone). Finally, I met Zsun, Prima and other participants at the hotel!

Day 1:

Day 1 started with our discussions about current issues in each APAC country.

The most important for me is leadership status in APAC region. I have worked as the only APAC regional leader for years. Sometimes, due by the day life, I could not respond in time to everything as others expected. Especially, since I decided to jump into another big new open source project, OpenCPS, a half year ago, my spare time have been less. That’s why I really liked to delegate APAC leadership to a group of active Fedora contributors in APAC, the ones attended three last APAC FADs for budget planning. I am still here to support everyone. However, I would like others to be more active to take the leadership to push APAC region toward.

The next interesting topic we discussed in the morning is how to do more activities within APAC, while keep the region connected to the world. We discussed the idea of running bi-annual FUDCons (proposed by gnokii). The ideas behind this is to save a half of money for running FUDCon every other year ($15k per year, at this moment) for supporting APAC people to attend Flock every year ($7.5k per year). Annual FAD can be organized as a separated event in a year and mixed to FUDCon another year. Some travel subsidy could be saved for other useful activities/events (or added to Flock support for APAC people – raised to ~$9k per year).

During the first day, we did review the whole APAC FY2017 budget to cut it down to the final allocated budget, $11,500. After a lot of adjustments, it was cut down to $12,200 ($700 difference). The updated budget table could be found on the wiki here with about $3k left for media and $4,200 left for events/activities in APAC budget until the end of FY2017.

Day 2:

During the day 2, we discussed about FY2018 budget for media, swag, events and activities.

Some of important fixed items were listed as below:

  • Swags ($1,000), DVD ($1,500), Release parties ($1,000) for 2 releases: $3,500 * 2 releases = $7,000
  • FAD for budget planning: $5,000
  • SEA translation sprints (for approx 10 teams): $3,000
  • SFD 2017: $1,000
  • Some events in India: $1,000
  • Some events impact to the whole region:
    • Hong Kong Open Source
    • Barcamp Bangkok
    • Barcamp Yangoon
    • COSCup
  • Then fianally, we decided to support COSCup with $4,000 to send gnokii there to re-connect Fedora community in China, Hongkong and Taiwan.
  • Total requested funds: $20,000

The whole budget table could be found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_KualaLumpur_2016/APAC/Budget:2017-2018 not has been really updated (someone will surely upload our final spreadsheet onto that page).

We also have a lot of discussion about how to grow up the APAC community. Some of them are really hot 😉 but most of them are quite effective for the whole region.

The FAD was ended at about 3:00 PM for sending some people (include me) to the airport to catch the late flights back to our cities for a coming work week.

Thank you all for attending and continuously contributing to Fedora. Especially thanks Izhar for hosting us, for welcoming us to our home with that really nice local dinner.

See you all everywhere 🙂