Barcampbangkok2, pictorama!

(A more serious post later, but for now, pictorama!)

Barcampbangkok2 was held at the beautiful Chulalongkorn University campus this weekend, known as Chula. I want to attend Chula because their official color is PINK.

Dedicated volunteers made a chain gang to bring food from the van to hungry barcampers. In Thailand, we have Thai food at Barcamp! Aren’t you jealous?

Atthit from Google India told us that the most important thing for a successful company is to solve a problem that users care about. The most popular talk at Barcampbangok2 was “How to get a Japanese girlfriend (by a real Japanese girl) by @31o5. It was standing room only!

(You can see the slides from her talk here. PS. Most of this applies to dating any kind of girl, not just Japanese ones! )

Muriel Bowie and I led discussion sessions on “How to encourage more Thai developers to contribute to open source software” and “Why foreigners in Thailand should learn Thai”. I told foreigners that if we want to know why Thais don’t contribute to OSS, maybe we should STFU when they’re answering, instead of interrupting them to give them our opinion about why they’re not contributing. (This is quite similar to what happens when you have a discussion about why they’re aren’t more women in computer science.) This made some people feel very jai ron (angry). Muriel helpfully encouraged shy Thais to speak up by asking “You — what’s your problem?” We were a hit with both foreigners and Thais.

Thanks to Mozilla-sponsored free beer, many Barcampers got really drunk on Saturday night!

The End.