FOSSASIA, me and Open Source

Written on: November 30, 2016

Hello there,

In this article I will be writing about why I have decided to do the FOSSASIA community’s tasks for my Google Code-in participation and what this participation means to me. However, before I begin my talk on that I would like have a brief introduction of FOSSASIA.

FOSSASIA is an organization (situated in Asia, established in 2009) that has been supporting developers and makers of open source technology. This organization has a community of developers who do open source projects, like web applications, android applications and many more. However, FOSSASIA’s community isn’t only about developers making softwares but also about the events and summits that they have organized in countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Singapore. These events attracted tonnes of Asian developers, and will continue to do so in the future. To find out more about FOSSASIA visit their home page, http://fossasia.org.

It is also important to have an understanding of what open source is. In simple words it means that the software/application has it’s source code open to all. Developers can take it and do their own modifications. For a better explanation on what open source is, check the article here.

Before taking part in Google Code-in I also didn’t have a clear idea on what open source projects were and wasn’t sure on how to become part of it. It was only after working on GCI’s tasks did I finally begin to truly understand open source projects.

Every mentor organization has their own interesting projects, but FOSSASIA piqued my interest for few reasons. The main reason is simply because I found FOSSASIA projects more suitable for myself - they have quite a few web design and development tasks, a field that I can confidently say I am skilled at. My second reason is similar to the first, that is FOSSASIA has a few open source android applications. I have recently gotten into Android Development, and believe that the applications brought by FOSSASIA community would be a good workspace to start on increasing my knowledge of android development.

Below there are some of the github repositories that have strongly taken my interest. Presently I haven’t gone into details, but will hopefully look into it very soon.

Bodyapps - An android application that can do measurement of various body parts
Susi - A chat application that provides user support through implementing data science and machine learning concepts.
loklak search - It is a Distributed Social Media Message Search Server, which collects searches, downloads, and visualizes messages from various social resources

Their repositories don’t end with these, their community has worked and is still working on many other projects that are made available to all, more information can be found here and here.

Till now, all the projects I have done were just practice for the skills that I have already learnt. I only have a few projects that I could share to the world with my head held high and say that I have successfully made something great for the society. Actually, I don’t think I can say that for any of them. Making great softwares and application is fun and exciting, but it is not something that be done easily by one.

Therefore, communities like FOSSASIA means a lot to people like me, who want to do be able to contribute to our society by doing something big. It is common to have this misconception that doing something for the open source community doesn’t really benefit you, but that really isn’t true. By being able to contribute my work to a big community like FOSSASIA, it also means that I have successfully become a part of this big community, and this is something that one can definitely be proud of. Personally, now that I have seen all these open projects from FOSSASIA, I feel more motivated to learn new skills so that I am able to contribute something larger next time. Not only has it motivated but it has also given me a purpose behind some of my work and has helped me think of my next steps into the developer world.

I plan to keep myself a part of open source community forever. In future I would love be get skilled enough to do large contribution to FOSSASIA community as well as to many other open source communities. This is just the start of my journey on Open Source with FOSSASIA, there is still a long way to go.