Awesome community of volunteers … all types of volunteers

The GNOME Asia Summit has an awesome group of Vietnamese volunteers this year – over 50 of them! What distinguishes them from most free software events is that they are mostly women and mostly business students! They are also extremely enthusiastic, full of laughter and always eager to help or ask questions to learn more.

These students have been working hard to get the event ready, they show up at 7:30 every morning, they spend all day interpreting for the speakers and the foreign attendees and they are planning a party for speakers and volunteers this evening. They've been doing a great job of interpreting – especially given that they aren't familiar with free software and technical terms and given that most of us speakers are not used to working with interpreters and speak way too quickly and long. And they still have time to ask lots of questions, make the speakers feel welcome and to laugh a lot.

The GNOME community is a richer one, and GNOME Asia is a great event, because of them.

(As soon as Emily Chen or Andy Fitzsimmon's load their pictures of the volunteer meeting to Flickr, I'll add a picture of them.)