I love presentations where the audience has lots of questions and comments. Not only does it mean the audience is engaged but the audience's questions (and their answers!) make the presentation richer.
So I'm quite excited that the GNOME Asia Vietnamese conference attendees ask lots of questions. (It's quite different from other Asian countries I've been to.) I've been asked:
- What is a desktop?
- What's the difference between GNOME and KDE?
- How old are you?
- What development tools would I use to work on free software?
- Is this your first time in Vietnam?
- As a woman, do you think IT is boring?
- Where can I download GNOME?
- How long are you staying here?
- What do you think of the free software community in Vietnam?
- Are there tools to help blind users use GNOME? (The guy who asked, who is blind, won the laptop running GNOME during the Lucky Draw. How cool is that?)
- What did you study at the university?
- Don't you want to sit at the front of the room?
- Do you work at a university campus?
- … and many, many more.
I've been asked questions during my presentation, during others' presentations, in the hall, … some of them make me want to ask the asker a bunch of questions in return …
There’s such an innocence about those questions, it’s almost funny.
in response to:
Stormy [Moderator] 1 month ago
It’s amazing.
I especially liked the stat about how:
* paying for things via mobile phones
* enabled people to have savings account
* which enabled them to have an emergency stash
* which increased their income over all as emergencies didn’t decimate them
I think the study was from Kenya.
http://opensourcetogo.blogspot.com/2009/10/communication-driven-economy.html#disqus_thread
:
Whether it’s your cherished iPhone, Nokia cell phone or Dell keyboard, it was likely made and assembled in Asia by workers who have few rights, and often toil under sweatshop-like conditions, activists say.
By the time a gadget reaches Apple’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York City or any other U.S. retailer, it may have passed through the hands of a heavily indebted Filipina migrant worker on the graveyard shift in Taiwan, a Taiwanese “quality control” worker who’ll soon be fired without warning, and a young Chinese worker clocking 80-hour weeks on a final assembly line, at less than a dollar an hour.
http://www.truthout.org/1122095
Hopefully getting more people involved in free software will enable them to work directly on projects and get paid directly for their work from the Western companies consuming their code.
They can also more easily create their own hardware/software solutions, assuming their government enables them to start a business easily.