hey ... I want to a little open source conference here in Tokyo over the weekend (about a thousand people over two days). There were 4 talks on OpenSolaris (DTrace and xVM, EeePC, OSUM, Globalization). The sessions were all full (about 50 people each), which was very encouraging. Everything took place in Japanese, but Ohta-san wrote his EeePC slides in English so I put them on the Advocacy files page because I know the EeePC is popular in other regions.
EeePC http://opensolaris.org/os/community/advocacy/files/OpenSolaris_on_EeePC_OSC_spring_u2.pdf Images: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/opensolaris_at_the_tokyo_osc In general, the Japanese-speaking community in Tokyo has been growing consistently and it's now noticeable. A variety of contributions are coming in, there is a new distribution, there is a repository, there are regular interactions with other communities, non-Sun people are presenting at events, university students are getting involved and forming new groups on campus, the Japan OSUG has started holding technical study groups on the weekends in addition to their regular monthly meetings, the ug-jposug list has over 200 people and activity is constant, and it's quite normal to get 80 or so people for OpenSolaris events and the bigger sessions draw about 125. As this Japanese community grows, we are trying to connect it to the many international communities in Tokyo so we can bridge to English and go global. It's getting interesting here. The OpenSolaris community is obviously still pretty small globally, but it's important that we step back and quantify what we have because I'm convinced we are doing more than we are even aware of. Let us know what's going on where you are ... Jim
