Talking with Jerome Gotangco (Philippines)
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007Monday 30th July, Jerome visited the CNF-AUF center in Bach Khoa and met with a few Hanoilug members. We asked him about the organization of Linux user groups (LUG) in the Philippines and learnt that there is one major LUG that resulted from the merging of several smaller LUG about two years ago. The Philippines LUG has about 370 members that pay a small fee annually. Four of the seven major cities of the Philippines are represented in the LUG’s board. LUG’s people in the South of the Philippines (Cebu Island, etc.) have a strong expertise in “calling centers” (IT support through a telephone line, for US customers for example) and have support from the local Chamber of Commerce. They meet about every two weeks, while LUG people from the North of the Philippines have more “virtual” activities : meeting in chat-rooms, using mailing-lists, etc.
There is a strong support for Open source softwares in the Philippines universities. Example : gcc is widely used to compile source softwares and Unix tools are quite familiar with IT staff.
We discussed also experience from Jerome Gotangco with the Ubuntu’s local teams. We verified through launchpad that there is actually no Vietnamese translation group : all Vietnamese translations are made by individuals who do not coordinate their works. There would be the need to establish a Vietnamese translation group and register to Launchpad. More issues were discussed and, later, we all get to “hai Xom” to have food and beer together.

EDIT : from left to right, Thao, Tuan, David, Jerome (with the ubuntu T-Shirt), Nghia, Quoc Thai - VD Quynh (behind the camera, not in the picture)

