Grants:TPS/Sky Harbor/OpenSourceBridge13/Report

Event name

Open Source Bridge 2013, Portland, Oregon, United States

Description of your participation

From June 18-21, 2013, I was a participant at Open Source Bridge 2013, where I gave a presentation on the open source culture in the Philippines, and how cultural congruences between open source culture and Filipino culture may lead to Filipinos embracing the open source movement. The presentation is based on an academic paper (here) that I submitted for a philosophy class at the Ateneo de Manila University in February of this year.

Aside from presenting at the conference, I was able to interact not only with the other participants who were affiliated with Wikimedia (such as Alolita, Sucheta, Sumana, Roan and others), but also got to meet and interact with people from the greater open source movement, some of whom I now keep in contact with via Twitter or Facebook. As I tweeted immediately after the conference: "I thought I would share something at Open Source Bridge to change people. Instead, it turns out that it has changed me." ([1])

What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events?

Open Source Bridge is actually the first open source conference that I have attended which is not related to Wikimedia (neither the Chapters Conference nor Wikimania), so I was able to appreciate the fact that as a conference, it was organized very well. I liked the fact that there was a dedicated hacker space just for people to talk and interact with one another, the sessions were facilitated very well, and I also appreciated the fact that they were able to put redundancy to their advantage: having duplicates of presentation available on-call (and Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adaptors for us Mac users) made the conference move efficiently.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

I feel that my presentation was appreciated well by attendees, especially since now they know what the open source movement looks like in the Philippines, particularly from a cultural standpoint. While open source is growing in the Philippines, we're still not there yet, and the lessons I will be taking back from Open Source Bridge will really help grow the movement in the Philippines. (To that end, I actually hope to hold a similar event for the benefit of open source communities in the Philippines at some point in the future, so we have opportunities to talk with one another in the same way.)

Detail of expenditures:

• Plane ticket (MNL-PDX-SFO-MNL): USD 1500.60
• Accommodation: USD 166.70 (excludes 17% hotel tax)

Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency): USD 282.70