My China FOO Presentation (一起建桥梁)

Update [2007-11-11, 21:14]: The slides are here (PDF 416.8K)

This Friday (9 November) marks the first China FOO event in Beijing. O'Reilly Media is gearing up for the event and I've confidence it will be a huge success. I was invited, but unfortunately I'm not able to go. I was even going to be brave and attempt to give a lightening talk demonstrating how poor my Chinese is! But then I realized I could contribute regardless.

Lightening talks are constrained to five minutes, but I've cheated here. I worry that when you deal with a multilingual environment, one has to allow for people's internal translation rates. And I've of course tried to cover too much ground. In English AND Chinese. To whit:

• Free and open source software is important to China's future growth. (开放代码软件对中国未来的发展很重要)
• It will allow China to deliver better software faster.
• It will allow China to build better companies more quickly.

BUT ...

• Language defines culture. (语言创造文化)
• Our community cultures are different, and we need to understand each other's cultures to build the relationships to allow us to build a bigger community.

All in eight minutes. With examples.

I'm not entirely happy with the audio over the slides. (My apologies.) This was a first exploration with Keynote, iMovie, my old G4 laptop and a video camera. I have some ideas for next time. Heart felt thanks to Jethro Cramp in Beijing for all his help with the Chinese translation. I've been learning Chinese, but the vocabulary needed was a little beyond my current state. All mispronunciations are obviously mine.

If you prefer Google Video to YouTube, you can find the presentation here.

谢谢你