My first travelling experience to Myanmar

Yangon, Myanmar is one of my wish list destination country and finally I could make it.

I got a chance to attend the BarCamp Yangon in January 31 and February 1 2016. It was my first time to participate the BarCamp in different country but attended many BarCamp events in Cambodia. So what is it BarCamp? It is an international network of user-generated conference or another word is self-organized conference that primarily focused around technology, social media, startup, community works and so on. They are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants.

I attended the BarCamp Yangon as a Fedora Ambassador APAC and got the chance to provide 2 topics talks for IT Automation with Ansible and How to Contribute to Fedora Project. There were around 2500 participants came on the first day and as well as similar amount on the second day, most of them came with passionated to learn and explore about new topics, lessons or ideas which is different from some experiences that I had with other BarCamp.

First Day 1 in Yangon, I arrived around 4pm local time and head to hotel. Thanks to Pravin who booked a great hotel which provided the very good services and friendly staffs.

BarCamp Day 1

We were instructed to go very early at 8:30AM in the morning at the Myanmar ICT (MICT) Park to be able register our topics that we wish to talk for the BarCamp Yangon. Finally we arrived early as the hotel and venue is very closer and on the time of the event opening ceremony and everything were spoken in Burmese.

After the opening, we were able to get the topic registration forms and spending 20 minutes to register, waiting for the call from organizer but finally our topics were accepted to talk on the first day. I went to a few topics but these were in Burmese.

My first topic was on the IT Automation and Configuration Management with Ansible. There were a few people able to catch up about the tool and also my English.

BarCamp Day 2

It was almost the same structure, we were instructed to follow the same processes by taking the forms and waiting for the topic acceptant. Luckily again, our topics were accepted to talk for the second day. I was giving my second topic on “How to Contribute to Fedora and Benefit for Students”.

Myanmar Fedora Community Meetup Day 3

We arranged a meetup with the local Fedora community group to discuss on the:

• Fedora project translation
• Fedora 23 Release Party (it was a late party)
• Leap talks on How students could contribute to the Fedora project
• Pravin talks on the Fedora Globalization
• Yan introduce the Fedora Installation Workshop

Here are the highlights about activities for the last two days at BarCamp Yangon and other activities:

• Unlikely all my topics were conducted in English but I have to find the Burmese translator to translate all my talks. My friend Pravin were able to talk in English better way.
• Pravin were able to talk about what he interested and intended to talk on the Unicode which is a hot topic in Myanmar.
• We were able to distributed almost 50 Fedora DVDs to different participants within our talks.
• I were able to meet many old friends who were in the BarCamp organizing team who were helping us a lot during the time in Yangon.
• Pravin and I have similar favourite about the foods, places to visit and some other common points as a husband.
• My flights were delayed 3 out of 4 times from Phnom Penh to Yangon. It was my first worst flights to stay in the airports longer than 9 hours.