Geeks and Nerds at a Cafe in Town
live blogging at 7:28pm on Saturday, Sep 15, 2007 [posted today, of course]
An early Saturday evening at a cafe in Phnom Penh
The rain has just stopped, I’m sitting at a cafe in town listening to tech guys talking about all things technology. Several tech savvies are embracing their laptops as free Wi-Fi is available, though you’ve got no rights to complain about the speed and reliability of the connection. Attending this kind of geeky meet-up you’ve got also to face the flash of light from digital camera. Certainly, it’s not a national or regional meeting, but almost anyone own a point and shoot digital camera.
Today, September the 15th, is Software Freedom Day. A few local tech folks organized a small gathering to meet people with one common interest: technology. Many people here attended the Clogger Summit in late August.
The meeting began with Thomas, a podcaster and media consultant from Germany, sharing his experience of WebMonday, which was first introduced by a German geek in the Silicon Valley, California.
The point we are talking about is what we want to do with this kind of meeting. What’s the name of this social gathering, when, where, and what to talk about. We have nearly 20 people who received an email invitation from two key people, who organized this event, Virak (self-claimed Phnom Penh Geek) and Phatry; not surprisingly, 16 people showed up; not too bad.
But what we’re mostly spending the time discussing now is what we’ll talk in the next meeting. We don’t seem to care about location and time; but Saturday evening sounds cool to everyone.
We’ll have our discussion available on the Web soon after this. We’ve been talking about using a new domain name or using the existing Wiki-based CloggerSummit. No worry, we’ve got many tech guys to help this out.
Who’s here:
Virak, Phatry, John Weeks, Vutha Morn, Mean Lux, Kakda Hok, Javier Sola, Tharat, Chantra Be, Thomas, Robert, Chan Theng, Heng Phan, Oro, and Lip Pong
I have an inclination in the idea of organizing a Barcamp-like gathering, where geeks and non-geeks can share and learn in an open environment. It looks nice to put it this way: Barcamb. Looking deep into how this kind of community establishment is quite interesting. It’d be great to see young Cambodians have a face-to-face meeting and talking with tech folks from Santa Clara Valley.
September 25th, 2007 19:53
CNN did a story about the increase in Cambodian blogs. Thought you might be interested in how the American press is writing about it:
CNN Story
September 29th, 2007 16:22
Thanks. I read the story; it’s written by Cambodian-born AP reporter Ke Munthit. I’m aware that this article been in the New York Times as well as International Herald Tribune. This is very interesting!