looking east

Today I was asked to come up with a time schedule for my master thesis. I have been happily coding code at codegent for my internship during the last two months, and though I have started planning my thesis at content level, I have never thought of a schedule. Well, I thought of it a bit, and then I decided to write a blog post instead. So, where am I now? What am I going to do? And where does this lead?

Where am I now?

For the last two months I have been observing, asking questions, reading blogs, browsing websites, and collecting my thoughts about software development in Thailand and China in general, and open source software in particular. I have been trying to find out how software development is being accomplished, if there is a open source community and how it is organised, and where open source development actually happens. And I believe I have come up with a few interesting discoveries and ideas. Most of these are inspired by informal discussions at Barcamp Bangkok and with my colleagues at work.

From an academic point of view, I am receiving support for my thesis by Dr. Pongsak Hoontrakul, Senior Research Fellow at Sasin, Chulalongkorn University. He and his team have generously offered to help me to get in touch with some of the key players in the (academic and business) open source world in Thailand and China.

Next steps

Currently, Julie and I are planning to organise regular web technology sessions in Bangkok to make up for the lack of such a forum so far. This will definitely be a great place to meet the “local geeks” and I believe that there will be plenty to discover for me through these sessions. I am also planning to attend the Asia OSS Conference & Showcase 2008 in Guangzhou, China in March, though I’ll be skipping the 2008 Linux Developer Symposium China which takes place in Beijing in two weeks.

In the weeks to come, I also am planning to write a number of blog posts about software and open source development in Thailand to organise my thoughts and to put together what I have learned so far.

I believe that at the current stage, I need to gain a more concise image of open source development in Asia, especially China and Thailand in order to re(de)fine my thesis topic and to start “serious” research in April. I am using the term re(de)fine, because I am not sure if the topic I have originally proposed (”Redflag Linux”) is the best choice after what I have been experiencing in the last two months.

I have finally been able to get in touch with some interesting open source developers here in Thailand and I have seen how hard it is to find these people. The person who helped me find these contacts is Neng (thank you, Neng!), a colleague from work who introduced me to some of his friends at Barcamp. What I am trying to say is: With Redflag Linux being a product with a very limited scope, it will be even harder to find a programmer in China were I don’t have any contacts and where I hardly speak the language. So, I’d prefer to slightly adapt my topic from “Redflag Linux in China” to “Open Source software in China and Thailand”, but I’ll need to speak to Basile about this first.

Impediments

Having been a scrum master has taught me to ask about impediments. So, what are the impediments for my master thesis?

I’d say my major impediment is language. I am having a hard time speaking Thai though I have lived here for over a year in the past and I have discovered that despite English being the lingua franca in computing, it still seems to be a major issue in Thailand. As I have already discovered during my last stay in Thailand, most of the Thais have a good written expertise of the language, but they are either too shy or not comfortable to speak English. I don’t believe that China is going to be much different different and my Chinese by far worse than my Thai.

The second impediment, as stated above, is meeting the right people which, at least in Thailand, is harder than I thought. I discovered that I cannot simply browse the web and parse it for a couple of interesting names as I have originally planned. Why? Impediment number 1. I can’t read the websites (yes, even in Thai), so I depend on meeting people in person. This is why I am planning to attend some conferences and other “geek gatherings”.

Outlook

I will first need to decide on my topic and then start focusing on my research, organising my trips to China, my interviews and so on. As for the next month I’ll continue to be happily coding, I still have some time to make these important decisions.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 7:37 pm and is filed under asia, academic, thoughts, open source, community, barcampbangkok, event, geeks.