What We Do

We bring amazing people together to create, develop, design and make things with Open Technologies - hardware and software - and share our work for the benefit of all. We organize Open Tech summits, science hack labs, meetups and coding programs with developers, designers and contributors. We also incubate projects into companies to support the development of a sustainable FOSS ecosystem.

Why We Do It

Our main goal is to improve people's lives by sharing Open Tech solutions. We want to see that information technology and science has a positive impact on our society. We believe this can be achieved if people have access to digital tools and knowledge. Open Technologies offer free and open access. At FOSSASIA we are excited how sharing is possible on all layers from software, hardware and design to data and knowledge and we work hard to enable people to participate in the sharing society, expand knowledge, tools and opportunities, freedom of communication and expression for everyone.

Who We Are

We are an organization of people from all continents based in Asia. We want to see progress and improvements of people's lives in Asia and everywhere. We are developers, designers, event organizers and contributors who want to learn and share ideas, create and make digital software tools and hardware, that benefit people around the world. FOSSASIA was founded in 2009 by Hong Phuc Dang and Mario Behling.

1. Before you apply for a Program: Show Your Interest and Dedication by Contributing in the Community

There are many ways to join the Free and Open Source Technology community. Here are some ideas what you can do to participate in the community. Students who are interested to apply for our coding programs should have an active understanding of Free and Open Source software and FOSSASIA and experience of the technologies used.

• Follow and join FOSSASIA on GitHub.
• Subscribe to FOSSASIA mailing list and newsletter.
• Follow FOSSASIA on social media channels and spread information distributed there.
• Star FOSSASIA repositories you like to show your support.
• Join the FOSSASIA chat channels regularly and help people who have questions.
• Fork FOSSASIA repositories and play around with the project.
• Set up projects and test them.
• File bug reports and submit feature requests.
• Solve a bug or implement a feature.
• Do a FOSSASIA mini-project.
• Write unit tests for FOSSASIA projects.
• Tweet or write a blog article about a FOSSASIA project.
• Make a video how to setup or use one of FOSSASIA's applications.
• Organize a developer meetup on eventyay.com and announce it to the FOSSASIA community (e.g. @fossasia in Twitter).
• Start a local developer group and announce activities on the Internet.
• Participate in a tech conference and present a FOSSASIA project.

2. Applying for Coding Programs: Show your skills and abilities by making making contributions in a project.

Show that you understand your project by making code contributions. Show that you understand how to implement features and solve bugs. Feature yourself as someone who knows strategies to master challenges. Also include information on yourself.

• Tell us about yourself, your activities in Open Source projects, university, your blog and background.
• Tell us why you picked this project, how would you use it?
  
• Include information on bugs or features that you have already solved in the project.
• Describe what you know already and what you believe you need to learn in order to implement these features.
• Describe what you believe needs to be done for the project in detail.
• Create wireframes and design samples for how the user interface might look like.
• List the features that you believe need to be implemented and do not forget to add your own ideas here.
• Make a development plan and tell us what tools and platform will you be using for development.
• Create a timeline and outline how will you spend the time over the course of the program, decide which features are most important and include them early on in the plan.
• Decide which features are optional, so you can drop them if you run out of time. At the end we’d rather see something working with just a few features, than lots of features which are all incomplete.
• Outline test cases and add information on unit test and possibly test frameworks you will use during your project.
• Tell us about what challenges might come up, that could delay your plan and make it more difficult.
• Please list resources where you can learn what you need to implement features (do this separately for each main feature).

3. During the program: Most importantly contribute code daily. Also share your progress with the community publicly and provide updates of your progress on project channels.

Continuously share information on your progress and challenges pro-actively and do not wait for mentors to get in touch. Be active in communication channels and mailing lists and submit updates. The idea of our coding programs is that students support project development with their work and do research to master challenges themselves (rather than expecting mentors to teach them). Other specific expectations are below.

• Make a daily scrum meetup with fellow developers or provide a daily scrum standup email each morning.
• Provide a weekly blog article with screenshots, media etc. each Thursday.
• Update the planning and design documents, wireframes and issues in milestones (preferably on GitHub).
• Organize a meetup in each month of your coding program and publish pictures and reports online.
• Make a webcast about the software you are working on before the end of the program.
• Provide documentation how to install and use the software.
• Include unit tests in your software application.
• Provide an updated presentation in an editable Open Format of your project at the end of each month and post it on a blog.
• Participate in the annual FOSSASIA Open Technology Summit and present your project.
• Help with FOSSASIA pre-university student programs, add relevant coding tasks for our projects and support students to solve tasks as a mentor.
• Sign the FOSSASIA contributors agreement that your code is Open Source and usable by the organization.