Sunday we had our 4th and largest Barcamp in Saigon. About 570 showed up to the premier free and open tech event in Vietnam. Here are 5 of the things I took away from it.

1. The most people sign up in the last few days before the event.

(if the below graph doesn't load, try reloading the page)

Traditionally, we would get a 50% show rate of the registrations but this time we had 999 people sign up and 570 show up. Without any setup for cross-checking registrations we don't know how many showed up without pre-registering. Because so many signed up after we settled financial calculations, it wasn't possible to accommodate the unexpected people with free food.

2. Barcamp is a recruiting event. Sponsors came with recruitment in mind. Non-sponsors can also try to muscle their way in. Giving a presentation is a great way to advertise your company and the people who ask attentive questions might be good hiring candidates. But giving a presentation as an individual is also a great way to advertise your hireability to companies.

3. Morning rush - everyone should have an equal chance in getting their presentation on the schedule as long as they show up to the opening. But it's kind of chaotic. When the dust settles, most sessions are in the morning while the afternoon schedule is sparser. A lot of people end up leaving before the closing ceremony and t-shirt giveaway, not that there's a problem giving out all shirts. Other Barcamps do it differently. Some use a voting system and I've thought about some implementations for next time.

4. Serial event organizing needs (infra)structure to make organizing less stressful over time. Without huge Google or Microsoft campuses in town, we're lucky we do have the large (although far) and impressive campus of RMIT to depend on. If we want to go Yangon-scale, we may need a totally different location.

As a tech-heavy event with talks on web scalability and high throughput, it's no good when the official web server falls over under load (I blame Windows). Good internet connectivity at the end is also a must.

Other skills the organizing team needs: Fund-raising, logistics, graphic design, legal, and the ability to get the word out.

5. Outsiders are awesome. I'm really grateful for the guys who brought Barcamp organizing experience from Cambodia, China, Southeast Asia, Germany, etc. to Saigon to share with us. Barcamps are often bootstrapped by foreigners. Outsiders also expose us to new ideas in technology. But I was happy to see at least some local ideas find an audience in the foreign attendees.

Barcamp isn't just about the sessions. It's as much about people coming together and sharing ideas outside of the sessions. The organizers' task isn't to control who speaks, unlike traditional conferences. Our job is to provide a platform for everyone to share knowledge with anyone who is interested. The trend, I hope, is for more people to realize that they do have knowledge that's interesting and worth sharing and to give them the opportunity to speak in front of an audience and further develop their ideas when putting together their presentations, and also get feedback from strangers that they otherwise would have never met.

Some newspapers reported about Sunday's event (in Vietnamese):
http://dddn.com.vn/2011072504147776cat187/rmit-viet-nam-to-chuc-thanh-co...

[This blog post is a rewrite of just the main points due to my baby Macbook Pro dying while I was distracted.]

Drupal content types with CCK make it quite easy to add any number of defined fields to an 'object', and with multiple/unlimited values for a field or with node references it's possible to make a Drupal node 'two-dimensional'.

Sometimes you need more. Sometimes you want tabular data, a table, to be part of a node. If the table always has the same dimensions, and at least the same columns for each node, then the above can work through node references and views.

What if you want to add a different two-dimensional table to nodes of a content type, but without knowing the number or labels for the columns and rows beforehand.  For example, you might want to attach a pricing table to a node, with multiple products and multiple ways to price each product.  An example of that might be 5 t-shirt designs, where shirts are priced based on size and quantity ordered.

[This is the third post about Accessing Facebook in Vietnam] 

Lately, ISPs in Vietnam has begun randomly blocking Facebook again after a period of openness.  When it's blocked, even accessing Facebook via their Lisp4 server (or using the Saigonist DNS server) doesn't work.

But there are a number of apps, both web-based and desktop apps, which integrate with Facebook to different extents.  These apps, once you login to them with your Facebook account, can basically get your Facebook updates for you without requiring access to Facebook.

One such app is Seesmic, which has both a web and a desktop client.  Seesmic connects to a numer of social networks and I use it for reading my Twitter feed, with a custom hack to fix a serious problem with disappearing Tweets.  But once you login to Seesmic and connect it to your Facebook account, you can see your Facebook feed as well as messages.  That's enough for most people, most of the time.

Other desktop apps that can connect to Facebook are Bubbles and Hootsuite, but I wasn't able to get Hootsuite to connect to my Facebook account.

Another less convenient way is to use Opera's online demo of their Opera Mini browser.  It's a Java app and you use it like you're using a phone, but it will connect to Facebook for you (unless your browser doesn't let Java make network connections).

When I saw that Diesel released a desktop app called Excellbook as part of a marketing campaign called Be Stupid At Work, I was hoping it would also work in bypassing the Facebook block.  It's an Adobe AIR app, which requires installing Adobe AIR, and is generally a piece of crap.  Even if you can get it to connect, it will require a connection to Facebook still and so it's not so useful.  Nice idea, terrible execution and yet another example of a bad Adobe AIR app.

Thanks to all the responses from people who listened to the short audio I posted the other day of a man "speaking strange Vietnamese".  I got all kinds of answers from "it's Vietnamese" to "it sounds like Thai mixed with Vietnamese" to "it sounds like a Thai or Cambodian man speaking Vietnamese".  Some people actually understood the content quite clearly, which talks about Jesus, while others couldn't understand it at all.

In fact, the segment was neither a man speaking Vietnamese nor a foreigner speaking Vietnamese with an accent.  This man was speaking his native language, which is Mường, a language closely related to Vietnamese, and perhaps closer to the origins of the Vietnamese language.  The Mường people are basically ethnically Vietnamese but live in the mountainous areas of North-Central provinces such as Hoa Binh and Thanh Hoa.

Although considered a separate language from Vietnamese, many Vietnamese speakers will find they can understand much of the Mường language without studying it.