EpiHack Myanmar 2015

Join fellow developers, open data enthusiasts and health specialists at EpiHack 2015 in Yangon, Myanmar, to uncover new ways to collect, track, and share data on emerging disease outbreaks. The event will held from January 18 till 22 2016.

What is <EpiHack/> ?

EpiHack is a health focused hackathon bringing together health and technology specialists to collaboratively produce ideas, tools and a network that can act as a first line of surveillance and response for disease outbreaks.

EpiHack Myanmar is the latest in a series of events implemented in partnership with the Skoll Global Threat Fund in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Tanzania and Brazil.

Why Myanmar?

Connectivity is quickly increasing across Myanmar with the arrival of new mobile providers and growing investments in infrastructure. Mobile and web technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to optimise and streamline the collection, dissemination, aggregation and visualisation of disease related information. EpiHack will build on such technologies to improve disease surveillance and outbreak response in Myanmar.

This event is by invitation only. Please register here. To keep informed on EpiHack Myanmar and EpiHack developments, follow @EpiHack on Twitter and join the EpiHack community on Facebook.

Also join the world's biggest unconference Barcamp Yangon right after Epihack 2015.

Barcamp Yangon 2013

Whoever said "Change is slow" hasn't been to Myanmar (also known as Burma). In seven short months, the country transformed into the something I now barely recognize. Getting Myanmar visa never been this easy, many direct flights to Yangon from all international hubs in South East Asia everyday. The Yangon airport is chocked with tourists, the prices just went through the roof. This time I didn't bring any crisp, unmarked hundred dollar notes to haggle for better exchange rate with the punters on the Yangon streets.

Walking out of the airport, I realized Myanmar has switched to driving on left side of the road. The roads are clogged with second-hand Japanese minivans, imported SUV's and decades old taxis jostling for space. For a moment, I longed for the small colorful Mandalay jeeps plying the quiet Yangon streets at sedate pace. Stuck in the traffic jam, I killed time by counting different cars with left and right steering wheels.

If you get stuck in the traffic jam, you can use the 3G mobile network to catch up with your email. Mobile SIM cards doesn't cost US$2000 anymore. Mobile SIM cards with data plan can be rented for $10 a day. If you are lucky you might even find $20 voice only tourist SIM cards. Mobile connections are still very expensive, it costs US$150-$200 for mobile connection. Perhaps it might soon change when the telecommunications market opens up in next few years.

Back in Myanmar after two years for Barcamp Yangon 2013, the biggest community organized un-conference in the world. This year over 6000 participants are expected to attend this event. Barcamps are hugely popular in this country, the event addresses the digital divide with open sharing and even help kick-start technology entrepreneurship activities.

Few years ago, young students would attend to use the free wireless internet access at Barcamp Yangon. Internet access was restricted to educational institutions and Internet Cafes. Today you can get internet connection in restaurants, cafes and even at home. It is easy to buy personal computers, smart phones and tablets locally. There will be explosive growth of internet users in Myanmar.

During Barcamp Yangon 2011 I kick-started the effort to translate Firefox web browser into Burmese. I have been mentoring the local Mozilla Myanmar community ever since. It had been a long road, we had many problems: building Mozilla community, finding volunteers for translations and deploying right web based localization tools. This trip to Myanmar would give me a chance to work with the community and resolve translation issues that are blocking Firefox Burmese release.

Barcamp Yangon 2013

Once again the barcamp organizers and volunteers efficiently organized such a large event. The event attracted significant
sponsorship this year, the talks in main rooms were marketing pitches from those sponsors. There were some interesting talks 'Make the web speak your language' and 'Women in technology' panel discussion. It was good to see many international participants at the event, they were in Myanmar on vacation and decided to attend the event. The Q&A session with the international barcampers was a good experience, it provided an opportunity for young Burmese barcampers to interact and get perspective on wide ranging subjects.

In my talk How to become a Firefox Hacker I shared how one can leverage existing web development skills to contribute to Firefox. Mozilla Myanmar localization lead contributor Zinmin shared the Firefox localization process and gave a demo of Pootle web based translation tool. The participants were encouraged to join the Mozilla Myanmar community and localization sprint after the Barcamp Yangon.

Attending Barcamp Yangon gave me a good opportunity to keep the pulse the fast changing Myanmar. It was good to reconnect with the open source communities and meet people in technology and non-profit world. Next year I hope to attend Barcamp Mandalay, it seems to have more developer focused audience.

Mozilla Myanmar Localization Sprint

After Barcamp Yangon, Zinmin organized Burmese localization sprint in Yangon. The localization sprint provides hands-on training for new localizers. After a quick introduction from Zinmin and the team started translating remaining strings Firefox Aurora. The Pootle web based tool does perform well bandwidth constrained environment such as Myanmar. Zinmin cleaned up most of the translation errors that were blocking the productization of Firefox Burmese Aurora.

During the sprint, Sajal and I spent some time testing Firefox Mobile. Firefox Mobile is important in countries like Myanmar where there is a large growing mobile web users than desktop users. However due to economic sanctions Google Playstore is not available in this country. Burmese users resort to various alternative app stores to find apps for Android devices. Another problem is network latency, for instance, tweeting pictures was really difficult. We looked in how to test Android apps network latency and performance issues.

You can read more about Mozilla L10N sprint on Zinmin's blog post in Burmese and the download the latest Firefox Burmese Aurora here.

Technology Entrepreneurship and Start ups in Myanmar

Spent some time meeting various technology entrepreneurs in Yangon. Start-up incubators like Rocket Internet and few others opened shop in Myanmar. Expats and Burmese diaspora are returning to start technology start-ups. Along with opportunities from the burgeoning economy there are challenges: People with good technical skills are hard to come by, the overhead costs are really high due to inflated prices.

I hope you'll get a chance to visit Myanmar and experience its rich culture. Perhaps you might wanna join the
Barcamp Yangon next year or spend some time working I'll help you find a co-working space in Yangon.

Ubuntu in Mandalay, Myanmar

ThanYalZin Min sends us this picture from Ubuntu day in Mandalay, Myanmar. You can see Min sporting the cool Mozcamp t-shirt in the photograph.

Mozilla Rep Chit Thiri Maung is planning the future Mozilla activities in Yangon and Mandalay. This year we launched the Mozilla L10N team during the BarCamp Yangon 2011.

You can follow Mozilla Myanmar Community here on their twitter page. I hope to see more Mozillians in Myanmar next year.

BarCamp Yangon 2011: Mozilla Localization Community Meetup

BarCamp Yangon 2011 provided good opportunity to engage localization community in Myanmar. The Make FLOSS Software Speak Your Language talk on the first day of BarCamp was well received. The talk introduced the concept of software localization using wiki-like collaboration tools.

On the second day of the BarCamp the Mozilla Localization Community meetup was held. Some of the mozilla localization contributors participated along few other localization enthusiasts. The goal of this community meetup was to engage the mozilla localization contributors and take concrete steps towards starting new Burmese language localization.

The Burmese multilingual support is hodgepodge of different encoding models and various unicode fonts (Refer Burmese Multilingual support wikipedia page). These problem are both historical and technical, the Myanmar NLP project is spearheading the standardization process. The contributors pointed several technical issues with Firefox Burmese multilingual support. They expressed their willingness to work with the Mozilla developers by reporting bugs and patches.

Ngwe Tun and Steven had already created Burmese/Myanmar (my-MM) Firefox 3.6 Language Pack. These translations should be merged into new locale repository for Burmese locale. The process of starting new Burmese locale can be tracked here (Bugzilla #631921).

Few other ideas that were discussed at the meetup are better co-ordination via a dedicated Burmese L10n mailing-list and getting more people involved in localization using web based translation platform such as Narro and organizing few more community driven workshops at other events in different parts of Myanmar.

Make FLOSS Software Speak Your Language, BarCamp Yangon 2011

I gave a talk entitled "Make FLOSS Software Speak Your Language" at BarCamp Yangon 2011. The talk covered web-based localization tools Launchpad Translations and Narro that are used to translate Ubuntu Linux and Mozilla applications. The translators can use these tools to contribute translations in a wiki-like collaboration.

This talk was designed as a hands-on session beginning with a short talk that introduced the software localization concepts in a simple non technical language, followed by a practical session where the workshop participants logged on and started translations guided by experienced members of the local translation community.

Make FLOSS Speak Your Language

Ahkeno, a Joomla! localization contributor from Myanmar translated the talk and explained some of the concepts in the Burmese language. She also shared her experience with the Joomla! localization project.

Myanmar based Mozilla Firefox localization community member Steven Zaw Htut talked about the Burmese language package for Firefox 3.6. He explained how to install the package and change the default language of the Firefox Web browser. You can visit the http://www.wordpress-my.tk/ website to download this package.

There was a good turnout for the talk. The audience was mostly young college students who were excited about participating in localization projects. The presence of active contributors from the Myanmar localization community offered them a chance to meet and join these localization efforts. I finished the talk with a few key points about working in teams, asking new contributors not to be afraid of criticism and focusing on quality translations.

Unfortunately we did not have the Burmese (my-MM) locale enabled on Launchpad Translation and Narro. It was therefore not possible to do the practical exercises without the locale and the slow internet connection would have made it difficult for many people to sign up and work on translations. This event nevertheless helped me develop the framework to begin developing material, both printed and online for the future localization workshops. The overall response to the workshop was positive. It showed me that there is definitely a need for these types of exchanges not only in Myanmar but in many different Asian countries.

Stay tuned. More about this event to come!

BarCamp Yangon 2011, Myanmar

Living in Hanoi, Vietnam, and working with the local Hanoi Linux User Group have been a great experience. They have helped me observe how community driven localization effort works and understand its problems. On January 8, 2011, few Hanoi Linux User Group members organized FLOSS Translation Camp to discuss how to promote localization and to address the problems of Vietnamese FLOSS localization efforts. Following this event and as a result of few off-line discussion with various community members, I decided to design a framework to introduce software localization to new contributors and to create an effective peer review process for improving the quality of the existing software translations. Dietrich who had been following those events closely suggested that I go to BarCamp Yangon 2011. Attending this would be a unique opportunity to know and engage the FLOSS community in Myanmar.

BarCamp Yangon is the biggest bar camp in South East Asia. Last year over 2000 people participated and more people are expected this year. Thanks to the efforts of Mike Amy and the BarCamp Yangon team, I was able to get the paper-work needed for the Myanmar visa. The international participants were received by the BarCamp volunteers upon arrival and everything went as planned if one were not to count the fact that I was stranded at the airport after arriving on a much delayed flight. I planned to stay at the Yangon YMCA but after visiting the latter, I made the wise decision to check into a hotel which offered clean sheets and a hot shower - a much welcomed treat.

BarCamp Yangon 2011 was held at the Myanmar Info-Tech campus on February 19th and 20th. The Myanmar Info-tech campus is situated near the Yangon University on the outskirts of the city. It was already crowded when I reached the venue at 8:30 AM. The registration counter did not have any information about my online registration so I skipped registration and headed to the main auditorium for the opening ceremony. The opening ceremony was very brief. The MC spoke in Burmese and then a dozen or so international barcampers were asked to go on stage to introduce themselves.

There were few machines setup for internet access in the main hall as well as free coffee. The media team was tweeting on the other side. The wireless internet was available, but it was painfully slow considering the number of people who were using it and the waiting one had to endure to get to it.

Unlike other conferences, BarCamps is a different beast. It takes a lot of jousting, pushing and shoving to get your talk posted on the white board that announces the day's sessions. Few of us who had sessions planned the titles of our sessions and handed them to a BarCamp organizer who promptly disappeared leaving us session less and in the dark. Luckily, I managed to swap a session with Luke,an attendee at the Barcamp, who had planned his talk for the next day. The sessions spread across various rooms in different buildings on the campus. Each room had a volunteer with a wireless radio that was helpful in getting across up to the minute messages. Closed circuit cameras were used in some of the rooms for the sole purpose of figuring out which rooms were available.

Please visit the page for more pictures from BarCamp Yangon 2011 https://picasaweb.google.com/barcampyangon/BarcampYangon2011

Intellectual property Lawyer and avid BarCamper John Young's talk on IP and Domain names was really interesting. Perhaps this kind of talks and the later off-line discussions sum up the joy of attending a BarCamp.

After the talk I ducked into a few sessions that were not very interesting. After a quick lunch we headed to my 'Make FLOSS Software Speak Your Language' Free Software localization talk. This talk is covered in the my next post.

While in Myanmar, I also attended The Software & Solutions Exhibition 2011 which was organized by MCF and was held at the Strand Hotel in downtown Yangon. The exhibition had stalls from Software vendors, IT training schools, and surveillance equipment vendors.

John Young blogged about his experience at the exhibition in this blog post “Bridging IT and Business” in Myanmar

Walking back from Strand Hotel onto the busy Sule Pagoda Road, I ducked into a pirate CD shop that offered everything from pirated Windows CD, Mac OSx, Android and Linux distributions. In a country with very little internet bandwidth, I was quite happy to see that it is possible to buy a Linux CD for less than one dollar.

Stay tuned. More about this event to come!