A few months ago I was lucky enough to head over to Thailand with Alex for their Open Source Festival and Joomla!Day. I say lucky because Thailand has some of the most passionate open source people I have met, and Thailand has a fair bit going on in the Joomla! space as well…its just a shame I don’t speak Thai!
First of all let me introduce Akarawuth, or ninekrit / joomlacorner, who leads a band of developers and translators that make Joomla! in Thailand very possible. Akarawuth has done a huge amount of work in Thailand, and even has a version of Joomla! 1.0.x in UTF-8 to make things easier, ports and translates many popular software releases, including Joomla! 1.5, and then on top of all of this organises Joomla!Day’s. The team that supports him is amazing as well and its great to see such a strong development team supporting Joomla! in Thailand.
Next on my list is Toby Patterson, or tcp, who is one of the development working group members. Toby is a great guy who I’ve run into a few times around the world and he’s been around the world and visited a few others including Louis. Toby’s also in Bangkok working on both developing new native 1.5 extensions as well as his work on Joomla! 1.5 bug fixing.
Both the Open Source Festival and the Joomla!Day were interesting to see and hear (well, as much as I could understand) what is happening in Thailand not just with Joomla!, but with Open Source as a whole. Perhaps most interesting for myself was some of the GIS work that is being done in Thailand, aiming to replace other proprietary mapping software options, which is just exciting. Then with the work in the Joomla!Day it was great to listen to presentations by both Alex and Toby as well as seeing some of the work that Akarawuth’s team is doing to make Joomla! even better.
On the whole, Thailand is an exciting place for Joomla! and I enjoyed my time there and talking to people about Joomla!, its always fun.
Samuel Moffatt
Core Team Developer
Joomla.org
