Speakers meeting

[Isam Bayazidi <bayazidi at arabeyes dot org>]

Salam all .. 
  Today we had a meeting for the OSS workshop speakers, it was a great ice 
breaker between speakers .. some of the figures that where present are:

Robin Miller - a big guy in OSDN (maybe president) .. OSDN include  Slashdot, 
NewsForge, Linux.com, GeoCrawler  ,SourceForge.net, Freshmeat.net, Slashdot.

Peter Gallagher - President "Development InfoStructure" (devIS)

Dr. Khaled A. Al-Ghonem - Chairman of Saudi Computer Society and founder of 
the KSA LUG .. as well as a member in the King Abulazziz university, and 
inchage for the Linux Labs in the University 

Dr. Ahmed Tantawi - Technical Director IBM Middle East
Jamel Sghair - Founder, President & CEO of Opennet (www.linux.com.tn) a RedHat 
partner

Sherif Shalaby - Territory Manager, IBM

there are a number of other speakers that I forgot the paper of their names in 
Robin Millers room in the hotel .. I was in his room because he asked me to 
make Arabic work in his laptop .. it is running Mandrake 9 .. it worked of 
course .. he wanted it to have Arabic because he want to demonstrate how 
Arabic works in Open Source software as well :-)

Dr. Khalid (KSA LUG) noted that the KSA LUG/University was doing some 
Arabization work until someone who can do it better showed up - and he 
referred to Arabeyes .. It seems that the KSA LUG is proud and supportive to 
Arabeyes efforts .. 

the IBM executive said that they wanted to have a continues efforts after the 
last year's Arabization workshop .. he said that he wanted other parties to 
involve and they didn't want it to be pure IBM effort ..
Tomorrow I will meet Rasha from IBM Egypt .. she was not present today .. 

mm .. I don't know .. things are hilarious .. I was very afraid and shaking 
before the meeting in 3 hours .. as soon as I got in between the speakers and 
they welcomed me and Arabeyes I felt more comfortable .. 

oh .. There was 2 Microsoft executives .. I still don't know what they are 
doing there .. both of them arrived about one hour late to the meeting .. 

Robin miller asked a quick question in the speakers event "Those who prefere 
VIM raise the right hand, those who prefere emacs raise the left hand" .. the 
total number of hand rose was 6 out of 17 .. not everyone is that technical 
involved I guess .. 

anyhow .. I can talk for hours in this 2 hours meeting :-)

Salam
Isam