KZ la,

As you know last year Karan Urao la (Drawah Tech Space) and Leki Choden la (Dragon coders) took the initiative and put in the work behind the scenes to setup the first FOSS meet at the YDF Innovation centre.

Karan put in the work to make the website https://fossbhutan.bow.st up and running, Leki la opened doors and DC purse to enable the physical meet, and I put together the server infrastructure on which this mailing list as well as the website runs.

This was a milestone in Bhutan's journey to becoming a producer of tech, rather than a consumer. We had several very interesting interactions.

For me, as an outsider, I see immense potential for these forums, where people from various walks of tech and entrepreneurship rub shoulders along with regulators, bureacrats, press, potential investors, students, etc.

All this happened because one or two people took the initiative behind the scenes to make this happen. But we can't rely on "someone else will do it" to make it happen and continue to happen.

It is time to join the "behind the scenes" and put your time and effort to make this happen again. Please reply me in private if you would like to help - I did not get any responses either on xmpp or on email replies from the people who showed initial interest - perhaps mail and xmpp are not the most responsive channels, but we must learn the fine arts of tech production before we can actually produce tech.

So once again, please ping me on xmpp or here privately - we need all hands on deck to make this happen.

Becoming a volunteer is a great way to get access to the who's who in tech in Bhutan and potentially abroad. This is because almost every recognisable brand in Tech today was built on FOSS. Let me give you a short list, for motivation:

Company: FOSS tech/project Apple: NextStep, Mach, *BSD Google: Linux Whatsapp: FreeBSD, Erlang Facebook: php, Linux AWS, ec2: xen "AI": tensor2tensor

etc.

When most people stand in a queue to get a job or business opening by trawling linkedin and other mainstream forums, smart people know that person to person interactions and relationships is the fastest way to make quality and trustworthy connections - with these connections, if we add hard work and competence, there is no limit to what we can achieve and help others through our professional journey. And the internet has no national boundaries!

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best,