Kuzu Zangpo La,

I'm really excited to announce that FOSS enthusiasts in Thimphu, Bhutan will be gathering for a first meeting at 11am on the 30th of November, 2024. The formal meeting will be for 1hr, and over by 12pm, with various talks on topics relevant to Free and Open Source Software.

We're still working to finalise the venue, but Karan Rao is leading the charge - liasing with the National library - the director Yeshi Lhendup-la has kindly tentatively agreed to provide the space, but we need to finalise logistics so stay tuned.

We are using this mailing list, which is publicly archived, for our important communications. Please note that replies go to the mailinglist, and will be *public* - so do be careful when wide replying.

Please reply to this email on the mailing list, if you would like to give a talk at the first meeting. For now, we are looking for technical content of a maximum of 20minutes.

Karan and I are working on two further means of communication - in the spirit of FOSS, we are working on decentralised and self hosted infrastructure - the first is an xmpp server - I will send instructions on how to join later this week. The second is an activitypub feed - he is working on the details. For now we have a landing page on https://fossbhutan.bow.st

While it's easy to just use a SaaS provider such as Google groups or WhatsApp from Meta, the whole idea of FOSS is to become self sufficient by becoming creators of technology, not just consumers. In this spirit, we are leading the charge - and in the process, we hope that the tech involved can be shared with everyone, so that Bhutanese become self sufficient in software tech.

We tried to obtain a top-level domain for Bhutan, but the bureacracy is out of reach at this point - hopefully, some of you will be able to help with that transition - until then, I (Math) am misusing my personal domain to act as TLD.

Please point anyone else who would like to join this mailing list, to:

https://mailman.fossbhutan.bow.st/postorius/lists/thimphu.fossbhutan.bow.st/

or you can also ask them to send an email to thimphu-join@fossbhutan.bow.st and they will get an automated email response with instructions on how to join.

Please stay tuned on this mailing list for further information.

If you would like to volunteer directly or help with online infrastructure, please email me (Math) _privately_ - we have a lot of tasks to take care off both offline, and online, in order to make this happen.

I am very thankful to Leki Choden-la, the CEO of Dragon Coders, who has kindly offered to support FOSS activities in Bhutan. I am also personally indebted to Gai Technologies (Bhutan) Private limited, for enabling my stay and contribution to the tech eco-system within Bhutan.

Many Thanks, once again, and stay tuned - we will announce final date, time and venue once things have been finalised.

Excited to meet everyone!