Lightning Talk Series: Voices Across Borders: Building Inclusive Tech Communities, #FOSSASIA 2026

Hello everyone. [music] Nice to see you everyone tonight. I'm sorry. Okay. Where do I start? In this session I'm particularly invited for my journey with open source. So starting with I have to start with my name of course. Mina already introduced me but you guys can call me Shins. I am a second year bachelor student learning business administration in DCC Thailand Chamber of Commerce and I am volunteering in this event since last 6 month 2025 October. When I first tried this volunteering opportunity, I didn't have any idea about this open source community. That was my first time and everything was so new to me. And at that time I met with really good mentor like Hong and Valia who had helped me along the journey. And also in my team our recent lead, I have a partner who called Amos and he was very helpful along the journey. So it was really good to get into a place that where people are helpful and kind to each other. And right now I am here standing here to share my journey and then to inspire more people to join this community. The reason is that we use technology every day. Everybody uses phone and MacBook everything but we don't actually know the feature and the function and I think that maybe if we pay more attention and if we have friends who understand about these stuff, they will easily explain it to you. For me I am really weak with technology but as a business major student I have to use every day. So after being here for a long time I've learned how to use AI properly and I know that which website can help me write this proper thesis and proper assignments and it was really a good thing and I can see that my academy have been uh significant improvement. I can see that. So, uh to end this session, I what I want to say is I'm originally from Burma. I'm here in Thailand and now I'm participating in the even where people all across the border are communicating, networking, and networking with each other. It has really been a long journey. So, if anybody want to learn anything from me today is that you can always try to start something new that you have no experience in it and you can learn by the help of your friends and co-worker. That's will be all. Thank you. >> So, hello everyone. I hope you still have the energy to listen to us here women talking in front of you. You may saw me running around in there in front. >> [gasps] >> Um yeah, so I'm Estela. I'm from the Philippines. So, I travel here just to join the first Asia Summit. Um this is actually my first time volunteering in the in an international summit. Um mostly I just joined, so um I think I'm just going to share to you how community building helped me also kick off my uh community, I mean my tech career. So, it's just that because like 10 years ago, I thought actually like I didn't have a place in the industry. Um I know that a lot of you here is uh coders, like developers, but I think when I graduated from college, I thought that I'm not really good with it and I didn't enjoy. So, I thought that oh maybe uh tech industry is not for me. And then because I've been in the Google Developers Group and leading our community chapters there called GDG Cagayan de Oro and also community leading Women Techmakers Ambassador in our chapter. And I've been with the GDG community for over 12 years now. And because of that I put it in the resume and when I am a fresh graduate I applied and the first thing the interviewer asked me is that hey, I saw that you're a GDG community leader like a member. Would you be able to um organize a Android study jam? And then I told them, yes, of course. And he was like, okay, you're hired. And I think that was a kick off for me. I was like, oh, so so what would be the the position because I applied for a project manager and I'm a fresh graduate. And he said like, oh, you're going to be a web developer here. I believe you can do it. I was like, oh, okay. And I was what? 20 years old around that time. And I was like, okay, then it's a 8-hour drive from where I live and it's my first time going there. So my mom just drove me there. But the thing is that I came from a very strong family support. So I grew up with a privilege also. My mom taught me how to be kind and how to you know, like love unconditionally. But my dad, I'm a daddy's girl. So my dad uh uh taught me how to be tough. So [snorts] I think it's because of that background. I just went there in a very unfamiliar city and told him, I can do this. And I went there be a web developer and I was like, I didn't enjoy this. I want to do something else and I love like strategizing, you know, like doing some tactics. So I went to um another company where I have a really great mentor in there and not just in the company, but I also met a lot of uh women who inspired me to continue in the industry and that's how I became a product designer and now I'm a senior. So, I would really encourage everyone to join community uh summits like this because it because it's not just teach us something, you know, like a a skill, but it also teach us and widen our space and knowledge and meet other people and I think it's something that I enjoy the most. So, I think that's it. >> Okay. So, my name is Tari. I'm from Indonesia uh based in Singapore. Well, I recently just moved to Hong Kong and I just finished my computer science study uh specialization in machine learning and AI in University of London and I've been contributing for sessions since I think before COVID slightly and then COVID then I start contributing to First Asia again. So, Okay. Thank you. Oh, no. Okay, so this is me and today I will briefly talk about my final project. Um I want you to build something that is applies to AI because of my specialization on it and has real social value on it and also to practice my future job and because I just graduated, so I'm actively looking. If you guys and you have opening job, let me know. Okay. So, here's AIGP doctor. It's a multimodal AI orchestration for medical diagnosis. And why I built this is because as you guys know, the computer science is changing rapidly because of AI. And traditional paradigms are shifting, especially for the junior developers. Many small tasks are automated. Like they can write your your script, making your task a boilerplate. So, I was thinking like new graduates will need to think more at the system level or architecture level. And I think that this final project for me is uh helping me for to practice this. >> [snorts] >> And the good news is uh in the first ecosystem today, there is many powerful models that already exist. There's a huge research effort that makes them great. You can find models that do text, speech recognition, vision, and there is many more. And there is also still huge value to provide it today by orchestrating this model into a system, by building interfaces or AI agents, and there's also more. So, here is like over high-level overview of my project design. As you can see, there is uh input web This is web interface input with user with multiple input. You can add like voice, uh text, images. So, when the user give a voice, it will use Whisper model to transcribe it into text to like uh minimize uh the complexity to send it to the router. So, the router act as a the orchestrations. And they will like send this input to the AI layer, which the AI layer has multiple AI models, and they will analysis the input and have the results based on what input you put. Like, for example, there is image, then they will uh tell the visions to analysis, or if you add text also, they will trigger the like bio bird or clinical bird. Then, once the input is there, they will send it to the aggregator, and do like the weightings, the weights. Like, the output will be weighted. And based on the output, it will send to the confidence level threshold. And if the confidence level is high enough, then we'll then we'll it give to output uh diagnosis output. Like, for example, oh, you have a cold. And if not, then it will send it to the secondary analysis AI, which there is 25 and 10 llama models. It's basically this model handling Q&A. And so, the user can add like follow-up questions about the symptom already started 2 days ago. And with this adding context, it will trigger the system to rerun the first AI, and then doing the loop until it reach the level confidence that is high enough, then you will get into the final output diagnosis. So, this is my final project, and I have been a small thought about myself, or like to new graduates or junior uh developers. So, life for recent graduate in junior developers are is changing a lot and fast. Many traditional tasks already automated by AI. As like what I say uh in the first few slide, writing small script or creating better codes is easily automated now, so we cannot rely on those tasks as our main skill anymore, I guess. Uh so, instead we need to focus on the understanding on the architectures level. And that's it. Thank you. And if you can reach me out if you have a more question. Thank you. >> Good afternoon, everyone. Good to see all of you here. So, um my name is Velia. I'm an event coordinator from uh FOSSASIA, and I'm from Vietnam. So, um today I will like introduce like have a quick introduce for you about Event Yay, the next version of the event Yay we knew now. So, if you are organizing conference, meet up, or workshop, I think this very useful for you. So, today I will mainly talk about call for speaker, review, and schedule. So, here is a organizer user interface. So, on the left on the right, I think uh we have a list a menu with uh many functions like setting, call for sponsors, speaker, manage speaker, manage session, and then we have a dashboard and show you like how many session do we have, and uh we need how many session do we need to review. Yes. So, here is a uh user interface. Um you can submit your session and uh save a draft or edit. Yes. So, the good thing about call for proposal, so you can customizable submission form. Also, you can file upload and multiple multilingual option. And you can choose whether submission are public or invite only. I mean, that is kind like you close the call for speaker form and you still want to give or sponsor or another speaker to submit their sessions, so you can create a set code and give it to them. So, also speaker can submit draft or final and they can receive automatic confirmation email. Yes. So, also the next thing is review. After the speaker submit their session, we have a review process. So, we will assign our team member to score session, leave comment tag, and then we can detect conflict of interest to make for sure like it's equal for everyone. So, the decision process is simple, just accept or reject or wish list button. So, for other system, we need to like download the speaker list and then we work on Google exercise, but now what for Event X, we do all in So, for the final one is schedule management. You can drag and drop schedule editor and also the system can check like speaker room conflict or when everything look good, the schedule is published it instantly as a public program page. Yes. So, you also can export or import your data your data like attendee list or speaker list from different like type file. And also there one another feature is email and communication. So, after the speaker submit their session, they can automatically receive an email. So, also you can We have a lot of built-in email template you can use or you also can create your own template and then just one click, it can send for all all the people. Yes. Yes, so that a really quick introduce about the next Event X. So, if you want to sharing about even day or the journey to fast Asia, you can contact me via LinkedIn or the email. Yeah? So, thank you everyone. >> [music]