Many websites in China are broken. They don't validate against the current World Wide Web Consortium recommended standards, support language encoding badly, and don't use widely accepted Creative Commons licenses for user generated content. A traditional approach in the online English-based communities is to develop a campaign and collect signatures from those who support the action. This type of petition would then be provided to the website operators in order to show them how much people care about a problem. This approach is total FAIL in china. Accelerating more businesses and developers to promote web standards in China requires a project and strategy that is rooted in guanxi and indirect marketing. By making web standards sexy like Apple products and using some type of public reputation system like Creative Commons licensing approach is the path to success. Site that fit a set of criteria are encouraged to apply a well-designed button to their website show they are part of the elite VIP culture of web standards. This presentation given by Jon Phillips, explains webstandards.cn, who is involved and provides an invitation for all to make their web site standards compliant.

Then our second topic will be presented by our most popular BLUG group, the Quadcopter Group. Since January 2008, Xuedi, Ollo and an increasing numbers of participants have been meeting weekly to make this totally Open Source Hardware project a success. We're now very happy and excited to see the results of their continuous efforts and see what will come next (a flying Gdium?). Of course they are going to tell us the secret of being the most popular group as well!

Then we will have OLPH - One Laptop per Hacker project presented by the G-team. Launched in December 2008, OLPH is an OpenSource project dedicated to hacking on the Gdium - 10" MIPS based laptop (Loongson Chinese CPU) running a customized version of Mandriva Linux (MS Windows won't run on it). Some of you may heard about it from the BLUG news earlier or even joined already! Now we even have a chance to meet them and know more about the project and its status, as well as ask questions. Isn't it cool?  (will be postponed to later)

Time: 7pm
Date: Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Location: Traktirr Russian Restaurant, 5-15 DonZhiMen NeiDaJie,DongZhiMen west of DongZhiMen subway
Phone: 8407-8158
Map: here
Presentation: here (Jon's)