Dear all, @Tor: thank you very much for raising the concern. I agree that political part plays a very important role in any international conferences. As a Vietnamese citizen, I have some responses to your thought: (1) Human rights: As long as we don't talk about Human Rights, we are safe for sure. I wonder if Libre Graphics meeting has much to do with politics? There was no topic about Human Rights during LGM 2010 I believe :-). Besides in order to hold an international event, we often need to co-organize with a Government office. In our case it will be the Information Communication Technology (ICT) Department of the host city. Co-organize means the Government would like to have their name appear as a co-organizer without doing any things. The advantage is they can help us acquire the conference license and visa. We had GNOME.Asia here with 1400 participants. Other events include Open Courseware conference , Creative Commons Launch, Software Freedom Day, Barcamp, and FOSSASIA in November. I think it is definitely possible to have Libre Graphics Meeting here in Vietnam (2) Problem of visiting Vietnam: I am not sure if the problem comes from the people or the process of getting in Vietnam. If it is about someone's opinion, I totally understand. Some people will avoid to visit Vietnam due to some political issues. There is nothing that we can do about it. On the other hand, if it is about the process, we can help arrange the visa for you as we did several times before. (3) Government issue: every country operates under its own system. I understand that we do not have a "perfect" Government here in Vietnam. However I think it is not so fair to reject a country based on its Government right? @pierros: thanks for your support. (4) @Agnez: your friend mentioned about a Foss asia group in Mekong ICT. They are from our team. We are organizing <a href="http://fossasia.org">FOSSASIA 2010</a> in Ho Chi Minh from Nov 12-14. They are in Chiang Mai at the moment. I got invited as well but I could not come because I have already used up this year vacation. Wow, this is such a small world :-). Again thank you very much for sharing your point of view. I am very happy that there are more and more people who would like to learn about our country. Why don't you all visit us to gain your own experiences about a "real" Vietnam? I would be so so glad to see you here. All the best from Vietnam, Hong Phuc On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:39 PM, Tor Lillqvist <<a href="mailto:tml@iki.fi">tml@iki.fi</a>> wrote: > I don't want to be a killjoy, but doesn't the Human Rights situation > in Vietnam leave much to be desired? Do we care? Should we care? (For > some value of "we".) > > If visiting the US is a problem for political/privacy/whatever reasons > to some people in the community, would the same people have a problem > visiting Vietnam? > > I know I wouldn't feel comfortable in a conference about one kind of > freedom (the free software kind) that would (presumably) be sponsored > by a government that is not that interested in more basic and > universal kinds of freedom. > > But I am not really an expert... and I might be convinced that gaining > more information about one kind of freedom will eventually help > improving other freedoms, too, in a country. > > --tml > _______________________________________________ > CREATE mailing list > <a href="mailto:CREATE@lists.freedesktop.org">CREATE@lists.freedesktop.org</a> > <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create">http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create</a>