[CREATE] Free as in Speech, and Vietnam?

[Hong Phuc Dang]

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 FOSSASIA
2010<http://fossasia.org>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 <tml at iki.fi> 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
> CREATE at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/create/attachments/20100609/0dec1b6a/attachment.html>