(I posted this to a certain non-public mailing list, but Nick suggested that I also publish it publically.)

I wanted to give a quick report about ApacheCon Asia 2006, now that I’m mostly recovered from traveling.

In short, it was a huge success. The attendance was as good as Europe, with far more non-committer attendees than we typically have in the US or Europe. There was a large delegation from a local highschool LUG, which I thought was amazingly cool. The related events (ApacheCon was part of a week of events called FOSSSL 06) drew a hugely diverse crowd, including numerous CEOs, many of whom were still in the “what is it” phase of Open Source knowledge.

The attendees were enthusiastic and eager to learn. It was a little hard to judge their reactions at times, because, as I discovered in later discussion, the local school system emphasizes the idea that asking questions or interrupting the “teacher” is hugely disrespectful. That takes some getting used to. But after-session discussions were enthusiastic and folks had good questions – just not many in the sessions themselves.

The “nearby” violence wasn’t particularly nearby, and didn’t affect things in the least – at least not as far as I can tell.

I was given a book entitled “Sri Lanka: The Emerald Island”, so it was pretty cool that ApacheCon was held on the Emerald Isle and the Emerald Island this year! 🙂

HUGE kudos to Sanjiva and his team, particularly Deepal Jayasinghe, who handled a lot of the logistics, and Rajkumar, who organized the GeekOut, which was the high point of the whole week, at least for me. But, of course, there were many other members of your team who I don’t want to overlook. Thanks for making this happen.

Sri Lanka is beautiful, and I’m delighted I got to visit. Sri Lanka has more Apache developers, per capita, than any other nation on earth. That aught to make you take notice. I don’t know if this stat is actually true, but I heard it quoted enough times, it *must* be! 😉