The X3 Xoops Engine launch in Beijing was one of the best and most professionally organized product introductions that I've ever experienced. I went to Beijing to bring the individual awards to members of the XOOPS China community, incl. DJ, who were not able to receive it in person at the Award ceremony in Seoul. It was also a great opportunity to finally meet personally DJ. We've been working together for the last three years, but knew each other only from emails.   
The event, Open Source Conference organized by XOOPS, took place in the Library of the Chinese National Academy of Sciences - a truly impressive location! The whole XOOPS China team, and especially Sushang Yang(Ezsky), did a most amazing job. Starting with the display board, the gift bags for participants, the beautiful brochure, sign-up book, photographers and videographers, welcome sign and banner - everything was extremely well thought out and executed with a laser like precision. Congratulations! The most amazing was the audience and the speakers. The fact that the X3 launch was able to attract tens of open source software developers, leaders and IT educators, IT media professionals, Internet entrepreneurs, open-source and PHP enthusiasts, and XOOPS developers and users gathered together in Beijing, to learn about Open Source and witness the launch of one of the most important releases in the nine-year history of the XOOPS Project - the X3 Xoops Engine, speaks for itself.   
The distinguished speakers included Secretary General of the "Software Building Alliance", a branch of the "China Software Industry Association", commonly known under its English translation "Co-Create Software League" (CoSoft), Ms. Chunyan Yang, who talked about the innovation in the creation of Open Source software, and Mr. Yong Cheng who gave a presentation on "Open Source Community: The TAO of Collaborative Innovation", in which he discussed the impact of Open Source from a global perspective, based on two examples from Finland: Linux and MySQL.   
Later I talked about XOOPS history and our community, since there were several people in the audience who were new to XOOPS, and then DJ presented in detail the X3 Xoops Engine architecture (see the presentation here). After that, we had several long discussions with the participants, about XOOPS, Open Source, and the software development in China and in the world.   
Then there was a group photo session, incl. a special picture with Ms. Chunyan Yang, several of the VIP guests and XOOPS developers. DJ also had an interview with local IT media company.   
And what can be a better ending of the meeting than a meal together in one of the nearby Chinese restaurants? The food was excellent, the atmosphere amazing, and we had a lot of fun. At this moment, I would like to express my deepest "Thank you" to DJ and the XOOPS China community for their incredible hospitality. It is amazing how close friends we can become by working together on-line, even if we never met each other in person, and were able to communicate only via emails. It is the common goal of making XOOPS the best it can be, to make the XOOPS community the most friendly and supportive, that brings us together and connects us with a bond that enables us to feel like old friends even if we meet only the very first time. I am so proud and thankful to be part of this amazing community! I wish, we would have more of these meetings - in Europe, in North and Latin America, Asia, Africa and Middle East. The way we progress right now, I believe, we will be able to have such XOOPS Conferences in the near future. I will be in Germany next year in early June, so maybe we can have the European Conference then (hint, hint  ) For more pictures from this event, please visit our Flickr
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