Recent­ly Hanoi was the loca­tion of FOSSASIA’s lat­est fea­ture event, the FOSSASIA Sum­mit. Won­der­ful­ly 3 mem­bers of the FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty went along to crew a FreeCAD booth pro­mot­ing our work and com­mu­ni­ty. Ajinkya, Amulya and Harshi­ta made the jour­ney over to Viet­nam from India, Amulya and Harshi­ta tak­ing time out from their sched­ules at Chandi­garh Uni­ver­si­ty and Ajinkya trav­el­ling from Mumbai.

With the booth set up it saw a steady stream of vis­i­tors over the week­end. Ajinkya, Amulya and Harshi­ta all report that the largest group of atten­dees tend­ed to be under­grad­u­ate stu­dents. They also report that most atten­dees hadn’t heard of FreeCAD before and the most men­tioned CAD pack­ages were Auto­CAD and Tin­ker­cad. Con­ver­sa­tions around this showed that in that part of the world Auto­CAD is still often taught in col­leges and often Auto­CAD is offered for free (as in beer) to under­grad­u­ates in the region.

Numer­ous aca­d­e­mics and Pro­fes­sors vis­it­ed the booth, with some pon­der­ing about the ubiq­ui­ty of Auto­CAD in the region and tak­ing pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als to start con­ver­sa­tions back in their depart­ments. Ajinkya, Amulya and Harshi­ta fed back that there were lots of gen­er­al ques­tions about FreeCAD like, “is it real­ly free?” “can it do x,y z?” and “is it avail­able on Lin­ux, mac, win­dows?” and more. It’s great to have these fun­da­men­tal ques­tions asked as they often moti­vate and enable peo­ple to feel that FreeCAD is worth look­ing at and explor­ing after the summit.

One great con­ver­sa­tion at the booth was that FreeCAD use is high in Tai­wan, espe­cial­ly cen­tred around the devel­op­ment and cre­ation of pros­the­sis. If any­one read­ing has links into that com­mu­ni­ty we’d love to hear from them and fea­ture their work. The image above isn’t that project but rather a pho­to from the neigh­bour­ing booth show­ing work from Sal­vage Gar­den, an assis­tive tech­nol­o­gy mak­er­space from South East Asia. 

Final­ly mas­sive thanks to Ajinkya, Amulya and Harshi­ta for tak­ing the time out to rep­re­sent FreeCAD so excel­lent­ly at FOSSASIA. It’s fan­tas­tic vital work you’ve done to pro­mote FreeCAD and also hard work, on your feet and talk­ing FreeCAD for mul­ti­ple days!