There was a big park outside my hotel in Fuzhou earlier this week where thousands of people gathered on Monday night to sing and dance. You just had to see the size of this park with hundreds and hundreds of people packing into various sections all over the place. Some sections were too dark to take photos, but walking among hundreds of happy people in the dark on a nice warm night was calming -- especially after a long day of OpenSolaris presentations.
I was with Shaoting Duan from Sun China, and she asked around and found out that this is really quite normal for this park. We walked around for a couple of hours. I was the only foreigner in sight, and everyone noticed me, too. It all got pretty friendly at one point when a keyboard player said hello to me -- into his microphone for everyone to hear -- and asked me to play along with the band. I`m absolutely serious. What ever gave him the idea I could actually do such a thing I`ll never know, but it was a charming thought nonetheless.
You know, I often write about community building for OpenSolaris. I try to learn from those who have gone before, and I try to build on top of what`s already there. Well, to me these scenes below represent communities in their purest form -- people just coming together for their own reasons, to have fun and express themselves. And that`s a significant learning experience as well. Anyway, it was a lovely night ...
