Last weekend, I visited Kathmandu, Nepal to attend and organize UbuCon Asia 2025 held at St. Xavier’s College. The event this year was held from Aug 30 to 31 by UbuCon Asia Committee, Ubuntu Nepal as well as GNOME Nepal.
With more then 400 registration and new programs such as community booths that we have accepted applications from across the world, It became an exciting event even before it starts.
At first day morning, a lot of people queued for the registration and badge pick up. Local team folks (such as @younggunner14 @saileshsingh36 and more) got very busy from the beginning!
Then the event started with the opening remarks from @younggunner14 as well as a keynote from @dimple-kuriakose with topic on Confidential Computing. While I just heard about its term, It was a good session to learn basics of Confidential Computing!
After the keynote, I’ve visited some booth at ground floor. There were DeepComputing, Ubuntu DDE, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubu4Cut Photo Machine, Things Cyber and more. Ubu4Cut booth and DeepComputing booth were the booth with most people visited.
For Ubu4Cut booth which was ran by by @choo121600, People queued up a lot to take selfies and get their photo printed with the Photo kiosk built with Ubuntu and Flutter. DeepComputing booth was also crowded with many people as they were running Framework laptop mainboard swap challenge.
After i had my lunch, I hosted a BoF with “Ubuntu LoCo Council & LoCo Leaders BoF” I gave people quick intro on what are LoCo and LoCo Council. Then also invited @fenris @jipangmenjerit @aryan @soumyadghosh @younggunner14 to the stage to share about what they do on their LoCo team.
I also joined the panel discussion “Growing Ubuntu and FOSS Community - and yourself, Locally and Globally” where @aryan @yushpokharel12 and @till-kamppeter shared their experience on growing their open source community and also projects.
After all day 1 conference schedule finished, A sync meeting with all organizers on-site including both local team and global team was organized to discuss what needs to be improved tomorrow and if there were any issues during the event.
After experiencing daily sync meeting at DebConf24 last year, I though it would be a good idea to have similar meeting. And indeed, it was a very productive time to discuss about the plan for the tomorrow and have local team and global team synced together.
Day 2 program started with a community keynote “From Scratch to Summit: Leading a Grassroots Open Source Movement in South Asia” from @younggunner14 and @saileshsingh36 which i believe missed unfortunately 
I’ll have to follow up a bit once the recording is available.
I have spend many of my times at booth or speaker waiting room during the Day 2 helping @choo121600’s booth operation a bit and also preparing my another BoF session. I were not able to find many swags at Canonical booth, So donated some t-shirts from UbuCon Korea 2025.
There were an unexpected issues with setting up @choo121600’s photo machine with photo printer connection. Everyone gathered at his booth this time to help out fix the bug then @kappuccino111 also helped out him to fix his photo machine.
Luckily, they managed to fix the bug then make the photo machine up and running again!
There were also some interviews with sponsors and participants ongoing which was done by the local team. They’ve been using their multiple phone for recording video as well as recording voice. I lend them my DJI OSMO Action Camera as well as some wireless microphones to help them with recording better interview videos. And looks like they recorded many interviews and also had some fund taking selfies (@aryan you are giving your dji to wrong people lol)
Another BoF I hosted on Day 2 was about “Next UbuCon Asia in your City…?” I described some rough process on selecting next city of UbuCon Asia, Event format, How the event is organized every year, team structure as well as instructions on how to submit a bid to host UbuCon Asia.
Closing remarks was the finale! organizers handed over token of appreciations to speakers and also sponsors. I had an honer to receive token of appreciations for the sessions I’ve hosted. and also had an honer to hand over certificate of appreciation for the main (Diamond) sponsor this year, Canonical.
After the closing, We had a time to take a group photo.
Then, I also joined the conference dinner which was sponsored and hosted by Programiz, who was one of our sponsors. Delicious foods were served, and also had time to talk with sponsors and other speakers during the dinner.
On the next day after the conference schedule were finished, I joined day trip just like last year. This time, we visited Bhaktapur and Nagarkot. I was able to see many historic buildings at Bhaktapur and had a bit of adventure activity then had some time to watch the stunning view from the sunrise view park.
And that concluded my trip to UbuCon Asia 2025 this year! It was an another successful event after a lot of work and collaborations with me, @fenris @jipangmenjerit @rjhsiao @aryan @younggunner14 @saileshsingh36 @utsavdotdev and much more people!
Thank you to our organizers, speakers, participants who joined the event this year as well as our sponsors including Canonical, Onlyoffice, Deepcomputing and much more for supporting this event!
For next year we haven’t decided the location yet, but already looking forward to it. The bid for 2026 is still open. If you are interested, you may find the detail here: UbuCon Asia 2026 - Call for bids!
and change the year right now?)