As well as all the news around Symbian’s open sourcing, the foundation is also extending its reach through new user community meetings. The First Kuala Lumpur Symbian Stammtisch (KLSS) will be held tomorrow, Wednesday February 10th 2010 at 5 to 7 pm. More details can be found at http://www.i-symbian.com/the-first-kuala-lumpur-symbian-stammtisch/. Hello; my name is Asri Baker and I am organising the Kuala Lumpur Stammtisch.

I am a Symbian user since the very beginning. In fact, my Symbian history goes back to the good old Psion days with Psion S5mx being my best personal companion ever! I still carry one around for doing my daily scheduling and quick note taking. Why are we so loyal to Symbian?

Long before Twitter and Facebook existed, there are many Symbian users in the world who started their own initiatives, building local Symbian communities to share their passion and interest about Symbian. They created online forums, blogs and websites and would meet face to face once in a while for fun and sharing information. These are the front runners of the open Symbian and they helped Symbian create a loyal army of users and supporters. These people would love to die for Symbian and I’m one of them!

But things have changed. The “new Symbian” does look into the community building and did some initiatives such as the Stammtisch. I take this as an opportunity to do something that I’ve always love to do i.e. building communities and after reading a post by Sebastian on this blog a few weeks ago, I decided I want to do this because the global Symbian community has long existed but they did not receive the attention they deserved. This is the time!

And here I am, in 24 hours time, the first Kuala Lumpur Symbian Stammtisch will kick off and it will be a historic event not only in my calendar but it also marks the first Symbian Stammtisch outside London, 10 thousand kilometres away. That’s huge!

In order to make this event smooth and would attract people to come, I contacted Symbian Foundation, asking them what kind of support they could give and I was totally overwhelmed by the warm respond. To make things more interesting, they sent me a package full of Symbian goodies This is what I would call “the heart”.

My heartiest thanks to everybody who’s been very welcoming and supportive in making the first KLSS a reality. If you guys want to set a Stammtisch in your city, drop these guys an email.