the lady with smile

I was late for 6 min. and the lady was standing at the lobby of Pan Pacific. She was pretty, tall and with a great smile in her face.
Waltruat is a knowledge management specialist and came to Malaysia to present a paper on KM in Biotech. She is also the director of Hong Kong KM Society. So we had a good 2-hour discussion over teah-tarek. She loves that tea so much.
The main topic of discussion was- the knowledge sharing culture in Asia. People in Asia are not so inclined to sharing and participating on volunteer basis, whereas it's just the opposit in Europe...they meet, drink coffee and talk. They share all professional ideas with each other. But Asians are reluctant, specially Malaysians- they don't ask questions in the classrooms/conferences but they only talk while having tea. Are they shy to talk in public?

So how to solve this 'not talking' problem?
We didn't have any solutions last night....but we agreed that this culture of 'not participating' it cannot be changed overnight.