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ReMo Camp 2013 – Madrid

Earlier this year from August 30th to September 1st, 2013, I was invited to Madrid, Spain, to take part in Mozilla Reps Camp as a Mozilla Reps mentor to discuss the roadmap ahead for the Mozilla Reps Program.

ReMo Camp is an annual event / meeting where the leadership of the Mozilla Reps program, comprising of Council members and Reps mentors, meet for 3 days. The meeting comprised of presentations, breakout sessions and discussions to draft the 2013/2014 Mozilla Reps program roadmap. This was the second time the entire program leadership met and worked together in person, the first being in Berlin in 2012.

Even though there were discussions on some pretty serious topics, we made sure that we had our fair share of fun as well, starting from wacky yellow construction jackets to crazy late night wandering in the streets of Madrid.

Amidst all the serious discussions and fun times, one thing that stood out quite prominently was the high spirits that was evident among all the participants throughout the event. I’m sure that future of the Mozilla Reps program is quite bright and secure in the presence of such wonderful people and it is going to grow by leaps and bounds in the upcoming days. 🙂

Posted in Events & Meetups, Mozilla

The Greek Experience – Remo Training Days

Mar 13

Posted by Sayak Sarkar

Reps at Greece for #remotrainingdays

Last week Mozilla brought together 40 Mozilla Reps from all over the world at Athens for week-long training exercise called Reps Training Days. The idea was to gather the most pro-active Mozillians under the ReMo programme in a single place and train them about leading the Webmaker initiative in their respective communities.

The training event was structured as follows:-

The Reps spend the first day observing a Hive Athens Pop-Up event.

Then the next 2 days are dedicated to developing local strategy and teaching skills; and finally

The Reps apply the lessons they have on a one day event teaching webmaking to a group of 100 students at the British Council.

The outcome from this event was phenomenal, with over 40 events being planned for the next 3 months to build local Webmaker mentor team and prototype events for the summer campaign, code-named Remix Party. The vibrancy of the geographical locations for which events were planned speak for themselves. From Taiwan to Indonesia, India to Mauritius, Kenya, Uganda, Romania, UK, France, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Canada + beyond, we had events being planned everywhere.

It was an amazing example of Hive + Webmaker Reps, with the local community stepping up to host the event. The energy levels of everyone at the event spoke for themselves.

Here are the links for some of the most awesome things from the event:-

Photos galore: https://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=remotrainingdays&m=text

Storify: http://storify.com/epilepticrabbit/reps-training-days-in-athens-march-2013

RemoTrainingDays Etherpad, inc. agenda: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/RTD

The things Reps want to work on/make/contribute to: https://docs.google.com/a/zythepsary.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aku8434q8_LPdHVHSU9CNlpkZVRZQ0U5Q0VtS0RhMHc#gid=6

Oops! Almost forgot – we also made our own Harlem Shake Video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/tn4Evp8BN1U

Posted in Events & Meetups, Mozilla

MozParty 2012, Pune

Jul 1

Posted by Sayak Sarkar

Mozilla Summer Code Party 2012, Pune

On Saturday, 23rd June 2012 we organized MozParty Pune at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research, as a kickoff event for Mozilla Summer Code Party. We had a good mix of college students and working professionals as attendees for the event. There were around 75-90 attendees in total for the event. We had talk sessions as well as hands-on sessions and workshops.

The day started with an Introduction to Mozilla Summer Code Party by me, where I talked about what exactly Mozilla’s Summer Code Party is, and to how to spread awareness about the open web. The audience seemed quite interested in the idea, and looked quite excited to find out about the various ways by which they can do so.

The next session was conducted by Soumya Deb (better known as Debloper), on How Websites Work. For this session he showed the audience Google’s Story of Send, and another video on How the DNS works. The animated videos were a great hit among the audience.

Next up, it was Ankit and Faisal who took the stage one after the other. Ankit had prepared a lovely presentation in Latex about the Mozilla Story where talked about how Mozilla became what it currently is, including the various technologies from Mozilla. Faisal talked about the various Add-ons, personas other cool stuff that users can use to brighten up their Firefox experience and also about the various security aspects of Firefox.

The surprise of the day however, came when Kinshuk arrived at the event. Even though he wasn’t supposed to be present at the event due to some family commitments, still he made time and came for the event. And to top it all, he even took a session on FOSS & its relevance to Students. He also talked about the student reps program and how college students can participate and contribute to Mozilla, throughout the day in various discussions with the audience.

Post lunch, we started with a workshop on Hackasaurus, and various other Webmaking tools like Thimble & X-Ray Goggles, conducted by me. I explained various aspects of these tools to the audience and conducted a competition to see who could make the best remixed sites from the available projects at the Thimble website. We showcased the best best results at the events, and awarded a few extra swags the ones with the best sites.

Next, Soumya took over the dias and took a couple of back to back sessions on Basic Web Technologies and Apps in HTML5 & B2G. These were one of the most interactive and awaited sessions by the audience. Soumya explained these topics using interactive demos and got the audience involved as well.

At the end of it all, we explained various ways by which the audience could contribute and get involved with Mozilla. We talked about the student reps and Mozilla reps programs, and also got 12 people sign up for the student reps program.

The links to the various slides during the session as well as the links for some of sites created using Thimble are included below:-