Mozilla Bangalore DevDay
Mozilla, The Centre for Internet and Society, and Mahiti came together on Saturday February 27th 2010 for the first Mozilla Bangalore DevDay. The tea, biscuits, and lunch from Hallimane was provided by The Centre for Internet and Society. With 300+ participants, this was one of the largest Mozila DevDays.
The start time was readjusted to 10am to accommodate more participants and to give those that had arrived some time to turn their brains on. Seth Bindernagel, Mozilla Localization Director, kicked the day off with a brief introduction about Mozilla. He also outlined some people in the crowd for their efforts, including Vineel Reddy (campus rep) from Hyderabad.
Lucian Teo, a Mozilla Volunteer from Singapore introduced how Mozilla allows regular individuals to participate in its mission to keep the internet public, open and accessible through their new initiative Drumbeat. He touched upon his own experiences which led him to be involved in the open web movement from a non-technical side.
John Britton, a Mozilla Volunteer from the USA, presented a working example of the power of Drumbeat: Peer2Peer University. Having successfully launched it’s inaugural session last fall, P2PU is doubling the number of courses this Spring. Although accreditation is not yet recognized by outside institutions, participants are encouraged to take an active role in their learning of their peers. Some course offered include Finance & Economics, Copyright for Educators, Creative Non-Fiction Writing, Kitchen Science, and Mashing Up The Open Web (organised by John).
Arun Ranganathan, Mozilla Evangelist, spoke about the web as a platform and web standards across software providers. He demonstrated exciting techniques in HTML5 including: drag and drop functionality, automated geo-tagging, font-face support, 2D and 3D support using Canvas and WebGL, accelerometer support, video embedding.
Seth presented a peek at what is coming in Firefox next –some ideas less than a week old, proof that their work is truly open! The topics he covered in this session included: Out of process plug-ins (OOPPs), Better start-up time, Jetpacks support, Theme updates, Extension Manager Redesign, Tab Matches in Awesome Bar, Weave integration, and Integrated Developer Tools. In practical terms these improvements mean a few things: when a page crashes in Firefox only that tab will crash -not the entire application-, in-browser add-on development will be simplified, installation of add-ons will be streamlined and possibly personalized, cross-device encrypted syncing for Firefox, faster and more intuitive drill-down into HTML source code.
Sreekanth S. Rameshaiah, the Executive Director of Mahiti, gave the audience a great overview of how Mahiti supports the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) movement. He introduced Convene who’s objective is to support technology-based social innovators through a network of individuals and organisations. This is currently done through workshops to show users how to apply FOSS for their purposes. He introduced MySME, a programme that focuses on micro-business development. It is also responsible for the most widely distributed newspaper in slums of Kolkata. In addition to the physical newspaper, they have integrated mobile technologies to spread information. An interesting product introduced is the micro-finance management software, OurBank. It addresses all content, client, and relationship management needs of these institutions.
Pranesh Prakash, CIS-India Programme Manager, spoke about patents, copyright, policy and how they affect users in the context of the open web. Pranesh began by explaining the differences between copyright and patents. Patents are supposed to provide incentives to innovators, their purpose is to disclose information to enrich the knowledge-base. He argued that software should not be patentable because the only winners would be big corporations, lawyers, and non-practising entities waiting to sues others. Furthermore, Free/Open Source Software proves that the theory that we need patents for software is incorrect because of the willingness to share ideas to make them better.
Ragavan Srinivasan spoke about Mozilla Labs, which is building a participatory platform to the open web. The evolution of content has been explosive, but browsers have not changed significantly since the beginning of the web. Some experiments that have come out of this virtual lab include Personas, Bespin, Test Pilot, and Weave.
Vineel Reddy, Mozilla Campus Rep, organised many events including Firefox’s 5th anniversary in India. He spoke about the sense of community that comes from being a part of the movement. The Mozilla Community is not just a fan club, it also comes with great support from Mozilla staff.
Arun stressed on the need for open standards and how Mozilla promotes this. In a call to action, Arun requested participants to report broken websites, to log errors in Bugzilla, to be a part of the change that will come. I think he said it best: "[Mozilla doesn’t] have a dedicated office [in India], but we have you".
Even after the sessions were over, and the goodies distributed, participants still wanted to speak with Mozilla, The Centre for Internet and Society, and Mahiti staff for ways to contribute to the open movement.
Let us all look forward to continued discussion, innovation, and sharing
… until we meet again next year!