Saturday, October 24, 2015

Planning for my first event

I started to plan for my first event in the month of September. I spoke with club leads, Mozilla Reps and RAL to know about how events are generally conducted, what is the standard procedure and stuffs like that. Vishwa, Khaleel, Karthic and Vignesh helped me throughout the process. The event was planned to be held at Madurai on November 25th. The event is about FOSS and general talks about web and Mozilla. People in and around Madurai were very interested in the event and approached me to help me with the event. We expect 50-100 participants in the event. The FSAs from Madurai got a venue for the event. I created an etherpad, formed a rough agenda and shared it with others. They started refining it and finally we had a perfect plan before us. It took nearly a month for me to do stuffs. I spoke with various people to gather lots and lots of information. We have also planned to have some interactive talks and games to make the participants more interested in the event and passionate about Mozilla. Now I am completely prepared and pumped up for the event. Looking forward to the event date.

Friday, October 16, 2015

Mozilla Task force

There was a call from Mozilla Tamil Nadu community to become a member of task force. I neither was an active contributor nor was an active member. It was just two months after I joined the community. But I applied to join the team. Luckily, I was accepted and I started to get along with the other members of the team. My primary motive was to spread Mozilla contribution to places where people have no exposure to these kind of Open Source related stuffs. I took the initiative of conducting an event at Madurai. The event was about Introduction to various contribution areas. People in the group agreed with my idea and supported me. Vishwaprasath, Khaleel, Karthic and Vigneshwer helped me with forming a perfect agenda and taking steps for the event. I created a pad, put down all my ideas and the other people helped in refining it to a meaningful and useful event. I finalised the event, got a venue and some people from the team volunteered to help me in conducting the event. One of my classmates helped me in all those stuffs. Looking forward to conduct the event.

The Anokha's effect on my college life

Anokha is the annual tech fest held by Amrita university every year. It was held between March 5 and 7th. There was a three day workshop conducted by Mozilla in my college tech fest. As I am pretty much interested in Open Source, I signed up myself for the workshop. The title of the workshop was "Introduction to Firefox OS App Development". During the first two days, they taught us the basics of HTML5, CSS and Javascript. I was pretty much attracted by the way people conducted the workshop. The most awesome thing was Mozilla is not just a browser. They have a lot of other projects and it is one of the most awesome and coolest Open Source organisation I've ever heard about. The community is also pretty cool and are friendly. That was my first intro to Mozilla Firefox. Then a lot of things happened during those two days and I got pretty much into the Mozilla stuff. I signed up for the FSA program and started to know more about Mozilla. That was a turning point in my boring college life.

My first contribution to Mozilla

Hi. My first contribution to Mozilla happened during the Weeks of Contribution. It was a contribution introduction fest held by Mozilla Tamil Nadu community during the months of July and August. I was very much interested and involved in the Weeks of contribution. There were many areas discussed like Firefox OS App development, Add-on development, localisation, Mozilla Developer Network, Mozilla Location Services and so on. There were ppts, video lectures and irc chats to describe the contributions properly and to make the contributors more involved in it. My contribution to Mozilla after I signed up for FSA was to localisation, in short l10n. This l10n is basically conversion of data from one language to other to comfort the user by interacting with him in his native language. I localised a few sentences from English to Tamil. That was my first contribution. Though it was just a small thing, that made me interested in Mozilla. Then I did a lot of stuffs which will the described in the upcoming blogs. I am now an active volunteer and evangelist in Mozilla.