Skip to main content

Maker Party@SIMCA

Webmaking is fun but teaching others to make the web is even more fun. This is the exact reason why I couldn't deny the invitation to be a presenter at Maker party which was held at SIMCA on the 21st of September 2013, officially the fourth Maker Party of the season in Pune. I wasn't sure if I could be a good facilitator at this event as I was down with fever and had a real bad throat infection just a night before the event. Somehow I did manage to bring my voice out while standing on the stage and to my surprise, my speech was so clear, no one got any hint of my ill health.

I began the session introducing the crowd to the idea of Open Source, Mozilla as an organization, ways of getting involved with Mozilla and the different Mozilla products.
The tough job was taking the crowd through localization project as being one of the best ways to start contribution. It was not that I was not aware of the topic. Localization had been my first project under Mozilla as well. But the slide being used was supposed to be Ankit's slide for his talk. But unfortunately when he got delayed (due to some unavoidable reasons), I had to fill in. Well, not knowing what the next slide contained and trying to talk on the stage...surprise at every slide change, is not a very comfortable situation to be in. But my being well versed with the topic someone did let me pull it off well...and I hope I didn't let the crowd realize the mess of the situation!
Ankit took the stage next and spoke in details about the Webmaker projects and a bit more in detail about the concept of open web.
Post lunch we did move into the labs for some realtime webmaking and remixing.
The fun part of the remix sessions are the projects in their 'Under construction' phase. I mean, just imagine the sight of someone remixing an Independence day page and trying to make some 'Titanic' page....there comes one hilarious moment when your background is that of the Independence day, with the image of the Indian national flag in background and someone just inserts a picture of 'Jack' and 'Rose' on top of that! Well, couldn't help but break into laughter.
We had some awesome makes by the end of the event and we closed the event by giving out some goodies to the best makers of the day.

My ill health did resume after coming back home....but somehow these events are so very tempting, I cannot say a "NO" to any of these invitations.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Quarantining Alone - A Once in a Lifetime Opportunity

This Covid-19 virus has turned the entire world upside down. It has broken a lot of older habits and set a lot of new normals. Towards the early days of this lockdown, I had written a blog - An Extrovert in Isolation . The early lockdown days were extremely difficult for me. That was the phase of breaking old habits. An extrovert by nature, couldn't accept the sudden change of being locked alone inside my house. I am writing this blog again after being locked at home for more than 100 days now. Most of the older habits are broken by now. A few new habits have become a part of my new normal. What seemed to have been painful 100 days back has now turned to be blissful. Here, I am sharing my story of how quarantining alone has ended up being the greatest opportunity and a huge transformation in my life.  I have been struggling for years to fix my sleep patterns. Going to bed late and waking up late had been a habit for a really long time. My struggles to change this habit had

RASCI model - the responsibility assignment matrix

In the last few days, both at my workplace as well as while dealing with a few activities around me, I have realized the importance of implementing a better responsibility assignment matrix, to get things done in a less messed up way. A few months back, during some random conversation, a friend of mine had introduced me to the RASCI model, one of the responsibility assignment matrices. Wikipedia says that the responsibility assignment matrix 'describes the participation by various roles in completing tasks or deliverables for a project or business process.'  In simple words, for any project, if we can divide each person's role and responsibility, it not only ensures a better end product, but also saves the time, otherwise lost in discussions (which organizations like to call as meetings). A RASCI implementation ensures that each person is responsible for only and only the task assigned to him (or her) and will not need to interfere with another person's task, un

The stranger in Pain

I have just returned from Malaysia today. After a 3 months stay in Singapore, I could finally make it to Malaysia, Kuala Lampur. Just a small 3 days trip with my friends. On the second day of our trip, we had decided to visit the Genting Highlands. Early morning we started off for the adventurous trip, only three of us- Sree Lakshmi(my room mate in Singapore), Nishita(my co-scholar from SCMS-UG) and me. We boarded our bus to Genting. Sree and Nishi sat together and I sat alone, taking a window seat. After a while, an elderly uncle, Indian looking, of about the age of 60+, occupied the vacant seat next to mine.  He initiated the conversation by asking me which country I am from. After I answered that I was from India, he said he was from Sri Lanka. My thinking of him being an Indian was proven wrong. He was a very friendly man. After the initial ice breaking, we started speaking about ourselves and our lives. He told that he had finished conquering the entire globe with just some 4 co