Priyanka's Scrapbook

If you are planning to be there at MozFest, one thing you can definitely not miss….is the Web Literacy space.  I will give you 5 reasons why: You can never know enough about the growing web. Whether you are just getting started on the world wide web or you are a web ninja...we promise at least one new learning for you at the Web Literacy space this year! The space decor will take you through a journey of the development of technology. Let's travel together right from the era of dot matrix printers to the today’s age of pocket printers! You will find your soul mates here! No, we are not gonna be running a matchmaking campaign...that's not what I am talking about. What I am referring to is our hangout space where like-minded people will get a chance of interacting, sharing ideas and building new things together. If at any point of time you need a break from the knowledge heavy sessions and interactions at MozFest, you are welcome to come and join us at the Web Liter...

There are those rare days in life, when you come home with a guilt in your heart...the guilt of having so much in life, but still not being content whereas, there are so many people out there, with so little and yet so happy! The last Sunday was one of those days for me. While driving down to Sarthak Seva Sangh , little did I know of what I was about to experience there. Sarthak Seva Sangh Orphanage is an initiative started by Dr. Anil Kudia to help make a difference to the lives of unfortunate street children. Some of these children are motherless and orphans and some are newborn babies who are absolutely directionless.The place currently hosts around 60 children. As a part of Mozilla's and Mile's initiative, we were to go there and teach basics of computer and internet to the kids. When we reached there, we were welcomed by the manager of the place (sorry for not remembering his name). He took us around the entire place, showing us the current infrastructure as well as e...

On the occasion of International Women's Day, the WoMoz (Women in Mozilla) community from Pune had decided to celebrate Womanhood and technology by paying tribute to to all the women, who are working towards making a difference in the world of Open Source technology. As per our planning, we, the organizers did gather at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research by 9.30am. It took us less than 20 minutes to arrange the room and put up a few posters around the campus, which could give our participants, the feel of event. The event was scheduled to begin at 10am. While planning the event, we had made a few mistakes (which I have listed at the end of the post) due to which we had a really low crowd turnout. After an hour of waiting, when we were almost about to call the event off and re-schedule it, did we have our guest speaker, Manjusha Joshi walk in. It was she who motivated us to continue with the event, even if we had way less number of participants than expected....

I have never been to any AdaCamp before this one, just read a lot about it. Thus, I was really excited for my first AdaCamp from almost a month before the commencement of the event. Most importantly, I was responsible to take care of Mozilla's presence at this event. This included helping all the participating Mozillians to get to the city of the event, arrange their accommodation and food and finally make sure that other AdaCampers, who were not aware of Mozilla yet, could also know about this Open Source organization and its different projects. I met the two AdaCamp organizers, Alex and Suki, for the first time at the reception dinner sponsored by 'Web We Want' on the evening of Friday, 21st November 2014. This was the same place where I also met a lot of other amazing ladies. The most interesting part was, meeting people whom I was already connected with, virtually, but was meeting for the first time. The next two days were one of the most amazing and learning exper...

I will leave my travel adventure out from this blog post cause they are sufficiently interesting to deserve a separate, dedicated post. So, I will jump directly to my experience of this co-incidential work-week at Portland. On the first day, when I walked into the Portland Art Museum in the morning, I was overwhelmed to see so many known faces and being able to flag a few new faces to their IRC nicks (or twitter handles), whom I was meeting for the first time outside of the virtual world.  What's your slingshot? During this one week, I heard a lot of amazing people, from David Slater to Chris Beard, from Mark Surman to Mitchel Baker....too much awesomeness on the stage! The guest speakers on the first day was Brian Muirhead, from NASA who made us realize that even though we were not NASA engineers, and our work was limited to the earthen atmosphere, sometimes the criticality of projects or the way of handling them didn't need to differ much. The second day's guest ...

Last weekend I had a blast in Bhubaneshwar. Over two days, I was there at two different colleges for two Maker parties. Saturday (23rd August 2014), we were at the Center of IT & Management Education (CIME) where we were asked to address a crowd of 100 participants whom we were supposed to teach webmaking. Trust me, very rarely do we get such crowd in events where we get the opportunity to be less of a teacher and more of a learner. We taught them Webmaking, true, but in return we learnt a lot from them. Maker Party at Center of IT & Management Education (CIME) On Sunday, things were even more fabulous at Institute of Technical Education & Research(ITER) , Siksha 'O' Anusandhan University college, where we were welcomed by around 400 participants, all filled with energy, enthusiasm and the willingness to learn. Maker Party at Institute of Technical Education & Research(ITER) Our agenda for both days were simple....to have loads and loads of fu...

While going through my twitter time-line this evening, I noticed Michelle Thorne's tweet stating that India leads with most Maker Party action this season. Well, who doubts that! In India, we have a maker parties being organized almost every second day. My facebook wall and twitter timelime is like overloaded with posts, photos and updates from all the Maker Parties happening around me. Maker Party, Pune Well, if you are still not aware of this one, we are having the grand daddy of this maker parties in Pune on the 6th of September 2014. The executive director of Mozilla Foundation, Mark Surman , is going to be personally present for this event. Just like all maker parties, this event is an attempt to map and empower a community of educators and creative people who share a passion to innovate, evolve and change the learning landscape. A few quick updates about this event:  Event date - 6th and 7th September  Event venue - SICSR, Model Colony, Pune Rough agen...

Well, I love the name Larissa came up with for today's event. It is kind of a little long but defines the event best - "Mozilla and WeTech Woman’s Maker Party". We had landed in Delhi on the 22nd of July 2014 and as Larissa defines it, Delhi was indeed a 'steam sauna'. We did spend most of that day going around and visiting a few famous places like the Red Fort, the India Gate, Parliament house etc. In the evening, we did meet the local Mozillians in Delhi. Well, it was an informal meeting of all Mozillians, talking all ' sh!t mozillians say ' ;) 23rd morning began with all excitement. It was a small crowd, but a really awesome crowd in that conference room. Right from the introduction session, we could feel the high intellectual capabilities these young ladies were filled with. After a small game of spectrogram, we immediately moved to introduce Mozilla as an organization as well as all the Mozilla projects. To my surprise, most of the participants ...

I am sure many of you have received an email last day whose subject line was "Invitation to MozCamp Beta India". I am not sure if you were surprised (or confused) with the 'Beta' word and its significance in the event name. Personally, I have never been to a MozCamp before but what I understand after my conversations with several former MozCamp attendees (please correct me if I am wrong), it used to be a gathering for all Mozillians of a region (mostly continent level) to be able to interact with each other. People who have been working virtually were given a chance to meet in reality during this. Also,these MozCamps used to focus a lot on cross community interactions and cross-cultural learnings. The structure of MozCamp is getting a bit modified from this year. Starting this year, MozCamp is going to be more like a 'Train the trainer' sort of event. Unlike previous MozCamps, not all active Mozillians will be called down to attend a MozCamp. Only sele...

My first year in Mozilla was more of experimental...I began my Mozilla journey with localization. Then tried my hands on some awesome Webmaking...and finally I got into MDN. Once I got introduced to MDN, I instantly fell in love with it. The MDN project had everything I like...an awesome blend of both documentation and coding. My MDN contribution till before the work-week had mostly been small documentation edits here and there, some playing around with KUMA and a lot of MDN Evangelism. When I got the invitation mail for MDN workweek, Paris, I was already on cloud nine. I had got a chance of meeting a few members of the MDN team previously in Santa Clara during the Mozilla Summit, and the very idea of getting to work with them again was super thrilling! The Super-heroes of Mozilla The journey to Paris was also an awesome one. Afterall, Paris had been my dream since my days of 'Mills and Boons' ;) Kaustav   and I had reached Paris on the 5th of March. It w...

This was my third GNUnify in a row as a participant....and the second one as an organizer. Being a student of SICSR and a member of PLUG, GNUnify is somehow way more than just another conference....its MY conference. Everything about GNUnify is a bit too special for me. The GNUnify fever gets on all the organizers right from December, but this time, being away from college (because of my job)....I did catch the fever a bit late ;) Right from 7th of Feb, right from a week before the commencement of the event, I went to college almost every evening; to jump into the excitement of GNUnify preparation. Its very difficult to explain others how we get this passion for the so called EXTRA work after office, but we who live it...just LOVE it! GNUnify is of-course way more to me than just the Mozilla Dev rooms. This year, the Mozilla Dev rooms were a tough job though...due to the lack of budget. The last MozCafe meeting that we had before GNUnify was a tricky one. Planning an event like G...

Since the day I had been involved with Open Source and known about FOSDEM, it was my dream to be able to attend at least one FOSDEM before I die ;) I never knew the dream would come true so soon, that too, it was a dream come true++ scenario for me. I was not only invited to FOSDEM, I was invited to give a talk on the platform of FOSDEM. I still remember the exact feeling when I had received that email which read "Your talk proposal for the Mozilla DevRoom at FOSDEM 2014 has been accepted!". I was on cloud nine....too happy to be able to share the news with even the people sitting next to me in office (I was in my workplace at that time). From the day of receiving the invitation to the day of travel...things moved a bit too fast and even before I had realized, I was already in the flight for Brussels. Day 0 in Brussels Brussels welcomed us with an awesome climate. The temperature was 0'C when we landed. I was warm in my jacket but I remember not being able to feel...

The event was rightly named and it was organized exactly a year after the version I. This time, the venue was chosen to be Techno India college at Rajarhat, Kolkata. This event was meant to open the doors of the Open Source world to the first year computer students of this renowned technical college. The event was planned and organized by Sayak Sarkar , presently a Mozilla Reps Council member, with the help of Srijib Roy ,a local Mozillian from the college. Kaustav Das Modak , a Mozilla Representative, and I were invited as guest speakers for the event. The event start unfortunately got delayed by an hour due to some technical issues faced by the organizers. Instead of 10am (IST), we began at 11am. I took the stage to begin the day with an introduction to Open Source followed by a Mozilla introduction. I touched a bit upon what are the different Mozilla products and current projects being supported by Mozilla. I also spoke a little about how one could get involved with Mozilla and ...

Public speaking and Evangelism is now getting a hang on me. I am loving the travelling, the interactions and the feeling of being able to enlighten someone with the little knowledge in my mind's bank. This time it was Bhubaneshwar that I got a chance of visiting. A student of the CET college, Bhubaneshwar, had contacted Kaustav (a Mozilla Rep) for hosting a Mozilla event in their college. When Kaustav shared the idea of hosting an event in Bhubaneshwar, the offer was too tempting for me to refuse. Bhubaneshwar is a small city in Orissa where there are quite a few renowned colleges. These colleges hosts some of the tetchiest minds of India. The city never had much exposure to Open Source in general. It was a platinum opportunity (golden is surely an understatement here) for us to introduce the Mozilla world to these techy minds. 21st and 22nd of December were chosen as the dates of the event. The Webmaker table-cloth....shot best Pre-event preparations: Kaustav and I we...

I remember rushing through my paper which got over by 4.30pm and I had a cab booked for the airport which was to pick me up by 5pm. Well, that was the level of adrenalin rush I had faced throughout my MozFest. After a not so uncomfortable journey of about 9.5 hours from Mumbai, I finally landed in London in the morning at around 6.45am (from here on, all the mentioned times are going to be London's local time). Well, after the immigration check and luggage check out, now the challenging job began. Initially had thought of not sharing this part of the story, but then again, why not! While trying to find the station from where I could get a train to Green park, I kind of got lost at the airport. I went to the wrong station and almost boarded a wrong train! Phew! A timely realization just saved my day. Finally after finding the RIGHT path, I did manage to check into the hotel. Didn't get much time to explore my room or the hotel though, had to immediately leave for the venue...

This one is gonna be long as I have too much to write this time. Mozilla Summit 2013 was my first International Mozilla event. The summit venue for me was Santa Clara, California. It was still 2nd of October 2013 when I did meet my fellow Mozillians at Mumbai International Airport. Though we were together at the airport, we were not traveling together. Mine was a flight to SFO via Amsterdam. After a long restless wait at the Mumbai airport, I did board the flight for Amsterdam. Well, it was a long flight indeed but somehow was not as tiring as I had thought it to be. I did get the first glance of Summit at the waiting lobby of Amsterdam airport. There were some 30+ Mozillians there....all heading to the Summit. Oh my god! Wearing a Firefox/ Mozilla T-Shirt made so much sense. It was like several members of the Mozilla family, who didn't know each other, did recognize each other instantly by the Family mark they were in. Another long flight took us to San Francisco. At the airpor...