• Namaste, India

    July 6th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 5 comments »

    On July 12, 2007, Chris Hofmann (Mozilla’s Director of Special Projects) and I will be going to India to meet many of the Indian community members who have been contributing to Mozilla. In addition, we hope to build our community of individuals who will take an active role in promoting the Mozilla mission and manifesto. Ideally, we want to learn as much as possible from those we meet, empower as many people who want to contribute, and connect those who feel drawn to helping spread Mozilla far and wide.

    The past few weeks have been an intense effort to piece together a very busy schedule for our trip. I’ve tried every means possible to reach out to people, including joining several groups on Orkut (and making a lot of friends there), emailing former colleagues, connecting with our Gujurati localizers (who are hosting a big event on July 21, 2007) and so much more. It’s been quite a test for the powers of the Internet, but with the magic or email, Skype, IM and social networking, we have wired together what looks to be an exciting trip.

    For those who might be in India at the end of next week and the following week, here is our itinerary:

    July 12, 22:00 : Land in Mumbai. Namaste India!

    July 13, 09:00: Travel to Ahmedabad, India for the India’s first ever National Open Source Conference. We will participate in the conference as attendees, meeting many of the key open source leaders in India. Also, we will participate in a discussion on community building for open source projects

    July 14: Day 2 of conference. Also, we will meet with students from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadebad who are creating projects that will help virally promote and spread Mozilla’s mission and software, specifically Firefox. We return to Mumbai on Saturday night.

    July 15: Back in Mumbai, we will meet with professor of Indian Institute of Management who focuses on marketing and tech. Sunday afternoon, visit Mumbai

    July 16: Travel to Bangalore. Meet with Mobilis (NGO using Mozilla in medical device space) and Ashoka (Seth’s former work)

    July 17: Morning — Meeting with Indian Institute Technology — Bangalore, presenting to students who will help with localization, building developer community, and creating ideas to virally spread the adoption of Mozilla software, focusing particularly on Firefox .

    Afternoon — Visit the HP Labs in Bangalore and learn from the team there about their lessons-learned when trying to spread technology throughout the India countryside.

    July 18: Morning — Meeting with Manu of Orkut/Google at the Google Bangalore office

    Afternoon — Meeting with Mahiti (www.mahiti.org). Mahiti is an NGO (founder is Sunil Abraham, an Ashoka Fellow and colleague of Seth) that is spreading open source software to NGOs across India. Their delivery is called “NGO in a box” and the default browser and email software is Mozilla. Along with other OSS solutions, they send Firefox and Thunderbird to over 200 NGOs throughout India.

    July 19: Morning — Fly to Hyderabad

    Afternoon — Presentation to students at India School of Business — Hyderabad. These students and the ISB marketing club will create viral marketing campaigns and then help drive them forward.

    July 20 Morning — TBD in Hyderabad

    Evening — Return to Mumbai

    July 21 — Localizer event in Mumbai arranged by the Gujurati Localizers. Several Mozilla community members and other open source enthusiasts from India will be getting together to create the team and project plan for localizing en-IN. The second half of the all day session will be creating a plan to build the Mozilla community and to spread the adoption of Firefox.

    July 22 — Morning: visit Mumbai
    Evening: Leave for U.S.

    Since the purpose of the trip is to build community in India, we are hoping to meet as many folks as possible. If you happen to be there at the time and want to meet up, please email me or Chris Hofmann. Start by posting a message to this blog.