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Moz Camp Delhi

February 10th, 2009 by seth bindernagel

Today, we arrived for the Mozilla Camp Delhi at the India Social Institute at 2 PM to a crowded room of Mozilla contributors and developers led by Mohak Prince, the most enthusiastic campus rep from Delhi.  In just two weeks, Mohak organized a midday event that attracted somewhere between 75 and 100 interested folks.  Three to four large posters had been created feature me and Arun’s visit.  (I have some pictures forthcoming, but I left my USB cable at home.)  Our names were spelled out on the 4′ x 3′ screen-printed posters.

At the start, we did some initial introductions while we got ourselves technically situated.  During that initial go-round, we found that nearly 100% of the participants in the room had coding experience with C++, JS, HTML, XML, CSS, and more.  All used Firefox with several extensions.  A few had developed add-ons.  The audience had some great initial questions, teeing us up for an extra special afternoon.  Here is what took place:

*  Pascal Finette did an online Skype chat discussing the Mozilla Labs concept series
*  I spoke about Mozilla community and L10n
*  Arun gave a presentation with lots of demos on SVG, HTML 5, OGG video formatting

Frankly, I was blown away by Arun’s presentation.  This guy is good.  As a member of the Developer Relations team, he really showed excellent demos to this audience.  My favorite was probably an OGG formatted video with SVG and CSS overlayed.  The reaction by the audience, if I remember correctly, was a gentle “Oooohhhh!”.  The combination of his showing his excellent demos, explaining the technology, drawing laughs (when a man was shouting outside and Arun somehow thought he was getting heckled), and driving interaction with the audience really made the crowd squeeze the most out of the 2 hours he presented. Obviously they were impressed and I won’t be surprised to hear from Arun that a number of the developers emailed him to find out how to participate.

I focused on l10n and community development.  After I finished, one request I had for Mohak and his team was to use the Mozilla Community Sites project for Mozilla Camp Delhi.  Given all the excitement, I hope they’ll use the MCS to set up a point for community development and interaction here in Delhi.  I also handed out a number of cards to people who hope to look at and contribute to Silme.

In closing, the first event in India was a big success.  I am not sure we could have anticipated such enthusiasm or curiosity in Mozilla.  If you attended the event, please comment on my blog.  Tell me who you are, what you do, and how you want to get involved.  I’ve linked below to many of the topics I mentioned in my presentation and will post the slides soon.

Special thanks to Mohak for his efforts.  Well done!

http://contribute.mozilla.org
http://wiki.braniecki.net/Silme
http://diary.braniecki.net/tag/mct/

Tags: , , , | Categories: India

4 Responses to “Moz Camp Delhi”

  1. Kinshuk Sunil

    Hey Seth
    Thanks for joining us at the event. It was great fun to interact with you and Arun.

    I had a number of Ideas on l10n and i18n… i will pursue them further a bit.. try and contribute at concepts… but most of all, I am going to continue organising more of such events so that people not only learn about the initiatives being taken and developments being made but also find a way to contribute…

    regarding the “who i am, what i do” part :)
    I am Kinshuk Sunil, a co-organiser at MozillaCamp Delhi; and I organise similar such unconferences including OSScamps (all across India) and I look after the community initiatives and engagement for my open source company – OSSCube. And I was the one that took the last video session with You and Arun.

    Reply
    February 10, 2009 at 11:09 am
  2. Satyajeet Singh

    Hi Seth,

    It was a splendid learning experience. Both you & Arun were fabulous. Hope to attend more such events in future.

    Good luck for your camps in Kanpur and Pune.

    Satyajeet

    Reply
    February 10, 2009 at 11:22 pm
  3. Manu Goel

    Hi Seth…. its wonderful to read your post…. we are happy you liked it as much as we did…. being a developer I have a certain biasness towards Arun’s presentation :) but I got to know many new things about localization through you presentation too….. u both were just awesome.

    Just because you mentioned it in your post, I am enclosing some details about me. Let me know how I can contribute

    I consider myself 6/10 on the following topics
    CSS 1,2,3 in general, CSS layouts, fluid layouts
    JS, Object Oriented JS, AJAX, jQuery, Ext JS
    HTML 4

    I also have an understanding of the following (2/10)
    Canvas
    Microformats
    HTML 5
    Localization
    Web Services
    Mashups

    Let me know how I can contribute.

    Reply
    February 11, 2009 at 12:27 am
  4. Mohak Prince

    Hello Seth,

    I guess I’m a bit late in commenting on the Blog post.

    Trivia about myself – Hi,I’m Mohak,Mozilla Firefox Campus Representative from Delhi,India
    I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams of meeting you & Arun,and that too in such time interval.

    Kudos to Mary,Jay (Mozilla Corporation),for getting me in touch with you & Arun.
    Special Thanks to Pascal,for providing deep insight into Concept Series.

    I guess,you were the more quiet type of the two (No guesses,Arun scored over being able to converse in Hindi) Though,I did find that you’re so passionate about your Indian visit,that I could very well reconnect.

    I hope,I can take forward the MCS talk and can actually inspire others to join me,in the prowess.

    Thanks,to Mozilla Team,for making it possible to have a see through about what’s happening in India.
    I remain indebted.

    I’ll stay in loop,and keep you updated.

    Regards,
    Mohak – Unorganizer of MozillaCampDelhi
    http://www.mohakprince.tumblr.com

    Reply
    February 13, 2009 at 1:43 am
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