Pad.Ma, Firefogg, and Mumbai Community

I’ve had the luck a couple times of sitting in on a presentation by Arun Ranganathan where he takes an audience through a guided tour of the Open Web with some really beautiful demos from our evangelism team showing off HTML 5 in Firefox.   Oftentimes, when Arun is presenting the future of the web as a platform, I can see attentive developers begin to imagine a web page and a browser where a set of third-party plugins (like our favorite target, Flash) isn’t necessary.  A very powerful part of the demo is when Arun presses ctrl+U to view source and web developers in the audience see exactly what is happening in the demonstration.   What makes these demos even more impressive is when you meet a company or team of inspired individuals in the audience who is bringing the Open Web to end-users with their project.

Our last trip to India was no exception.

On our first Sunday night in Mumbai (Feb 22), we co-presented with one of these organizations at a Mozilla community meetup.  The group calls themselves Pad.Ma or, in longer form, the Public Access Digital Media Archive.  The project “is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial use.”  And, right on their website, they state their intentions to align with web standards:

Q:  Which browsers do you support, on which platforms?
A:  We currently support Firefox and Safari, on Linux, MacOS and Windows.  We do not support Internet Explorer. However, if you wish to endeavour to make the site work on IE, please appeal to IE to support web standards in their next version.

(In fact, for some fun, fire up IE and visit their website to view a strong statement from them regarding your present use of IE.)

More on the meetup, but let’s rewind by just a few hours before we met Pad.Ma face-to-face…

After a four hour roadtrip on the Pune-Mumbai highway, we arrived at our hotel in the cool neighborhood of Mumbai called Bandra.  Freshened up in about fifteen minutes, we piled two-by-two into autoricks and motored our way on a humid evening through the snaking streets to the event location.  Arun had treasure map-like directions that led us down narrow alleyways.  “When you see a cross on the wall, proceed a few more feet and you’ll see an apartment entrance on your right…” Arun read as we navigated through the Pali Hill district’s corridors.  Up a few stories and our eyes opened to a rooftop event with a large projection screen, bean bag chairs, a minibar with soft drinks and beer, and two big vats of local food.  We made it.

Invited by a local community member named Sanjay, about 25 people came to hear us speak about the Open Web and how we were building community in India.  After our presentation, the team from Pad.ma followed by showing their amazing work to archive movies on the web.   If you’re a movie person, this site will fascinate you, so please look around it.  The Pad.ma presentation was followed by their demo of the “Firefogg” addon, which allows you to easily convert videos to .ogg theora video compression format.

It was a nice tandem.  Arun chatting about the Open Web and explaining cutting-edge demos.  And, just when we thought we might lose the audience on how the technology could be applied, Pad.Ma presented their work and the Firefogg addon.  It was a nice blend of demos and practice and I believe the group’s imaginations were sparked.  The Open Web had been delivered to a rooftop audience in the Pali Hill neighborhood of Bandra.  Sometime during the evening, fireworks started to explode.  This was not planned.  An Indian wedding was taking place in around the corner.