“This causes the comment to become irrelevant to the text it references.  Additionally, if someone then fixes the localization note, localizers won’t be notified on this change, and the comment does not get changed in our translations…As some of us are actually reading such comments before translating, it is important to get it 100% accurate.”

Here is an example that Tomer provides.

<!– LOCALIZATION NOTE (bookmarksSidebarGtkCmd.commandkey): This command
-  key should not contain the letters A-F, since these are reserved
-  shortcut keys on Linux. –>
<!ENTITY bookmarksGtkCmd.commandkey “o”>

You can see that example in our code on MXR here:  http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla1.9.2/source/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/browser/browser.dtd#110

For those readers who may not be seeing what is happening here, notice that the <!– LOCALIZATION NOTE –> is referencing “bookmarksSidebarGtkCmd.commandkey“, but the !ENTITY variable name is actually “bookmarksGtkCmd.commandkey“.

That mismatch in the entity names has made that localization note untrackable by any locaization tools.  Unfortunately, localization tools will not understand which comment belongs to bookmarksGtkCmd.commandkey.  Furthermore, localizers who use these notes for translations will have to make the educated guess where the comment is pointing.  If the note gets updated in the future, it’s likely that localizers will miss it.

Tomer suggested writing a script to look for these mismatches.  In the very least, I am hoping this post will spread the awareness to developers to remember to do this.  A quick request from l10n community: please maintain localization notes if entities get changed.

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I’ve used it so many times when images or text are small and I want a scaled up view of the details.  Also, I have to admit that sometimes my eyes get a little tired and it’s nice to scale text to a bigger size so I can read without focusing too closely.

How do you use Full Page Zoom?

So, before we get too far into it, here’s how to use full page zoom…

I use a Mac and love keyboard shortcuts, so I press Command and the “+” sign to zoom in.  Command and the “-” sign pulls me back out.  You can also go to the View –> Zoom menu and zoom in and out from there.  When hitting the command “+”, I can zoom in over and over again until the image or text I am viewing scales up to the desired size.  Once I am finished, I hit command “-” to take me back to the state I want.

(On a PC, you can use similar keystrokes with Ctrl + and Ctrl -.  Or, go to that view menu again…)

And, if you prefer it the old way, where you can zoom in on just the text, select the “Zoom Text Only” option under the View –> Zoom –> Zoom Text Only.  With that setting activated, you’re back to zooming just text.

One final note, when you zoom in and out, the state of that page persists.  If you navigate away from the site but come back to it later, the zoom state will remain.  This can be very handy for many reasons, not the least of which is accessibility.  Readers who prefer a much larger text for reading will not have to re-zoom every time they visit their favorite sites.

What’s in that tide pool?

Let me give an example of how I have used this recently.  My friend Jordan puts all of his wonderful photography on his site he calls Nomadic Planet.  Recently, Jordan has started experimenting with high dynamic range photography (or HDR for short).  HDR allows photographers to take several photographs with different light settings to create a more dynamic range of exposures.  Nifty software allows the photographer to then combine all those shots into one, resulting in a final photograph with a depth of field that shows great detail in the foreground all the way to the background.

Jordan describes this as a beautiful sunset at the end of the road in north Kau’i at Ke’e Beach State Park in Hanalei, Hawaii.  It’s a 3-exposure HDR taken on April 27, 2008.

But, I really like tide pools.  And, because Jordan’s HDR technique provides so much detail in the entire landscape, I want to zoom in on the bottom left corner to see if I can find any little shells or starfish or whatever.

Voila, FULL PAGE ZOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

Here’s the shot from my browser (I uploaded the screenshots to Flickr to allow me blog this…)

Anyone see a starfish?  I don’t.  But, thanks to full page zoom, I was able to get very close to the area I wanted to investigate.

Want more technical background on it?

Robert O’Callahan did two interesting posts about this feature a while back.  The first post you might want to read came in February of 2007 and discusses a patch landed by Eli Friedman that “is a major cleanup of the way we work with length units in Gecko.”  The second post worth reading again discusses the behavior the zoom implementation.

Without a shred of knowledge about this computer science behind this feature, I found these two posts really interesting.  Thanks to Roc for passing them my way as background.

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Here’s my story.

Last week, I found myself repeatedly performing the same task with my browser.  Over and over again, I would click on the “View” menu option in Firefox, select the “Toolbars” option and then mouse over to “Bookmark Toolbar”.  Why?   I have daily tasks that use bookmarklets that I’ve placed in my bookmark toolbar.  However, I like a sleek look for my browser, so I always choose to hide extra features like toolbars and sidebars.  You can imagine that the process of collapsing and uncollapsing my bookmark bar got a bit tiresome and it triggered the thought: “What if I built an extension that could take care of this for me?”

My curiosity to develop an extension for Firefox had always been overshadowed by a bit of timidity in crossing into the world of development.  I am not a developer, having taken only two or so CS courses in college.  What if I had a question?  Who would I ask without seeming to waste a Mozilla developer’s very valuable time?  Forget it…just move on, right?  Well, not this time…I felt like I had a good idea and was curious.  So I gave it a try.

Before going further, let me share the extension.  It’s called the “Bookmark Bar Toggler” and you can install by following this link.   The add-on remains in Mozilla’s add-on sandbox and will be in “experimental” phase until it moves into recommended status.  Therefore, you have to log into addons.mozilla.org to get this extension until it becomes recommended by AMO.  The Bookmark Bar Toggler allows a user to add a button to the chrome of the browser that collapses and uncollapses the bookmark bar.

After realizing I had an idea that an extension could solve, I began to search around on just how to make it.  I felt that this would be a terrific experiment.  Can I actually write an extension and then blog about the pain and/or joy of the process?

So, last Wednesday night, I looked at Mozilla Developer Center to see what I could find on extension development.   I found the page: “Building an Extension“.  It looks like Ben Goodger started this back in 2005.  Thanks, Ben.  Also, many thanks to Eric “Sheppy” Shepherd (docs guru) and all the folks from the community who have edited it to its present state.  “Building an Extension” takes the most novice (me) through the process of setting up an environment on the OS, creating a chrome manifest, and writing the XUL and JavaScript code.  I followed the step-by-step process to build the sample “Hello World” extension.  I eventually got it working, but not without some frustration.

One of the first things this tutorial asked me to do was to create the install.rdf.  In the install.rdf example, I was asked to cut and paste several lines of code into a document.  Admittedly, I was a bit anxious to begin hacking on my idea, so I changed some stuff that I thought I would use for my eventual extension.  Specifically, I changed “<em:id>sample@example.net</em:id>” to what I thought would be my extension’s ID.  I chose “firefox.toolbar.tray”.  Why did I do this?  Not sure…in hindsight the name doesn’t even really make sense.  But, the XUL hackers reading this will know that I changed the syntax to something incorrect, even though it tells me RIGHT IN THE TUTORIAL that this has to be “in email address format”!  Notice that my ID has no “@” symbol.  I thought I had followed every step, but my “Hello World” just wouldn’t work.  I eventually had to go back and recheck everything until I saw this error.  I was reminded not to be hasty, but also I had to wonder, why didn’t a flag pop up and tell me that this was an issue?  It might have been nice for some error message to have popped up somewhere alerting me to this syntax error.  Is that possible?  Another possible piece of feedback, maybe we should make the instructions about that syntax even more explicit.  Only newcomers are going to read this documentation, so let’s make it painfully obvious.  I must have spent nearly 2 hours trying to find this simple error.

Another error I found in my install.rdf was incorrectly referencing the version of Firefox where this extension would work.  At first, I had entered the <em:maxVersion> to be 3.x.  I just didn’t know what to put in there.  But, this was not correct.  I eventually found that I had to change the code to <em:maxVersion>3.0pre</em:maxVersion>for my extension to work.  This wasn’t really documented too well and it would have been nice to get some sort of error message…but I eventually figured it out by looking at other install.rdfs and seeing the proper syntax.

Eventually, I got “Hello World” to show up in the bottom status bar of my browser and began to feel like I was in business.  It was time to start figuring out how I was going to create a button that would make my bookmark bar collapse and uncollapse whenever I clicked it.  Web searches led me to this great article on MDC:  Custom Toolbar Button.  Could it be this easy?  I had the sample extension I just built on my computer to use as a framework, and now I had a tutorial on how to add a toolbar button to the chrome of the browser.

I began walking through the tutorial and thinking about what I wanted the extension to do.  I wasn’t able to find every answer on the Web, so I turned to the Mozilla community for some help.  So many tools exist for someone to access when needed:  MDC, irc.mozilla.org, Planet Mozilla, MXR / LXR, and more.  I’d be foolish to try to convince anyone reading this post that I know how to code in CSS, XUL or JavaScript, I don’t.  But, that didn’t mean I couldn’t ask or poke around to find answers to my questions.  That’s just what I did.  I got on IRC and asked some random questions to developers I knew would answer.  I could have easily visited #extdev to ask the extension development community about what I was trying to do, but chose to call on individuals I knew…either method would have worked.  With the “Custom Toolbar Button” tutorial and some persistence, I quickly learned how to create a set of CSS, XUL, and JS files that would get my extension running.  (Stick with me non-hackers…it wasn’t too tough.)  The explanations are all directly in the tutorial and it wasn’t hard to piece together and then figure out where I had bugs.

The trickiest part for me was writing the JavaScript.  I knew I had to expand the sample function that was set up in the MDC tutorial.  The skeleton was there and I had my ideas. I used the DOM inspector to inspect the browser chrome and find the exact name of bookmark toolbar that my function would reference.  Then, I got a tip to look at some SeaMonkey code in LXR and saw the “collapse” command.  I also got a tip on the final line of code, which dictates the state of the command (whether the bookmark bar was collapsed or not) to persist after I restarted or shutdown.  That code was in the SeaMonkey source here, line 4491.

I ended up with the following code:

function OpenCloseBookmarkBar() {
var elem = document.getElementById(”PersonalToolbar”);
elem.collapsed = !elem.collapsed;
document.persist(”PersonalToolbar”, “collapsed”);
}

Really not too hard to understand, is it? I admit, I stumbled through writing this.  But once I had it, it was easier for me to see how it worked.  Many thanks to sspitzer for a tutorial how to write this code.  Couldn’t have done it without the help of one of Mozilla’s long-time Jedis…sspitzer.

Another tricky part was creating the correct order of the lines of code in the XUL file.  I misplaced my JavaScript command in that file, as well as the reference to the CSS code.  But, once I saw that this was in the wrong order (by looking at other, similar XUL files and asking around), I changed it to the correct order.  In a perfect world, I probably could have used some better documentation on this.  XUL seems like it can be a pretty tricky language and structuring these files for a newcomer is pretty foreign.

The next step was designing the button for the chrome of the browser.  I went back to lxr and got the .PNG file for the Firefox 3 Mac theme.   Asa gave me some great tips on how to perfectly crop out and edit the section I wanted and, voila, I had a button for my extension.

The “Building an Extension” tutorial gives a great tutorial on how to package up the extension.  I followed these guidelines, zipped up my files, and put the extension on AMO.  To be honest, the process was really straight forward and not too painful.

It is obvious that so many community members have put work into this process.  For a non-developer, it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn close.  Congratulations and thanks to everyone who had some effort in making extension development easy (MDC, AMO, those who are on IRC and ready to help…), it wasn’t bad at all, sincerely.

So, what did I learn and what’s next?

1. Version 2 of this extension needs to have a few things:  I have to create images that look good on other platforms; I am going to work on l10n; and I want to add key stroke commands that will collapse and uncollapse the toolbar.  Do you have any other recommendations?  You know the drill, comment on this post.
2. I learned that MDC is awesome.  Really, this is a great resource from the Mozilla Community.  I was impressed how much of the documentation was already updated for Firefox 3!  Writing this extension would have been impossible without the community’s work on MDC.  What a terrific resource.
3. It would be nice if there was some built in XUL debugger or error messenger that pointed out syntax errors and other things like where to place lines of code.  I don’t even know if this is possible or if it exists, but it was a thought I had.
4. The addons.mozilla.org upload process was very well designed.  It allowed me to write a detailed description of my add-on and get it in the sandbox without a challenge.  Add-on developers are probably familiar with this experience, but for a newcomer, it was a great user experience.  What do you think?
5. The Mozilla Community does it again…couldn’t have done any of this without those who were responsive to my questions or those who helped write the documentation.  Special thanks to Seth Spitzer, Asa, the guys on IRC, Dan Mills (irc nick: Thunder) for some thought provoking conversation, and all those who wrote this great documentation.
6. Extension development is not as scary as I thought it would be.  I really wanted to demystify the experience.  With so many tools on the Web, a community of developers who will answer questions, and so much open source code to look at, I came away thinking that the biggest challenge is probably finding an idea and knowing how to do good web searches…just like when I had the idea to buy a new Nintendo Wii for $300.  That was also challenging, but I had the idea and performed some superb web searches. Time for some Guitar Hero 3 with Xavier Stone and  Casey Lynch.

That’s it.  Happy to enter the world of AMO as a novice hacker.  I’ll keep playing around with it to see how I can make this extension better.

Oh…and please install my extension and tell me what you think.

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What did I learn in this process, and what, if any, valuable takeaways from this process are worth sharing?

Here goes…

This is one of the first major events that I helped take a lead role in planning.  Mary Colvig is our event planning manager and has been a long standing member of Mozilla’s marketing team.  (If she had a blog, I’d link to her…but no…though she’s thought about it, apparently.)  Mary’s brought some nice rigor to this process.

Here are some things we agreed were important for this trip to succeed:

• Create clear goals and potential outcomes if we were to participate;
• Enlist key constituents from the Mozilla community and Mozilla Corporation to help in the decision process;
• Host weekly, purposeful meetings to discuss updates;
• Divide tasks among all involved in planning;
• Carefully craft and adhere to a budget;
• Gather approval from senior staff that we should do this.

I had a few clear cut goals that I knew I wanted to push if we were to participate.

1. Riding the momentum from our trip to India in late July, use FOSS.IN to grow, build, cultivate our Indian developer community;
2. To get as many Indian localizers together so we can add a few more languages to our list of localized languages;
3. To test Firefox in India, creating an evangelism community who can either help file bugs and/or reach out to web developers who sites might not work on Firefox;
4. To explore and learn about other issues for Indian Web users that will help us better serve users in the region (fonts and font rendering has been an issue in the past…likely to change with Firefox 3).

To accomplish these goals, we proposed the project day, a large undertaking by me, Mary, Chofmann and a few others.  I wrote the first draft of the proposed events, sent it around for feedback, incorporated that, and then finalized the proposal.  We were then accepted.  After a few enthusiastic meetings, we were suddenly in the midsts of many moving pieces seeming to come from different directions, all colliding at one intersection.  (random picture illustrating how we felt…)

From one side, we had FOSS.IN asking us to prove that this would be a valuable, contributor-focused day.  The conference organizers were NOT interested in having another discussion about a product or applications of a product.  They asked us to come to the project day with some interesting projects to work on.  They wanted us to get into the code and work!

Another side came from a set of key decision makers we asked to help think about this day.  The questions we repeatedly had to answer,

•  ”What value will this bring to the Mozilla community?”
•  ”Is this a good use of resources and is it a leveraged way to build and empower community members?”
•  ”If someone is going, is it a good use of their time or would their time be better used elsewhere?”
•  ”How will each Mozilla participant contribute to an effective project day?”
•  ”What are the deliverables of this event?”

Finally, we had emails from contributors, colleagues, and new friends asking how they could participate in the day and where their talents could be used.   With an approved project day and set of events, we had to figure out how to incorporate everyone and meet everyone’s objectives.

Moving parts.

What lesson did I reinforce?  As always, get buy-in.  Have clear goals that are both valuable to Mozilla and attainable.  Collaborate openly.  Be creative.  Communicate.  Sure, you might think these are so obvious.  They probably are.  But, tying clear goals and outcomes like these to event planning is something we are trying to do more systematically.  For FOSS.IN, it’s worked for the planning.  We’ll see how the day goes in early December.

And, if you’re going to be in Bangalore for the conference, please do consider attending our project day.  I think it will be a huge success.

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OK, maybe not, but I am psyched to be attending this two-day event that will bring together open source enthusiasts, educators, and developers to talk about a free and open web. In addition to attending the conference, I am looking forward to chatting with Dave Humphrey who has been a great friend of Mozilla and has really done so much to bring newcomers into the Mozilla project.  David, Shaver and I have bounced ideas back and forth for some time now, so it will be nice to see him again in person to see where else Mozilla can help provide leverage to build more communities.  I am especially interested to see how David and Seneca have progressed with their Mozilla curriculum development.

So, whoever is going to be there, please look me up.  Canadian friends, should I bring my winter coat?

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1. A discussion on new accessibility features in Firefox 3
2. Demos from interesting projects like Access Firefox
3. How a blind developer performs QA and testing for Mozilla
4. A blind contributor shows off Firefox 3’s best features with a screen reader and his own nightly build of Firefox.

In the spirit of 24, the team of presenters is truly international. I will be in Tokyo, helping to organize the conference and emcee-ing the session. One group will present from Mumbai, India. Then, we’ll have 2 contributors from Boston. Our final participant will be dialing in from San Diego at 4:30 AM!!!

I’d love to hear if you’re up-all-night with Mozilla during 24. I will be!

Please check out our accessibility session, it will be very cool.

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Project Days at FOSS.IN are not presentations about an open source project. They are meant for community members (both for new contributors and long-time participants) to get together to work on the project. We have created a very packed schedule for extension developers, localizers, and bug testers to come together to work on Mozilla. Here is the proposed schedule:

Name of the project:
Mozilla Project Day, Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Url:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/DeveloperDays/FOSS.INDecember2007

Date:
(Proposed day) December 5, 2007

Name of the proposer:
Seth Bindernagel, Mary Colvig, Chris Hofmann, Mark Finkle & Axel Hecht

Proposers involvement in the Project:
Mozilla will send a team of employees to help lead a Mozilla Developer Day with the Indian Developer Community.

Pre-requisites to participate:
Interest in learning more about Mozilla. All participants are welcome. During the project day, we would like to shine some light on Indian contributors, specifically mentioning where work has been done. It will be most helpful for Mozilla Indian contributors to participate and discuss what they have been contributing. Some knowledge of the localization process or knowledge of the XUL programming language, JavaScript, and/or the Mozilla platform would be helpful, but is not required.

Audience:
application developers, extension developers, open-source evangelists & enthusiasts, localizers, security experts

Handouts to be distributed with pointers to material:
Most materials will be distributed electronically or developed for all to see and contribute to through the following wiki site: http://wiki.mozilla.org/DeveloperDays/FOSS.INDecember2007

Proposed Schedule for the Day
Theme of the day: Building a Mozilla Community and getting Firefox working better in India
(We hope to have two concurrent project plans, one discussing how to get involved with Mozilla via the extension development platform. The other describing how to get involved through either the QA/Testing or localization efforts.)

Other ideas to include in the tracks above:

• QA sprint — Introduction to the Mozilla QA process and then have folks do ready to testing on different platforms. (We might need to do this because as Mozilla comes closer to the release of Firefox 3, having a localization sprint might not be feasible.)
• Localization hands on workshop and/or Testing Day — Will depend on release schedule of Firefox.
• Need to keep it focus on empowering users and developers
• Presentation of developer tools that will help you better develop web content: Fuel & Firebug/Finkle

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Thoughts?

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Several contributors from the ILUG-BOM group assembled for the final event of our Indian Tour. It was held at the Homi Bhabha center, TIFR and many thanks to Dr. Nagarjuna G. for hosting. Dr. Nagarjuna is a driving forward the GKnowldege program, which is an effort to organize knowledge and produce a network of concepts interrelated to each other by appropriate relations. Nagarjuna is also the president of the Free Software Foundation, India and his doors seem to be very open for open source contributors. Thanks to Dr. Nagarjuna for making the event so nice and welcoming!

The ILUG-BOM event was initially organized by Nirav Mehta, who was one of the lead localizers for Firefox in Gujurati. He invited several of his colleagues and other enthusiasts to attend. We were so honored to have people travel distances far and wide to meet us. In fact, several came from Pune, which is at least a one-hour flight away. Thanks to everyone for making the journey. It rounded out a wonderful trip to India where we met so many people enthusiastic about the Mozilla community.

The day was filled with presentations.

• Chris and I gave the “Mozilla: Now and Then” discussion, where I spoke about the community and Chris gave a lot of back story on Mozilla and the growth of our project. We also opened the conversation for comments on “just-about-anything” (answering questions when possible ). Finally, we put out a specific call for contribution to localization projects and to community building in India. I believe we will try to do some very organized events in Bangalore and Mumbai, perhaps a Developer Day in concert with FOSS.In. If you have interest in participating, please contact me via this blog, Orkut, or Facebook.
• Ankit is one of the localizers in India and gave a great presentation on how to localize for Firefox. His knowledge of the process and description of the interaction he has had with others in our community (Pike!) was an awesome sign of the vibrancy, commitment and energy of contributors in India.
• We saw a great presentation by Shantanu Oak on an extension that translates all content on websites into a home language in India. You can experiment with it here. In Shantanu’s words:

“Whenever I see any page that is not written in Hindi script, I simply click on this option and read it in Hindi.”

• We also saw a presentation by Krishnakant Mane, a blind developer who is contributing a lot to Mozilla’s accessibility code. He told a nice anecdote about how he had submitted a bug related to accessibility issues and expected it to be corrected in a reasonable time frame. He went to lunch and when he returned 20 minutes later, the bug was fixed! He really gave a lot of praise to Mozilla for the attention that we have put into accessibility stuff. To see Krishnakant present was so inspiring! Congratulations to him. Chris and I left thinking that he should do a YouTube video on all the features he has been using and contributing to for those who have any accessibility issues. I also intend to connect him with Ken Saunders at Access Firefox.
• Then, a contributor named Siji showed some issues about printing India Sanskrit-based script from Firefox. He created and showed his extension, which solves a lot of the alignment issues when printing.
• Finally, Dr. Nagarjuna presented on an extension that he and others developed for the GKnowledge project.

You can read more from Kartik, one of the day’s organizers, at his blog: http://kartikmistry.org/blog/?p=343

The day was great. Thanks for attending, everyone. Please email or comment if you have questions.

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Open Source in Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad, as described by some at the conference we attended, is an academic center where many scholars and professors are studying and working on their academic pursuits. Given that fact, it may come as no surprise that Professor B H Jajoo from the Indian Institute of Managemt was the lead organizer (with his colleague Dibyajyoti Bhuyan). The conference was also sponsored by the Confederation of Indian Industry. Conference topics touched on several different topics, and here are just a few of the sessions:

• Why Free Software?
• OSS Enginnering
• Open Source Business Methods
• OSS deployment in e-Governance Projects
• OSS and its relevance in India
• Building OSS communities (a presentation by me and Chris Hofmann)

The conference had roughly 250 attendees and Chris and I were able to meet many of the leading minds in India who are thinking about open source software and how it will gain more traction. I was impressed with everyone’s presentations and thought that Atul Chitnis gave a very interesting talk, stressing the importance of OSS in India. He has been working on open source projects since 1993 and it is his firm belief that young Indian entrepreneurs and start-up companies in India have no other option but to use open source software. Overall, I was impressed by the energy put into and the breadth of the presentations. It seems that many of the Indian professionals at the conference are trying to find the best ways to promote OSS while also making sure that the ideas are sustainable in the business setting. In my short time at the conference, I quickly learned that the spirit of the participants was very entrepreneurial and each individual seemed to be seeking ways to make open source software and their business ideas a success.

Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad

Another reason for our trip to Ahmedabad was to meet with professors and students at IIM-A. Many expressed interest in taking on student projects that will allow them to utilized their marketing and technology acumen to promote Mozilla and help spread its mission and software throughout India. Many thanks to Professor Anil Gupta and other members of the IIM-A community, including all the students we met and organizers like Guarav Shilpi. We met with three different student teams who are all thinking of ways to promote Mozilla. As part of the arrangement, students will either receive credit for helping Mozilla or, in the very least, list the project work on their CVs. Our next step is to reconnect with the students and professors when we return to the U.S. The ideas were terrific: launching a campus reps program in India, finding interesting ways to distribute Mozilla software, creating viral marketing campaigns similar to the NYTimes full-page advertisement at the release of Firefox 1, and localizing Firefox into Indian languages. It promises to be an active semester with lots of projects being taken on by these students.

Visiting Gandhi’s Ashram

In the pictures that I include in this post, you’ll see several from a morning trip to Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram. As the wikipedia link describes, “Gandhi made it his home, and on March 12, 1930 he embarked on his famous march to Dandi, Gujarat for the Salt Satyagraha. He vowed never to return to the ashram until India became independent.” If you have seen Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi, you might remember the famous salt march to Dandi. Gandhi used this peaceful measure to show the British occupants that the Indian people would not tolerate the unfair and exorbitant taxation of salt. Some say that nearly 450,000 people joined him on the march in 1930. This fact alone is staggering. We learned during our visit that Gandhi, in a time of limited communication, was able to communicate to, organize, and then empower so many people to march for a cause. His mission was always grounded in non-violence and peace. We also learned that it was Gandhi’s unique ability to make people understand their freedom and choices that they had. Rather than being subjects to the British throne, he encouraged Indian people to seek independence peacefully. It was a fascinating trip to th Ashram.

The trip to the ashram was also very important for us because it gives us yet another glimpse at how people think in India. Like Gandhi, many people here feel empowered and entrepreneurial. Gandhi’s teachings are everywhere, his image is on the Rupee bank notes, and it is obvious that many people incorporate his ideologies into their lives. Many times at the OSS conference, we would hear about why the businesses people were starting were not only sound business practices, but would also bring about great social change here in India. That was unique because (at least in the U.S.) it’s not often that social change and business are so closely linked. It almost appeared as a strategic imperative to the entrepreneurs we met. And, we learned from our hosts, that it is this style of thinking that pervades the society and has its roots from leaders like Gandhi.

So far, fascinating. We have already met hundreds of people and Mozilla is well-known by them. Please take a look at the photos and let me know what you think.

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