To see all the moving parts of Mozilla 24 happening at once, and to witness the amazing teams in Japan, Thailand, Paris, and Stanford all working tirelessly to pull off this event was both awesome and exhausting and so much more. Repeatedly, I would get IMs, emails, IRCs (is that a term?) mentioning what a creative and interesting event it was while 24 was taking place. Messages came to me from India, Germany, U.S., France, Japan — all remarking on the coolness of what was going on. I believe we have to give a big “congratulatory-blog-on-the-back” to Chibi, Kaori, Gen, Kohei, Masayuki, Eiko, Shimono, and all the tons of others who made this idea a reality.

I took part by organizing the accessibility track, as mentioned in my last post. Pretty much, it happened with relatively few snags. From my location at Keio University in Tokyo, we were using Skype to dial into a conference call that I had set up for all the panelists to dial into so we could have a live phone conversation. Skype dropped our call once in the middle of Tim Keenan’s presentation. Aside from that, everything else seemed to go pretty well. If you are in my timezone in California and did not get up at 4:50 AM to watch our discussion, here are all the presentations (or as much as I can provide):

1. 1. 1. Video presentation by Dr. Nagarjuna G and Krishnakant Mane from the Homi Bhabha Centre in Mumbai
      2. Video presentation about Access Firefox by Ken Saunders
      3. Aaron Leventhal’s presentation: Aaron L’s Moz 24 presentation
      4. Tim Keenan’s three links about Mozilla’s QA for accessibility:
      • Mozilla’s Accessibility QA Home wiki page
      • UI Accessibility Test Plan
      • Sample bug that highlights tools used by accessibility testers and developers (namely Accevents, see comment 5 by Tim)

What were some outcomes of this session?

First of all, it was definitely nice to get a few of the players in the Mozilla accessibility world together for a session. I think having each person chat about their specialties was very valuable. A lot of praise and congratulations were exchanged, and I believe this is pretty valuable.

Secondly, I think we found some developers or contributors in Japan who might be willing to work on some Japanese-based accessibility issues.

Third, the team of panelists has already started planning for future events, including an accessibility hack fest in October and a game plan for participation at the annual CSUN conference.

If you viewed the accessibility track online (thank you!!! I know it was 4:50 AM in California…), then please comment on what you thought. It was exciting to be a part of and congrats and thank you to all of the panelists. They were terrific.

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.

What have I been up to in the past two weeks?

1) Mozilla 24

I scheduled a track for Mozilla 24 featuring Mozilla Accessibility contributors. We have quite a line-up ready to go, with a number of our blind or visually impaired contributors putting together presentations about how they are contributing to Mozilla.

Have you seen the stuff for Mozilla 24? It will be a great worldwide event so please participate on September 15 and 16. Because I have taken a lead in planning a session and have been supporting our lead organizers in Japan in pulling off the conference, I will be going to Japan from September 11 to 17. More travel. More meeting community. If you’re in Tokyo in early September, tell me and we’ll meet up.

Some other cool stuff about Mozilla 24:

• Three fun contests/ways to participate
  
• Information about the conference
• And, just for fun, the Road to Mozilla 24 from CNET Japan

Everyone on our Japanese team from our marketing team here has really put in a lot of hard work to make this happen.

2) FOSS.IN Project Day submission

After my trip, I got inspired by all the activity in India, so I decided to work with some developers there, Chofmann, and others at Mozilla to submit a project day for FOSS.IN. I hope it gets approved because there is really a groundswell of activity happening around Mozilla stuff. If you care to learn more about project submission for FOSS.IN, then read here.

I’ve been impressed with most of the process thus far. Everyone is communicating over a Yahoo! Group. We are all commenting on submissions and passing along ideas. It’s been pretty cool.

3) Community Giving & Empowerment stuff

We’re going to start moving faster here. Shaver, Asa and I will review a few request next week. In about 11 months, we’ve *officially* reviewed 45 requests….very close to 1 per week.

(I make it a point to highlight officially because a lot of requests have come through that I have simply passed along to the correct contacts, whether internal at Mozilla Corp or to the guys at Mozilla Foundation.)

We have a good process now and are going to keep moving forward with it, but how to be a bit more agile, experimental, aggressive…just a few of the things needed to scale.

What else…what else….

Interns are leaving Mozilla for the summer. A quick shout out to Andrew Stein, Rishi Mallik and Sarah Arora. All have been a real delight to work with and some really great stuff has come from their creative energy. We’ll probably see a few of their projects surface more publicly after they leave, but credit goes to them.

Last stuff to report: India has been going very well. Chofmann and I are spearheading an en-IN build of Firefox, optimized for Indian users. And, the student teams at IIM-Ahmedabad and Indian School of Business are all starting their projects next week. We’ll be sure to report on that going forward.

That’s all. I’m out.

1) Monday, August 6: We’ll be hosting a conference call with several teams of students from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadebad. Each team will present ideas they have about spreading Mozilla software and building community in India. We intend to formalize these presentations into semester-long projects where the students will receive academic credit for their work.

2) Tuesday, August 7: We’ll host a very similar call with students from the Indian School of Business. Many of the students interested in helping all have technical/engineering backgrounds and have returned to management school to gain some business experience. Nearly all the students we met intend to return to the technology sector after they graduate.

3) Tuesday, August 7: Mozilla brown-bag presentation about the India trip

4) Wednesday or Thursday, Aug 8 or 9: Call with Mahiti and Indian localizers who will help take on the localization efforts for Firefox.

5) Ongoing: Planning for Mozilla 24, where Indian community members participate. I’ve already had one call with Kaori about this and we are trying to find the best way to get the Indian community involved. Looks like we might have one developer who can present. Still working it out.

If you want to participate in any of this stuff, please let me know. Happy to include you.

Final thoughts: India was a fascinating place to visit. There is so much activity there around open source and Mozilla and we returned to the U.S. enthusiastic about our community. We also learned so many intangible things that we want to share with our colleagues in Mountain View.

In a country with over 1 billion people, it becomes obviously clear that as the population continues to grow, the growth of India’s economy and infrastructure will have to keep pace…and hopefully there will be equal distribution of that economic gain.

Overall, it seemed that everyone we met was deeply aware of the dichotomy of challenges and opportunity that face the country. We heard from one local person we met that Gandhi promoted the concept of “a leader in every village”. Our trip began with an educational stop at Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram where we got an even greater sense of his teachings and influence in India. It was clear that his ideas about empowering others pervades the society. Following his teachings, we hope to find leaders in every village that make up the Mozilla community in India and worldwide.

No comment.

For now, the conference is happening in Japan, but the idea is more global. Essentially, the idea is to hold a 24 hour conference that kicks off in Tokyo. As business day progresses around the world, each of our communities will be able to come online and contribute to the conference. Mozilla 24 will take a lot of logistical coordination and we’ll need to find people in each of our locales across the globe to help contribute. If you’re interested in learning more about the planning, contributing to the proposed tracks, or just have some general questions, please email me and I will make sure to put you in touch with Gen or Kaori.

(Have been having some trouble uploading to Flickr…pictures from yesterday and the Gumi are forthcoming.)